We've gone BATTY!!!

This week in first grade our science topic was All About Bats.  We read many books about these night creatures, and used this new knowledge to help us create a Bat can/have/are chart:

We then used our new knowledge to create informational pieces of writing.  Students had to pick three facts to write about in their stories:

 All of the student's writings on display in the hallway:

We also had our first publishing party where students chose whether or not they would like to share their writings with the class.  Almost every child chose to read their writing...

We also created a bar graph to decide if the class thinks bats are creepy or cute...here's the results:

Overall, most of the class thought bats are creepy, but it was a close call!!!

Our BAT theme even crossed over to our "Read the Room" center for the week where the students had to find "Batty Contractions".  Students were given a sheet with bats that had two words in each bat.  They then had to "Read the Room" to find the corresponding contractions...here's a look:

In math, we have been working very hard at understanding  fact families.  We had fun "acting out" the number sentences for a given set of numbers:

Once we were able to get the hang of how to compose fact families, we explored the Common Core Standard 1.OA.D.7 to understand the meaning of the equal sign.  We acted out problems that explored moving the equal sign to the beginning and end of a given number sentence.  I think they the students finally understood when we acted out all the parts of the problem.  They could see the addition/subtraction sentences "in action".  Here's a look:

First we have: 5+4=9

Then, we show that 9=5+4 is the same problem, we just moved the equal sign:

And we explored the relationship in a subtraction problem:

First, we have: 9-5=4

 

Then, we move the equal sign and get: 4=9-5

After acting out MANY different examples I think the students FINALLY understood the meaning of the equal sign!!!:)

We used our knowledge of fact families to create our FRIGHTFUL FRANKENSTEIN FACT FAMILY projects...

 All of our Frankenstein's on display in the hallway...

And, last but not least, our teacher directed center this week was an informational reading on Christopher Columbus.  We read the story several times, then we highlighted all of the proper nouns that we found (we have been working VERY hard on nouns this month!!!).

Wow, that was a LONG post...thanks for hanging in there till the end!!!