Autumn

This week we studied fall. I know it's a little late, but Thanksgiving came so early this year! We were able to squeeze in our unit before December.

Monday we learned about corn. We read Corn by Gail Gibbons and created a Tree Map for what we had learned. The kids just adore reading nonfiction books. I love it! After we made our Tree Map, the kids went back to their desks and created some tear-art corn. They turned out great! Then we wrote sentences, using the Tree Map, to go along with our corn. The kids did a wonderful job of using capitals and periods, checking and editing their own work before they came to me. Yay!

We also read a nonfiction story about autumn and things that are special about the season. Then, the kids made their own Tree Maps to write about fall weather, harvests, and clothes we wear. These kids really are rockstars with their Thinking Maps!

We read and retold There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves. These old ladies book are always a riot. We practiced using our sequencing words to retell each of the things she swallowed, then we made connections to the text. I was glad to see most of us are using nice handwriting!

We also started learning about objects in the sky this week. We created a Circle Map for our schema for outer space. After watching a quick video, we were able to add to our Circle Map. We'll keep updating our schema for the rest of the unit. The kids love to be able to visually see all the new things they've learned. It's a great way to assess our learning!

I just love how Angry Birds found a way to make it onto our Circle Map. Yes, they are a part of our schema but we made sure to note that they are fiction! :)

In math we've been practicing our fact families again. We have been using fun fall pictures to make part-part-wholes. Then we're writing corresponding number sentences to make our fact families.

Thanksgiving continued!

This week was only 2 days, and for that I was thankful! :) I'm pretty sure all of us were ready for a little break. We've been working so hard without any days off!

Monday was a very fun day in our class! It was all about apples for the day. We practiced visualizing as I read a story called "The Little Red House with No Doors and No Windows and a Star Inside." We talked about what such a house might look like and why it might not have any doors and windows. We came up with some pretty fun ideas. At the end of the story, I told them that the little red house was something we'd turn into a sweet dessert in the afternoon. We were very excited to learn we were going to make applesauce! I showed the kiddos how every apple has a little star inside its core to hold its seeds. We checked the apples that I cut for applesauce, and we found stars in every one! We made Flow Maps to show the steps for making applesauce. It was definitely tasty!

We also had some fun practice for our math facts this week with different Thanksgiving-themed worksheets. Here are just a couple of examples.

Tuesday was Turkey Day for us! We made some fun turkey headbands to start off the day. It was a great exercise in following directions, and they always turn out super-cute.

Since it was a short week, we didn't have a spelling list. I told the kids we'd be practicing our number words and ordinal numbers. To practice, we drew turkeys and hid our words inside them.

We also painted some turkeys using our watercolors. I love how we draw these together step-by-step, but each painting always turns out with its very own personality.

We learned about turkeys on PebbleGo then created a Tree Map together using a "Share the Pen" exercise. The children came up with the words for the Tree Map and got to write them themselves!, then they went back to their desks to write their own sentences. We wrote our sentences on some pretty cute turkeys!

We had a wonderful two-day week, and the kids had done such a great job listening and working hard that we ended the day with some Turkey Bingo! It's always a big hit, and it helps us practice our reading, especially when Ms. Stookey won't read the words out loud! :)

I hope everyone had a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving! I'll look forward to seeing all y'all on Monday!

Thanksgiving!

Last week we began learning about Thanksgiving. It's my absolute favorite holiday, and the weather is finally cooperating! :)

We started off the week by reading Who Will Carve the Turkey This Thanksgiving? by Jerry Pallotta. The kids and I love all of his books. (We had read Who Will Haunt My House on Halloween? in October, and there are more to come.) After reading the story, the students made connections to the text and created a page for a class book. We thought of which animals might help us carve our turkeys but of all the silly things that could go wrong if they came to our dinners. It was very interesting to see which animals might come over for Thanksgiving!

We also learned about Squanto on PebbleGo. I feel like I'm always commenting on how wonderful PebbleGo is, but I just can't get over it! The students are learning so much about nonfiction texts, and they're so motivated to discover new facts. They really enjoy looking up new words in the glossary and talking about all their new schema. I love seeing those lightbulbs go off each day!

The students really started to understand what Thanksgiving is all about. We talked about how we want to be thankful for the good things in our life. They realized how hard life was for Squanto and the Pilgrims. We talked about different things in our own lives we were thankful for, and then we made a Thankful Quilt to hang in the hallway. We came up with a HUGE list. It was definitely hard for the kiddos to narrow down their absolute favorites. :)

We also read about Samuel Eaton and Sarah Morton, two Pilgrim children. Using a Double Bubble, we compared the lives of boys and girls in Plymouth. The kiddos have been doing a great job of using their thinking skills and explaining their reasoning to others.

We also learned about the first Thanksgiving. This is a great resource that we use each year. It's fun that it is interactive for the kids, and they learn a lot about what life was like for the Pilgrims. We talked about how life was not easy for them, and they left everything they knew to come here to be free. Then the kiddos drew the Mayflower and wrote one thing that they had learned during the week.

Friday was one of my favorite days of the year. We read Stone Soup and watched an online retelling of the story. Then we talked about the importance of sharing with others. I told the students I'd be sharing a special meal with them. We were making (Ms. Stookey's Special) Stone Soup! There were cheers all around. We discussed all the different ingredients from the story, and I shared with them how I was going to add my own favorite things too, to make it extra-special. After we made the soup, the students made a Brace Map for all our ingredients. We had to wait all day for the soup to cook, but we were very patient. It got pretty rave reviews, so that made me happy. :) It was a great day to end a wonderful week.

As for math this week, we've been practicing finding patterns on a hundreds chart. The hundreds chart is one of my favorite tools for math (besides number lines). I am a visual person, and I know lots of our kids are, too. It helps to see all the numbers in order and learn the strategies for adding and subtracting. We played a few fun games with the Airliner. Using this tool seems like fun, but we're secretly practicing all our new skills!

We finished up our science unit on heating and cooling. (Stone Soup fit in perfectly!) We discussed the water cycle and Ms. Coburn found an awesome song online for us! Here it is! We came up with some movements for the song to help us remember what the parts of the water cycle were. I'm sure your kids would love to sing it for you at home. :) We finished our evaporation experiment, too. The students discovered that if a container is not open, the water can't evaporate from it! Instead, the water vapor gets stuck inside and condensates back into the container. We were very excited to learn this fact. They also discovered that if something is shallow and wide, the water in it will evaporate the fastest. (I even had one friend explain to me that the reason it was so cloudy outside was because our water had evaporated into the air and turned into clouds as it condensed. Yay for listening and learning!!!)

Nocturnal Animals

Today we finished another book! We have been researching nocturnal animals since last week. I was glad to know the kids had a LOT of knowledge about these animals already. We had a lot of great schema from Kindergarten, books, and family! We've been using PebbleGo and different library books to research these animals. We found lots of interesting facts! Who knew that bats could live to be 30 years old? Or that opossums had 20 babies in a litter? First Grade never ceases to amaze me. :) We are still doing a great job learning our nonfiction text features (glossary, table of contents, labels, etc) and researching to write stories! As always, I'm very proud of our firsties. We'll be working on Thanksgiving things for the rest of the week!