Last Day of School 2010-2011

What a great way to start our last day of First Grade! The hand-painted bookshelf with lots of favorite books was the perfect gift for our classroom! (It is behind all the silly faces.)It has been a great year and this class is the best! Congratulations for a job well done!

Field Day

A highlight of our last week of school was Field Day. There were at least ten different games and activities that tested our agility, teamwork and stamina. We worked so well together that we got at least three compliments from three different parents about how well we worked together. Those compliments put us over 100 hundred compliments for the year!

Class Party

Thanks to our inventive and imaginative class parents, our class party to celebrate the end of our school year together was a great success. Our theme was scientific experiments and we were all Mad Scientists!! We made volcano monsters, had balloon races and flew whirligigs, among other amazing events of the day.

Wacky Hair Day

The last week of school was Spirit Week and everyone at Jamestown was invited to do something different each day of the week to show our "spirit" and creativity. Wacky Hair Day was especially - well- WACKY!!

End-of-the-Year Self Assessments

Throughout the year, we have been doing self-assessments to help Ms. Runkle write report cards. At the end of each marking period, we record how we are feeling about our classwork and our classmates. It gives us a chance to think about what we do well and areas where we can improve. It was amazing to compare our last self assessment of the year with our very first one! We have all grown so much and made such great progress. Yay, us!

Hot Weather=Indoor Recess

A recent poll among First Graders in Ms. Runkle's classroom revealed that most of us prefer recess indoors, especially when it is hot! With so many hot days, we had lots of opportunities to do some cool things indoors!

Morning Meeting Leaders

By this time in the school year, we all know how to do Morning Meeting! So, we all took turns leading Morning Meeting and gave Ms. Runkle a break!

Zoo FIeld Trip

Spending the day at the National Zoo was a great way to kick off our Animal Research Project. We had great fun seeing all of the animals at our zoo, but it made it really hard to decide which one we wanted to research! It was such a treat to have so many parents from first and second grade with us! We had a busy day and the bus trip back to school was so quiet . . . .

Animal Research Projects

We worked really hard on our Animal Research Projects! After choosing one animal to research, we used books from our library, websites in the Computer Lab and help from our parents as part of our homework to record our facts and write a report. We also created dioramas to show our animal's habitat. It was exciting to be able to teach our parents and friends about our animals at our Animal Research Report Publishing Party!

Weeks of May 9 - 20, 2011

The highlight of our last two weeks together was Pajama Day! After such a great Teacher Appreciation Week, I thought it would be fun to show the First Graders how much I appreciate them. Everyone loves to go to school in their pajamas!

Pajame Day + Math = FUN!!

On Pajama Day we included our stuffed animals in the fun as much as possible. They were our constant companions and helped us hone our math skills, especially! After a midnight snack of Lucky Charms cereal where we sorted and graphed the marshmallows, we measured our animal with a tape measure, ruler and on a balance scale. Now we know how tall and big around it is and how many pop cubes, or another math manipultive, will balance it. The trickiest and most fun was the balance scale since some wouldn't exactly fit on the scale. Then, we practiced the art of improvising!

More Pajama Day Fun!

It is great fun to play outside in our pajamas! After recess, we wrote bedtime stories for our stuffed animals.

Making Lists

During Writing Workshop we have been talking about all the different reasons for writing. One idea that we practiced was making lists. Two of our classmates have a mohawk haircut. They decided to make a list of when to wear their mohawk "up" and when to wear it "down" so they could wear it the same way on school days. This is a great (and unique) example of students applying what they are learning in the classroom to their personal lives!

Birds and Nest Mobile

We love working together in First Grade, whether it is writing a story together, buddy reading, playing a math game or making art! It helps us learn how to cooperate and problem solve and share ideas. We made a mobile that includes birds, eggs and a nest. We had to decide what type of bird we wanted to use for the mobile and then find out what color its eggs are and what materials it uses to build its nest. Then we worked together to color it according to our research and make the mobile balance.

Retelling Stories

We are really enjoying retelling stories using puppets and props. "Miss Lucy" is especially popular and it's fun to retell "Mrs. Wishy Washy" too. Retelling stories helps us with our reading comprehension skills as we remember the beginning, middle and end of the story. It also helps us with the story elements of characters, setting and problem and solution. We are now doing text innovations with these familiar stories by changing the story elements. Next, we will make our own puppets and props to tell a brand new story!

Planting in our Garden

After a very soggy week, we finally got to plant in our garden. We planted basil, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, pumpkins, and lots of marigolds to keep the insects away! We also found worms, ladybugs, ants and grubs.

Mystery Reader

Our most recent Mystery Reader read us some really funny stories--Fancy Nancy, among others.

Weeks of April 25 - May 6, 2011

Happy Arbor Day!

In addition to celebrating Arbor Day by a visit from our Superintendent and lots of tree experts and a new tree in our Courtyard, we made a tree for our classroom. We made things for our tree that we would find in our area such as birds, butterflies and deer. After reading "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein, we added leaves to our tree "by tracing our hand to make a leaf cutout and writing a way that we are giving and kind on it. We also learned more about trees from a Park Naturalist from GUlf Branch Nature Center. Now we are all tree experts!

Writing Buddies

In Writing Workshop we are practicing revising our stories. It is really helpful to read our stories with a Writing Buddy and then hear tips to make the story even better. We learned that adding dialogue, an interesting problem and a "KAPOW!" ending all can make our stories more interesting.