And This Is Just One Reason I Love First Grade!

First Graders are so adorable! I love how they think and how they truly believe in the wonders of the world. On Friday I took down our Super Hero bulletin board while they were at Phys. Ed. When they came back to the room they were shocked to see this...

Instantly they knew what had happened! The fairies had been here! So, inside I am just tickled because I know this is because the book series we are reading, The Pixie Tricks.

(Quick side note: if you are looking to make your kids go absolutely crazy, they are still selling these books on Amazon even though they aren't printing them anymore. There are eight in the series.) 

Okay, back to the story...

The teacher in me is now thinking...great time for a science lesson. So we start brainstorming other things that could have cause this to happen. Two ideas were:  the things were hanging so long that the backs came off and the marks are shadows. We expanded on the shadow idea and figured out shadows are caused by the sun and we have skylights right above the board. All of a sudden I have lots of excited faces. I'm thinking, "They've figured this out, the sun faded the paper." Oh yes, they figured it out...We now are sure it was the fairies and pixies! This is just like Peter Pan when he lost his shadow because there are fairies there, too! 

And this is just one reason I absolutely love first grade!

They are so innocent, sweet and excited about everything around them. They believe :)!

SOME PICS FROM THIS WEEK

Writing about Fall and painting Autumn pictures with Q-Tips.

Science Experiments...collecting and observing leaves, taking the chlorophyll out of leaves to see what color remains, looking for the air that leaves give off and seeing what happens to a leaf in dyed water.

We rewrote one of our favorite big books, LAZY MARY. We used real pictures to illustrate. We have our own black and white copies to bring home and share. Here's a picture of the colored copy being read to kindergarten.

9-25 NEWSLETTER

Hi! This week just flew by! We continue to work on becoming super heroes in our classroom :)! We are very excited about making our costumes. We made masks this week! On Wednesday we will tie dye our capes with our peer helpers. A huge thank you to Wyatt, Manyuh, Lucas and Colton for donating extra t-shirts. We now have plenty for our class :)! We will wear our costumes on Wednesday, October 7th for our special super hero celebration.

READING AND LANGUAGE ARTS

We have been reading LOTS of big books. These allow me to model reading strategies and word work with the class. Some of our work this week involved: contractions, compound words, looking for little words in big words, getting our mouth ready, looking at pictures, two vowels working together, punctuation, stretching out sounds, capital letters, blends...as you can see we do lots of work with our big books!

We wrote two class books. They are called:  LAZY FIRST GRADE and I SEE MY FRIENDS. We’ve had lots of fun with these. We can’t wait to share them at home but they need to stay in our book boxes for a little while.

MATH

We finished up our first assessment. I give each math assessment one on one. This way I can make sure it assesses math and not reading. It also allows me to take notes on what your child is saying and doing. For instance, the answer might be 15 but 51 is written. The child might have actually said 15 but written it wrong. By assessing individually I can make sure I know what was happening.

We worked on addition and the many ways to make ten. We are working on counting up from the largest number.

ITEMS OF INTEREST

• We did a special Autumn painting and writing activity. It’s hanging in the hall.

• We did Fall science experiments with second grade today!

• On Friday, Oct. 2 we will be having a special Friendship Day

Having Some Fun With Math, Writing and Spelling!

We are having fun practicing our addition facts with lots of dice activities. We are working hard to remember to say the largest number and then count up from there.

We had some new authors share today! 

Practicing spelling words is fun when you can hide them in your pictures!

White T-Shirts Needed

Wednesday, Sept. 30th we will be making tie-dyed capes out of white t-shirts. The t-shirts work better if they are big. Please, send in one white t-shirt (can even be one of mom’s or dad’s old ones) by Monday, Sept. 28...actually the sooner the better so I can prepare them. If you would like to donate a five pack of Hanes, size LG kids or SM adult, we would greatly appreciate it...just in case we don’t get enough in for everyone to participate. Thank you in advance for your help with this project. It's always one of the kids' favorites!

A Few Pics From Our Busy Week

Practicing our spelling words with Rainbow Spelling.

Read to Someone

Some of our First Grade authors!

Practicing Spelling Words with Fancy Writing!

Creating!

And last but certainly not least...a few from the puppet show at Open House!