Happy Spring Break!

Have a great spring break, my favorite first grade class!  

Learning about Remarkable People in History: George Washington

This week, we learned about George Washington.  We read, analyzed, listed, and wrote about this famous person in history.  Ask your student what they learned about George!

 

 

 

 

 

Go Read the Dictionary!

We read a lot in D102.  Stories, poems, informational books, articles... you name it.  We love it, and we've gotten pretty good at it this year.  Today we incorporated using a dictionary into our reading.  While writing a alphabet poem, we used our picture dictionary as a reference tool.  This reinforces our knowledge of alphabetical order and is good practice for finding information on other subjects in the future. 

Special Visitors at Northfield

We had such a special treat last week:  We were visited by Sandra Philipson and Jenny Campell, author and illustrator of the Max and Annie books.  It was so neat to hear about Mrs. Philipson's inspiration for her writing... her dogs!  (She even brought two with her to meet us.)  After hearing about her dogs and her books, we were treated to a drawing lesson from the illustrator, Jenny Campbell.  So cool!

For more information on these books, you can visit their website at  http://www.maxandannie.com/

100 Days Smarter!

Today, we celebrated our 100th day of first grade.  Check out this little slideshow of some of the fun we had learning on this special day!

Contractions!

 

Today we discussed contractions.  We talked about how we sometimes condense two words to make one and use an apostrophe.  For fun and to reinforce the idea, we danced along to this silly song.  Watch out, it's catchy!

Right Back to Work!

We may have been away from school for a couple of days, but jumped right back into the swing of things in math class.  We've been learning about digits and place value, as well as practicing addition and adding coins.  Here are some pictures of us working hard during math time today:

Science in Action: Making Ice Cream

The students in D102 have been excited about our science experiment all week.  Today was the big day: we made ice cream!  As you know, we've been studying states of matter.  We turned a liquid (milk) into a solid (ice cream).  It was a delicious experiment!  

Enjoy some pictures of our work:

We measured,

we mixed,

and tasted our work.

And, as all good scientists do, we wrote about our findings:

We EVEN made a social studies connection by reading some informational text about how ice cream is made in a factory.  What a great morning!

You Read to Me, I'll Read to You!

Mary Ann Hoberman writes some really neat books that are designed to read with someone else.  Written poetically and with rhyme, sentences are written on different sides of the page and in different colors.  The colors indicate who is supposed to read.  We read some poems from this book and the children LOVED it!  :)  

Afterwards, we had the chance to write our own poems in the same fashion titled, "I Like."  The students did a great job with this and had a lot of fun writing together!

Happy New Year & Writing Our Resolutions

Last week, we read the book, Squirrel's New Year's Resolution.  It is a cute story about a squirrel who can't decide on a resolution, only to find he'd started one all along.

After the story, we wrote our own!  

What is MATTER?

     In Science right now, we are learning about "states of matter."  What a great time of year to learn about this as we see different states of water outside our classroom window!  We've read a book on the subject and have begun to categorize different matter in our lives.

Here's a really fun video on the subject: