Valentine's Week

The week of Valentine's Day is always one of my most favorite weeks of the year! We started off our week by reading The Biggest Valentine Ever. This book is one in a series by Steven Kroll. Around Halloween we read The Biggest Pumpkin Ever so we were able to compare and contrast the two stories. This story is also a great one to teach author's purpose because it has a clear lesson. We talked about what the author's purpose meant and we discovered in this story the author was trying to tell us that when we work together we can often accomplish more than we can alone.

In the story, Clayton and Desmond work together to make a mouse shaped valentine for their teacher. As a connection to the story, we put together valentine bags by making heart shaped animals. I LOVE these!

Next we read Clifford's First Valentine's Day and practiced retelling the story elements on a chain of hearts.

On Valentine's Day, we read the book Valentine's Day by Gail Gibbons to learn a little bit about the history and symbols of the day. Everyone was very interested, and we learned a lot of new information. After reading, each student traced and cut out a large heart. Inside the heart they wrote 3 facts they learned about Valentine's Day:

Then, after getting their work checked by me, they flipped it over and used watercolors to paint the other side. These turned out great and are currently hanging in our hallway!

To get ready for our Valentine's Party, we put together these books:

During the party in the afternoon, students were able to open all the Valentine's from their friends. We talked about making sure to say thank you and actually read the valentine, not to just take the candy or prize and throw the rest away. To help the kids remember to do these, we used these books. As the opened a card from their bag they would read who it was from, say thank you, then glue it into the book. This makes sure they take the time to look at the valentine's and leaves students with a nice keepsake to take home.

I LOVE watching the kids open their valentines. All you can hear in the room is "THANK YOU ___" "THANK YOU ____" over and over. Melts my heart every time.

I loved spending the week with each of my 20 little Valentines!

Dental Health

This morning we read The Tooth Book, which is a fun nonfiction book about dental health. The book contains lots of fun facts about teeth as well as information about how to take care of your teeth.  We learned a lot of interesting things. For example, did you know that small birds pick at crocodile's teeth to keep them clean? Everyone agreed this was "disgusting" but also great to see two very different animals working together to help eachother.

After reading the book we reviewed how to take the best care of our teeth and why it is important to do so. Then, each student completed a worksheet with dental do's and dental don'ts as an assessment.

After we finished up our work we got to attend a special Kids and Cops presentation by a police officer in the pod. Kids and Cops is a great program that works with schools to teach kids that police officers are their friends and are here to help them if they need it. They talk about ways kids can be safe, and what to do when interacting with strangers. They visit our school each year and we find it is a great way to get kids to be comfortable with police officers rather than scared of them.

Doctor DeSoto

February is dental health month, so we are spending a bit of time this week focusing on what dental health means. We opened up the topic yesterday by reading a fun book: Dr. DeSoto.

To make connections to this book, each student made a page for our class book using the patterned text: I am Doctor _____. I would work on a _____.

Some of my friends had such creative ideas and took the time to really think about the details in their pictures! (I was also happy to see how many of my friends knew how to spell their last names!)

Contraction Surgery

This week we are working on contractions for spelling. This is a concept that many students have a tough time understanding. I found this activity last year and it was so successful I tried it again with this group.

Today, we were contraction surgeons!  We started by building a little background knowledge talking about what a surgeon actually does. Once everyone understood the concept, I showed them how they were going to be word surgeons by cutting open some words and then "stitching" them back together.

I paired the students up and gave each of them a sentence strip with 2 words. Their job was to take the words and preform surgery to turn them into their contraction form. To make the apostrophe, we used bandaids!  Everyone had a blast, and I think it really helped them to understand the concept of a contraction.

100th Day

Today was the 100th day of school and everyone had so much fun! We started out the morning by having a 100 year old costume contest. We took a class vote to determine our best boy and best girl costume, then met all of first grade out in the pod to have a grade level vote. The boy from our class took best overall boy in the grade level! He had a great costume, but it was his acting skills that secured him the win! He was hobbling on his cane like an old man and speaking slowly. TOO CUTE!

After our grade level vote, we took all the kids who dressed up on a parade around the school. We interruped Ms. Shoffit in a meeting so everyone could yell, "hello whippersnapper!" hahaha!

The costume contest and parade took up a large chunk of our morning. With what was left we made a birthday book for a friend in our class and worked on a 100th day project. Each student was giving a dicut of the number 100. They had to use the numbers to make a picture of something. Some of my friends had such creative ideas. I personally love this one:

What a fun morning! I know Ms. Coburn had lots of fun 100th day activities planned in her classroom this afternoon as well.

Hard to believe, but after today there are only 80 more days of first grade!

100 Years Old

Happy 100th Day of School!

Oh my goodness do we have some ADORABLE old people here in first grade today! Thanks so much to all the parents who helped their children dress up as a 100 year old man or woman. The costumes are just precious! It was SO hard to pick the best ones!

This morning we met out in the pod with all of first grade and modeled our costumes. Then, we took a walk around the school as a mini parade to show off our costumes. Everyone LOVED them! All the kids were hobbling around like they were really 100 years old and calling out "hello whippersnapper". It was hilarious! I REALLY wish I could post pictures for everyone to see.

All the students who dressed up today get to have a special "mix it up" at lunch and sit together at the "senior citizens table". hehe :)

We are having too much fun this morning!

Polar Bears in the Arctic

Last week we finished up a unit on penguins who live in the Antarctic, so this week we moved on to polar bears who live in the Arctic.

On Monday we read a nonfiction book about polar bears, and then did a little research about them on Pebblego.com. After reading, each student made a polar bear using construction paper, and wrote three facts they learned on it's body.  We learned a lot of interesting facts! For example, did you know a polar bear can swim up to 60 miles? Or that they build a snow den for the 2 babies they have at a time?

On Tuesday we learned a little bit more about the Arctic environment and the people who live there. We read the book Angela from the Arctic and then had  discussion about how her life is the same and different to ours. After the discussion, everyone made a double bubble comparing and contrasting their life to Angela's. We were surprised to learn that even though her daily life looks very different than ours, we have a lot of things in common with her as well. For example, we found we all love to eat pizza and watermelon!

On Wednesday we read Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear? This is a fun book because the kids pick up on the pattern pretty quickly and can help read along. After reading we brainstormed our own list of animals and the sounds they make. Each student completed a page for a class book by following the story pattern. They did such a nice job!

On Thursday we read a little more about life in the Arctic and the Inuit people. We had a discussion about their way of life and how it is very different than ours, but that doesn't make it bad, just different.  Each student put together an Inuit person and wrote 3 facts they learned on the body.

Friday we had a little fun and painted an arctic scene. We did this as a directed drawing, and as we drew each piece of the scene we reviewed what we had learned. Did you know it only takes two hours to build an igloo? Neither did we!

Penguins!

Sorry for the lack of updating; I've fallen a bit behind in the blog! I'm going to try to do a really quick catch up, then be more on top of it starting this week.

The last 2 weeks we studied Penguins. We read ALL of the Tacky the Penguin books (which everyone just LOVES) and we spent some time discussing character traits in regards to Tacky. As a connection between reading and writing, we wrote our very own Tacky stories. Each student was responsible for creating their own character like Tacky and following the story frame to write about their character. Each story told why their character was odd, what the problem was, how the friends tried to fix the problem, and finally how their original character did solve the problem. These turned out SO cute!  Here is an excellent example:

We finished off our penguin unit learning a bit of nonfiction information about penguins. We read a few books together, and did some research on pebblego.com. After learning about the different kinds of penguins, each student completed this worksheet as sort of a key to help them identify the different types:

The next day, they put their knowledge to use and created their own penguin. Each student had to choose one of the penguins we learned about and use construction paper to make that penguin. They were allowed to use their penguin "key" we made the day before as a reference. This was a fun project, but also a good assessment piece to see what they knew about how the different penguins looked.

Emperor Penguin

Macaroni Penguin

One more fun thing we did this week was measure ourselves against a life size picture of an Emperor penguin! We learned from pebblego.com that the Emperor is the largest of all the penguins, standing at about 4 feet tall. We taped our penguin to the back of the door and each student got to come up to see how they measured up.  We found that the Emperor penguin is about the same size as the average first grader! A few of us were a tiny bit taller or shorter, but most of us were almost the exact same size (well, except for me of course haha)! How exciting! Here you can see how we measure up as a class: