Week of June 14-18, 2010

Wow! This is the last posting to our class blog for the 2009-2010 school year! (We still have one more week so don't go anywhere!) I hope you will look back over the year and remember all of the fun things we have done together! Croaky enjoyed going home with each one of you and having exciting adventures! Croaky and I wish you a Hoppy Summer!

Enjoying our Garden

One morning during Writer's Workshop this week we investigated our garden and wrote and drew about what we saw. We are all master gardeners! We have sugar snap peas, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, sunflowers and humongous zucchinis! We even tasted fresh zucchini and zucchini in bread from our garden. It has been exciting to watch our vegetables and flowers grow from tiny seeds. With the help of Ms. Gerlach, we planted pumpkins so next year's first and second graders will have pumpkins for fun projects in the fall!

Field Day

Field Day on Thursday was great fun. We were lucky to have nice weather for all the fun activities that we did together. We did a sack race, torch relay, noodle throw and a dizzy bat race, among others. We were all good sports and fans. We all won!!

Buddies for the Last Time and Hats On Day

On Friday we got together with our 5th grade Buddies. (Many of us had on our hats for Hats On Day, a fundraiser for children with cancer.) They helped us complete the page about Buddies in our Memory Book. We drew pictures of each other and wrote about our favorite memories. Potato Olympics, disguising our turkeys for Thanksgiving and designing forts for Delores and Morris were among the top picks. We wish our buddies all the best in middle school next year!

Goodbye Carlyle!

We were so lucky to have Carlyle with us for three weeks. She was kind, helpful and lots of fun. We wish her the very best in her bright future. Happy Graduation!!

Week of June 7 - 11, 2010

As you will see from the posts below, we had a very hands-on learning week! From building block cities with geometric shapes in math to going to the science fair in the gym, our learning really came alive! In Writer's Workshop we started our First Grade Memory Book while continuing to work on our stories about our interests and special places. We began learning about fractions at the end of the week in Math Workshop. Friday's puppet show was a great end to an exciting week!

Block Buildings and Cities

We ended our geometry unit by putting our geometric shapes together to build buildings and cities. The children became very adept and recording their buildings and drawing the three-dimensional shapes. We have many architects and designers in the making!

Science Fair

Students from HB Woodlawn came to Jamestown to share their love of science. They set up several stations around the gym and we were able to participate in their experiments and demonstrations. We learned about balance, force and gravity, optical illusions and sound waves, among other exciting discoveries. It was really great to meet older students who enjoy science and to learn from them. They were great teachers and a lot of fun too!

Puppet Show!

We celebrated John's birthday with a puppet show. The pupeteer, Bob Brown, taught us the difference between puppets and marionettes and introduced us to many of his friends who did clever acts including juggling, gymnastics and dancing. Best of all, the show made us all laugh really hard! Many thanks to John's parents who provided us with a fun-filled and educational show!

Week of June 1 - 4, 2010

The highlight of our week was having Carlyle Bruemmer join our classroom. She is a senior at Yorktown and doing her "Senior Experience" with us until June 18. She is so kind and helpful to me and the children. We are glad and thankful she is with us! In Writer's Workshop we brainstormed story ideas by jotting down things about ourselves such as our hobbies, favorite places, happy and sad times and our favorite holidays. The children will use this list to generate ideas for both fiction and non-fiction stories. In Reader's Workshop we continued thinking about the main idea in the stories we are reading aloud and to ourselves. We are also making mental images for short poems and practicing our grammar skills. Even though we don't have new word study patterns, we are continuing practicing our word study skills with sorts we have already done. See below for what's going on in our science and math units.

My, how our Storybook Garden has grown!

Take a look at our before and after pictures of our garden! We have been lucky with getting plenty of rain but rain also brings weeds so we were busy wedding our square feet this week. Thanks so much to Kim Tomlinson, Cynthia Walsh and Monica Gerlach for all of your help in getting and keeping our garden going.

3-D Shapes

First graders wnjoyed learning the names and different faces of three-dimensional shapes as part of our geometry unit in math. We have been exploring the shapes, guessing what shape is hidden in a bag, making shapes out of paper and building interesting things with the shapes.

Balance and Motion

In our Balance and Motion science unit this week we practiced balance doing yoga poses, balancing in different ways with our bodies and balancing books on our heads. We realized that balance takes lots of focus, concentration and perseverance!