First Grade Salutes our Veterans

November 11th...the day we celebrate our Veterans for their service to our wonderful country...and keeping the freedoms that we all have...Thank You!!!

First Grade spent the week leading up to Veteran's Day, learning and celebrating these brave men and women.  We began our week with an anchor chart to list and describe all the characteristics of a Veteran...

We used information from our anchor chart to write a Thank You letter to our Veterans...the students had to pick three things to say thank you for...

Here are all of our Thank You letters on display in the hallway...

In our teacher directed center for the week, we did a guided reading story about Veteran's Day.  We practiced reading and discussed all of the freedoms that we have because of our military:

After we read the book, we practiced putting Veteran's Day themed words in alphabetical order...

For our read the room center, the students traveled around the room reading various Veteran's Day words, and figured out how many syllables the word had:

Thank you Veterans!!!

An October Review...In November!!!

Oh.My.Word...can I just say OCTOBER literally FLEW by...I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Halloween has come and gone, and we're steadfastly getting ready for Thanksgiving!!! Anyhow, the First Grade class of Our Lady of Peace had a busy and productive month learning about Fire Safety, Spiders, and Pumpkins...we even made the Catholic Spirit's online website with our fire truck picture:

SPOOKY SPIDERS...

We began our learning of spiders by creating a bar graph on whether or not we thought spiders were creepy or cute...overwhelmingly, the class thought they were cute!!! Me?? Not so much!! #spidersarecreepy

We learned many facts relating about these amazing arachnids, and compiled all of our information into a Spider can/have/are chart...then used our new information to write an informative piece on spiders...

We compared a non-fiction book on spiders, to Eric Carle's "The Very Busy Spider" using a Venn-diagram...

And...we learned and labeled all the parts of a spider:

We also participated in pumpkin investigations during the month of October...we cut apart a real pumpkin, and explored all the parts...they loved it!!!

Then, with our new knowledge of all the parts, we created a model to hang on display...complete with orange dyed spaghetti to represent the pulp!!!:)

In math, we worked hard on learning combinations of ten and we created chain links of all the combinations to have a visual reminder on display...

We were also lucky to have the Fords Fire Department come to our school and give our students a talk about fire safety...then we were all able to have a turn at squirting the fire hose...So.Much.Fun!!!

So...as you can see we had so much fun in October, and I'm personally looking forward to November because it's my favorite month!!! Here's a picture from my back yard...I'm loving the beautiful colors...