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

Purple Day

Purple day was a great success! We continued using our ten frames to represent numbers. The students are doing a great job of using the ten frames and writing the numeral it represents. Baggie books went home today, please have your student read each book (preferably twice - it helps build fluency and comprehension). I am still working on determining guided reading levels, so if the books seem to easy, please be patient and just know that they may change soon. Thanks!

The students looked pretty darn cute today and I thought I would share these short videos and pictures! Enjoy!

Ps. Send your students in pink tomorrow!

Here is our wonderful class saying "Hello"

We were trying to say "Welcome to First Grade", but I think it got a little jumbled :)

Giving our very best silly faces

Orange Day & Green Day

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! We are back and in full swing with our first full week. The students did a wonderful job of getting back into the hang of things and we are starting to pick up steam! The students featured their wonderful green clothes, which definitely made the room feel like St. Patrick's Day! We began our day learning our new word wall words. For this week, we will be focusing on:

play

we

am

at

my

We will also be working on making words using our "_am" chunk/word family. In math, we are continuing to review our numbers and shapes. Today, the students partnered up with a buddy and verbalized a list of the differences between a circle and a square. They did an excellent job and I loved hearing all of the math talk! This activity helped provide the platform for students to describe the varying attributes of these two shapes. We are off to a great start!

Remember to send your student in purple tomorrow!

Love,

Mrs. Walker

Blue Day

Ah blue, it was so wonderful seeing all of the students wearing blue today (it is one of my favorite colors!). Our classroom looked like a sea of 21 smiling students. Today, we worked on learning our language arts procedures. This featured reviewing our word wall words for the week. Word Wall words are sight words that all of our wonderful students should be able to master with automaticity (with an automatic response, or fluently) by the end of the year. Here are our first words:

a

see

like

I

the

We also began learning our first word chunk or word family. When learning word families/chunks, I tell students that we can make many different kinds of words by switching out the beginning sounds. Our word chunk for this week is "_at". The students did a great job of coming up with different "at" words such as - cat, sat, rat, mat, etc.

Tomorrow is our first Friday, and short day! I can't believe the first week is almost over. Holy moly! Remember to send your students in orange!

Love,

Mrs. Walker

Yellow Day

Our second day has come and gone and I don't think I stopped smiling all day! All of the kiddos are super sweet and so wonderful to work with. Today we focused on practicing our rules. We went to our first assembly and the students did an amazing job of demonstrating assembly behavior! :) In the afternoon, we began work on our time capsules. I think this is going to be such a great way to document the first week of the students' first grade year! I am looking forward to tomorrow and seeing all of my wonderful students in blue!

Love,
Mrs. Walker

Red Day

The real first day of first grade has come and gone. I can't believe it! All of the students looked great in their red clothing today! Much of the day was spent on learning our new rules and practicing new procedures, but we also made sure to have fun in between. After reading "First Day Jitters," we drank jitter juice to help wash away our own jitters about starting a new year. The kids loved it and I think it totally did the trick! :)

I am looking forward to another great day tomorrow and make sure to send your sweet student in wearing yellow! Tomorrow, I will also be sending home homework folders home for the first time. Please look in the folder and take out the pink information card. This needs to be filled out and sent back to school. Thanks!

Love,
Mrs. Walker

Ps I'll have pictures up of red day once I know that all of our students can have their pictures on our wonderful blog.

Finally!

The first day of first grade. Well, kind of. We had orientation today and I was finally able to meet all of my wonderful students and their fabulous parents! I have been counting down the days since I saw my class list. It is so great to finally put all of the smiling faces to the names I have been memorizing! The students did a great job on their self-portraits and I appreciate all of the parents that took the time to come to orientation. I am excited to kick off our color days tomorrow with red. So, kiddos, make sure to wear red on Tuesday and remember to bring all of your fabulous smiles!

love,
Mrs. Walker

Welcome First Graders and Parents

Back to school is here and I can't wait to meet my new class! This is my third year here at Willow Springs and teaching first grade! First grade is so much fun and I thrilled to meet all of my new first grade friends. I have been setting up our room and planning some fabulous activities for our first week. This is a new blog for me and I am hoping that this will be a great place for us to keep track of all of the fun and amazing things that we do in our class. I will also make sure to post upcoming events and any other important information about what we are learning. If there is anything else you would like to on our class site, please let me know and I will be sure to get it on here for you!

Love,

Mrs. Walker