Week of October 25-29, 2010

Happy Halloween! The primary team teachers got together and dressed up like dice in honor of all the fun math games we get to play with them. Our week was filled with pumpkins and bats and writing our own Halloween stories as well as hearing them too. We started our subtraction unit in math and are wrapping up our “What is a Scientist?” unit. The Halloween Parade and Party were a great way to end an exciting week!

Technology in the Classroom

For the first time this year, we got to practice our math facts using iPads and iPad touches. There are lots of fun applications to use and we will do this every Monday for the rest of the year to improve our math skills.

Scientists are Inventors

We used the recyclables that we have been bringing in to make up our own inventions. We had lots of opportunities to make mistakes and fix them and learn from them. Our inventions are on top of our lockers so be sure to come by and take a look!

Bat Rulers!

We had fun measuring things in our classroom with a “bat ruler.” After talking about the difference between standard and non-standard measuring tools (like a bat ruler) we measured everything from chairs, to pumpkins to ourselves! Then we decided to see how many bats long our classroom is. It is 154 bats long!

Measuring Pumpkins

We had a fun Friday even before the parade and party! We measured our mini pumpkins in a variety of ways to bring our science and math skills together. We used regular scales and balance scales for the weight; cubes for height; and a tape measure for the circumference of our pumpkins. We estimated first before measuring. We also compared our pumpkins’ statistics with each others to come up with some subtraction sentences. We also tested our pumpkins to see if they would sink or float.

Halloween Party

Our parents did a great job planning a fun Halloween Party. After listening to some fun Halloween stories, we paraded around the neighborhood with the rest of the school. Then after a yummy snack, we had a relay race outside. Then, we made lanterns, popcorn hands and felt some witches parts that one parent found on her door step that morning! It was yucky!!

October 2010

Our classroom blog for our 2012-2011 First Graders is finally up and running. Enjoy reading about what we have been doing in the past few weeks. Be sure to share the blog with your child as he or she can add lots of details to what is written below.

Courtyard Gardening

Thanks to a knowledgeable and energetic parent, we got to work in our garden? We cleaned out the dead plants, amended the soil and planted some pansies as companions to the bunches of marigolds that are still growing from last spring. Our pumpkin vine continues to grow but is not bearing fruit. Oh, well maybe next year . . . .

Math

We finished up our first math unit and got lots of practice with our addition skills One our our favorite games is Five in a Row! Our next math unit includes addiition and subtraction.

Language Arts

During Language Arts we are writing about small moments of real things that happen to us. Ralph Fletcher’s visit on Monday helped us understand how important lots of details are to making a story interesting. We are playing games with our word study words and responding to stories with writing and art projects. We continue to find books that are just right for us and enjoy reading with pointers and each other. We learned some “robust” vocabulary words which are words that we aren’t expected to spell necessarily but will enrich our vocabulary. We also thought of lots of words that we may use in our writing about Halloween.

What is a scientist?

Our “What is a Scientist” unit is giving us lots of opportunities to use our observation skills and drawing what we see. We found a really lazy grasshopper and a stink bug in the garden who sat very still for us as we sketched them. We are also noticing how the leaves are changing and things are dying back in our garden. We set up an experiment to find out how grapes turn into raisins. We set up three different experiments: grapes in a sunny window, squished grapes in a sunny window and grapes under a heat lamp and then guessed which grapes would change to raisins the quickest. We also practiced the scientific skill of classifying and sorting using sea shells, buttons, animals, fruits and vegetables on the Smart Board and our own shoes.