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...

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!!!

Criss-cross APPLESAUCE...It's Johnny's Birthday!!!

Happy  Fall y'all!!!!  I am SUPER excited that my favorite season is upon us...the cooler weather, the beautiful colors, Halloween, Thanksgiving...I could go on forever!!!  Anyhow, this month, we've been learning all about apples.  Our lessons culminated with a big celebration of Johnny Appleseed.  We read many books about Johnny, and even made applesauce in the classroom!!! It smelled A.MAZ.ING all day long!!!  We listed all of the information we found about Johnny Appleseed on our Johnny Appleseed anchor chart:

Each of the students brought in one apple.  We took all of the apples, peeled them and cooked in the crock pot all day to make applesauce.

ALL of the students really enjoyed this finished product:

We invited the PREK 3&4 to come listen to us preform our APPLE poems and songs:

We have also been reading stories written by Kevin Henkes this month.  We are using his stories to learn all about CHARACTER.  We read Chrysanthemum, Webbely Worried and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.  We compared and contrasted the characters, and learned how to create a story map of a story, and also learned how important it is to be kind to one another.  We used the story Chrysanthemum to understand how unkind words can hurt other's feelings.  I made a large, red heart for the class.  Then, as I read the story I had each child in my class take a turn to wrinkle the heart each time somebody made fun of Chrysanthemum's name.  We passed the heart around to each child to see how much the heart had changed.  We then talked about how hurtful words can stay on a persons heart no matter how much you try to smooth it out.  We then promised to "Think and be smart, because it's hard to fix a wrinkled heart" as we placed a band-aid (with our names) on the heart to symbolize this pledge:

Working on our Character learning in our interactive notebooks:

 Our name flowers:

We also started to learn all about NOUNS.  We also completed our first "read the room" activity where the students scoured the classroom looking for nouns.  Once they found a word they wanted to use, they had to place it on the correct Post-it in their notebooks (person, place or thing):

Here are some first day of school photographs...I was just waiting on some photo releases!!!

 "First Grader" hallway bulletin board display:

Here are the links to the Kevin Henkes stories that we read in class:
Chrysanthemum:

Wemberly Worried:

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse:

Can you believe it's almost OCTOBER?!!