Week of December 11th

Water travels in a cycle, yes it does!

Students put on their (metaphorical) lab coats and goggles and became expert scientists! Students continued to explore the water cycle this week! Students learned about the three parts of the water cycle: evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. We spent our afternoons making observations, doing experiments, and of course singing about the water cycle!

All week long your little scientists have been recording their observations about a cup of water sitting by the window to learn about evaporation. We’ve worked on adding scientific details to our observations.

Using ice cubes, cups, and warm water students predicted what might happen inside the cup. Students observed the cup fogging up and little water drops appearing! Condensation at work!

Last but not least, shaving cream clouds helped us visualize precipitation at work. All the snow outside helped too!

Have your student sing our water cycle song! We’ve been singing it all week!

Students also did a fun Snowman at Night craft and had chips and salsa as part of our All-School Celebration!

Week of December 4th

We had another great week in first grade!

This week in math students learned how to represent and interpret data using a bar graph. They also practiced doubles facts and combinations to tens. They shared strategies to solve these facts and discussed how they are all still working to get better (and faster!) at solving these equations!

We also spent a lot of time coding this week! This week students participated in the Hour of Code as part of the Computer Science Education Week!Students explored Scratch Jr. independently and with partners. Students had to problem solve and complete tasks.

This week students practiced identifying nouns and verbs! We learned two chants to help us remember the difference. Have your student teach you our chants!

We’ve had another science filled week! We focused on clouds. We read books, sang a song, and made our own clouds. The students were so busy at work making cotton ball clouds. They did a great job making each cloud look different and like the right type of cloud! I may have forgotten to get the camera out as we were having so much fun but check out a few examples! Next week we’ll use what we know about clouds to learn about the water cycle!

Weeks of November 13th and 27th

We’re back to work after Thanksgiving! We started our new science unit. We are learning about weather! We learned about temperature, wind, and how we measure weather this week. Ask your student what an “anemometer” is! We are keeping track of our scientist observations and learnings in our science journals! We created our own wind--huffing and puffing to push objects across a table!

We practiced our sight words and our handwriting while getting up and moving around the room! We also practiced our short e sounds this way too! The kids are always focused and ready to learn during a write-the-room activity! Just look at those teacher letters (what we call neat handwriting)!

This student found a connection to math in our reading. The book said the glasses were in "rows" but he noticed that they were actually in columns!

Look at this reading stamina and focus!

Here's a belated peek at our week before Thanksgiving Break! We did a lot of fun Thanksgiving activities and read books about Thanksgiving. We did turkey math and made Thanksgiving bracelets. I hope you read your student’s Thanksgiving book! We had a four winds lessons about beavers, too! We tried to be beavers by chomping down carrot trees and eating pretzel bark! We all had a blast!