Halloween

Granted this is a bit on the late side, my apologies! But let's revisit our Halloween festivities! With Halloween on a Monday, I didn't know what to expect from the kiddos, but we had a blast! With the Halloween parade in the morning followed by a wonderful Halloween party, the tikes definitely left school exhausted! Here are a few pictures and videos from that wonderful day!

Halloween morning!

Our cute silly picture

Love the costumes!

Hard at work craftin!

Spider treats!

Awesome pencil topper from our cute princess!

Musical chairs

Sooo fun!

Such sweet smiles!

Around and around we go

Pumpkin Week!

This week we have been learning about pumpkins. Fall and Halloween are two of my favorite things and pumpkins definitely fit into both. On Monday, I found the bumpiest, scariest pumpkin I could and hid it in a brown paper sack. I told the kiddos that this mystery bag has something in it, but that we need to use our senses to figure it out. The students were only allowed to use their sense of touch during the first go around. This was a great exercise for adjectives! Then we moved on to smell. What does the mystery object smell like. Students began guessing, but pumpkin was not coming up. Then finally, we were able to use our sense of sight to see what the mystery object was.

Afterward, we read part of the book "How Many Seeds Are in a Pumpkin?" Then we made our own predictions.

Saying goodbye to our bumpy pumpkin!

Such great smiles!

After slicing - sawing rather - the pumpkin into two pieces at home, I decided that I would need a second pumpkin because there was no way I was going to be able to cut it into 4 pieces for each table group. Armed with four pumpkin halves, I had the students decided who was going to scoop out the pumpkin guts and who was going to count the seeds into piles. The students did awesome! We found out that there were 387 seeds in our smooth pumpkin, and only 189 in the bumpy!

Working hard and counting!

Great team work!

Eww...it feels slimey!

I love the discussions that happen during this activity!

To finish up pumpkin week in a fun, tasty way, we had a pumpkin tasting day! A big thanks to Anna for bringing in all of our pumpkin treats. The students tried pumpkin seeds, pie, cookies and bread. Pumpkin food was such a hit!

Jog-A-Thon

Friday was our wonderful Jog-a-thon and boy did we have fun! The kiddos did such a great job running the .6 mile! I was surprised at how fast some of our students are. I definitely couldn't keep up with some of them! After we ran, the students gathered on the playground to see all of the other students. Music, food, fun and smiles! Friday was a great day to be in First Grade!

Apple Tasting

To kick off our unit on Fall, we have been learning about apples. We have discussed how apples grow, how they taste, made apple art, and finally we ate the apples. Today was Apple Tasting Day and the students loved it! We sampled apple juice, apple jelly, apple cereal, apple sauce and of course apples. Such a big hit! Big thanks to Anna, our room mom, for putting it together!

Jog-a-thon Week

This week, or what is left of it, will be so much fun! We have the Jog-a-thon on Friday and Apple Tasting tomorrow (Thursday). But first things first, this week marks the first week that each student has their new spelling words.

Spelling:
Please work on the spelling concept with your student, remember to help him/her see this as a learning opportunity and to celebrate when they are spelling the words correctly in their authentic writing. On Friday, we will take our spelling celebration! If your student has pictures in his/her sort, then the student only need to work on getting the concept right.

For example, one group is working on the "sh" digraph. When spelling a word, they need to work on getting the digraph correct, but then to sound out the rest of the word. So if the word is sheep, students could spell it "shep" and get it correct because they had the digraph right. But "seep" wouldn't be right as they are missing the "h".

If you have any questions about spelling, please let me know!

Language Arts:
The word wall words of the week are:

in

get

said

big

be

We are also working on the short "e" sound and the word families/chunks "et", "ed", and "en". 

Math: 

This week we have been talking about addition. The students are doing really well adding two numbers together! Today we played a domino game using M&Ms as our dots. Definitely more engaging knowing you can eat your math! It was also a great way for students to make two groups (or parts) and then bring them together to find out the sum, or how many were in the whole group. 

Some of the language is a bit different in this program. We have been talking about part-part-whole. So one part may be 2 and another part 3, then the whole is 5. Or the addition sentence would look like:

2+3=5

We are getting psyched for our Jog-a-thon on Friday. First grade is the last to run at 10:35am. I plan on running the route with the kiddos and will take loads of pictures for our wonderful blog. Hope to see you all there in your running shoes!

Love,

Mrs. Walker

Week 4 - Holy Moly!

We completed our first day of our 4th week! Is time going by super fast for anyone else?! This week, the kiddos are working on completing their Must Do centers - they have 7 to do by Friday and I have to say, we have some pretty hard workers! - while balancing their Can Do centers.

Our word wall words of the week are:

me

jump

if

and

here

We will also be working on our short i phonics concept. This week we will be using the "_it" and "_ig" word families/chunks. We will continue to review short a as well. 

Something that was new for the kiddos today was rotations. As a first grade team, we split the kids up into 4 color groups (red, blue, green, yellow) and rotate them from teacher to teacher and activity to activity. I was lucky enough to teach PE and the kids had a blast! I love rotations because it allows the kids to see some of their other first grade friends in an academic setting. Rotations consists of PE, Discovery (science), Music, Star (social studies). 

One last new thing for the week - Homework! The students took home their very first homework pages this week. I reminded them to not worry because it isn't due until Friday! But it is a good idea to set up a homework routine and a specific place for your child to do his/her homework. This will help them become more successful, and will be less of a battle! :)

Love,

Mrs. Walker

Brown Day

Welcome back from our wonderful three-day weekend. I hope everyone had an amazing break. Mr. Walker and I went up to Snowbird and took the tram up to the top of the mountain. It was such a fantastic mini-getaway from the valley. I was surprised to see how many wild flowers were still in bloom!

Mountain View

Wildflowers

So breathtaking! 

Mr. & Mrs. Walker

The kiddos started the week off beautifully! I am so pleased to see how well the students fell back into the routines. We began the day learning our new word wall words - I can't believe we are already up to 15!

look

can

on

go

you

Our new word family/chunk of the week is "_an." (can, ran, van, tan, etc) The students did a fantastic job manipulating the beginning sounds and creating new words using the "_an" chunk. 

We began a new concept in math, quantity discrimination. We are working on greater than (more) and less than (fewer). The biggest hurdle the students are having with this concept is the vocabulary. Our math program is very language rich and we will be spending a quite a bit of time understanding our vocabulary.  To learn this concept, we used snap cubes to make towers. I had students build two towers using varying heights. We worked on saying greater than and less than. Such as 2 is less than 10 or 8 is greater than 4. The cubes added a great visual and definitely helped our hands-on learners. 

Here are some pictures of our wonderful students hard at work during centers!

Remember tomorrow is rainbow day, send your child in whatever they would like to wear!

Love,

Mrs. Walker