Week of May 24-28, 2010

In Writer's Workshop we finished our fictional stories about the animals we have been researching. Your children are so imaginative! We continue to make sure our writing is readable to others and that our sentences begin with capital letters and end with the correct punctuation mark. In Reader's Workshop we have been focusing on determining the main idea in a story and what details support the main idea. After measuring things with non-standard units of measurement such as tiles, paper clips and cubes, we finished our math unit by using two standard units: the ruler and tape measure. It was great fun to compare how big around our elbows, wrists and necks are! We will end the year with a study of geometry and fractions in math. We have completed our animal research projects although some students are not quite ready to bring them home! We will start our final science unit on balance and motion next week.

U.S. Botanic Garden

On Thursday all of the first graders went to the U.S. Botanic Garden. It was very HOT so we especially enjoyed the Children's Garden where we could water the plants and ourselves! We were extra lucky because our librarian Ms. Blain went with us. She brought a special plant identification book that made our trip extra exciting! One of our students was particularly interested in Venus flytraps and similar plants and we were able to track down a pitcher plant in one of the outside gardens. Our last field trip of the year was a great way to extend our plant study and get some ideas for our garden at school!

Week or May 17 - 21, 2010

With so many rainy days this week, we had lots of indoor recess! The children love these opportunities to build things and play games in the classroom. All of the rain is also helping our garden grow. Thanks to Monica Gerlach, our garden is looking more and more like Mr. McGregor's! We hope you will stop by and see the fruits of our labor. You are always welcome to come and help the children water and weed their square foot. As you will see below, we have been working on our Animal Research Project across most of the curriculum. In the computer lab, we went to a great website and learned more facts about our animals. There was even a video that showed our animals in action and another section about our animal's life cycle. In math, we finished up unit on place value and will move onto measurement next week.

Animal Dioramas

We will finish our Animal Research Projects this upcoming week. So far, we have written a non-fiction report and a fictional story about our animal; we made a bookmark with fun facts on it about our animal; and our grand finale will be a diorama for our animal! Making the dioramas has required the students to use a variety of skills. They are sharing ideas with each other about how to make their animal stand up in the diorama. They have access to a variety of materials such as textured paper, tissue paper, construction paper, cotton balls and anything else they can think of to make their dioramas depict their animal's habitat as clearly as possible. We are learning that when we see a classmate's idea and use it, it doesn't mean we are "copying" it; instead we are sharing good ideas with each other and it's a compliment if someone wants to use our idea! The dioramas will be displayed on top of the students' lockers so please be sure to look for them the next time you are in the school building.

Week of May 10 - 14, 2010

This week we said goodbye to one of our classmates. He and his family are moving to another city and we had a fun send-off for him on Friday. During the week we made a book for him. He also got to choose his favorite classroom job (line leader) and he chose our activities during Morning Meeting. His leaving reminded us that we are all leaving first grade in just six weeks! To begin the process of ending the school year, we worked in small groups to think of as many tips as we can to share with the rising first grade class. We also named things that make first grade special (so I can be sure to remember to do them again!) As hard as saying goodbye and change is, it is still so amazing to see how much everyone has grown--physically, academically and emotionally. We are finishing up our animal research reports during science and Writers' Workshop. In math we continue to work with the 100s chart and some of us are making charts up to 1000!

Week of May 3 - 7, 2010

This week in Writer's Workshop we wrote poems for Mother's Day and added them to cards that we decorated with textured paper that we painted in art class. We also wrote about our trip to the zoo. In Reader's Workshop we began reading about the animals we chose to study for our animal research project. We are revisiting the 100s number grid to practice our addition and subtraction skills and making fact families to increase our fact fluency. This week was also Teacher Appreciation Week and I felt SO appreciated. The wonderful food, flowers, poems and other gifts were such nice surprises and made for a festive week. Thank you!

Zoo FieldTrip

Our trip to the National Zoo was a great way to kick off our animal research projects as part of our new science unit about animals. We had lots of parents with us and were able to travel around the zoo in small groups at our own pace. The highlights of the trip were seeing the very sociable orangutans, the elephants, pandas and tigers. Playing at the giant pizza garden was a fun way to end our day!

Bamboo Forest

Monica Gerlach (Matthew's mom) taught us about bamboo and then led us into the magical Bamboo Forest. We used some of the bamboo in our garden to build tepees to support our sugar snap peas.

Week of April 26 - 30, 2010

The main focus of our week was getting the garden ready for planting and actually planting! Monica Gerlach visited us on Tuesday afternoon and took us to the magical Bamboo Forest in back of the school building. We learned about bamboo from her and also got some bamboo to take back to our garden. Thanks to the Gerlachs, we have two bamboo tepees for our peas to grow on. With the help of several other parents, we planted broccoli, cabbage and marigolds. In Reader's Workshop we talked about character traits and learned how to focus on what a character is like instead of what the character is doing. We continue to work on good sentence structure in Writer's Workshop and we wrapped up our unit on fact fluency in math.