Wednesday, November 27, 2013

"Peek at the Week" November 18-26

Happy Thanksgiving!  We have had a fun week and a half in room 126 learning about The Mayflower and the meaning behind the holiday we are celebrating this week.  We ended our fun week with an "Informance" showcasing all the exciting things children are learning in Music, Spanish, P.E., Art, and Library!  Our specialist teachers worked countless hours preparing for this wonderful performance!


 Writer's Workshop

We are working on showing, not telling our character's feelings when we write.  As we wrote our stories, we tried to put ourselves right back in that moment and remember how we were feeling and what we were doing.





1st graders did an amazing job writing about their feelings and showing the reader how they felt during the moment.  We also played a little game called "Guess My Emotion" to illustrate this point. 



Reader's Workshop
We spent the last several days learning all about The Mayflower and Thanksgiving.  We started by reading a fun book called The Ugly Pumpkin.  In this story, a pumpkin feels left out because he doesn't look like the other pumpkins.  We stopped and talked about how we have had feelings like the poor pumpkin.  Many of us 'told' the book about a similar experience.





We also learned that characters can change throughout a story.  At the beginning of this story the Ugly Pumpkin was sad and lonely because he couldn't find any friends because he thought he was a pumpkin.  At the end, he finally found where he 'belonged' because he realized he was really a squash and felt happy inside!




Of course, we had to try some squash!  Squash was eaten by many pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving.  Many first graders had never tried squash before.  Many didn't think they were going to like it, but were very surprise :)











After enjoying the squash we took a class vote on whether we liked squash.  These were the results:



Next, we began learning all about the Mayflower!  We read a story called "If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620."  


We learned that life on the Mayflower was very tough.  Families could not bring all of the belongings, and often could only choose one thing to bring with them!  We talked about what each of us would bring, and made a class book!




Throughout the week we collected facts we learned and added them to our "Mayflower" boat!


Pilgrims ate dried biscuits and salted beef while traveling on the Mayflower.  Many pilgrims grew tired of this meal after 66 days!  We decided to see if we would have been able to survive the Mayflower by trying this meal ourselves :)









We also made a Thanksgiving project on Tux Paint in the computer lab.  Children traced their hands to make turkeys and then wrote about what they were thankful for. 






Math Workshop
We wrapped up our unit on the Double Decker Bus.  This unit was very powerful, and many children have a stronger understanding of using 5 and 10 groups to help them add and subtract.  This is a skill that will be ongoing this year.  We spent the week using our arithmetic racks to help as add and subtract passengers on the bus. 





We wrapped up the unit by writing and solving our own bus stories!  Although this proved to be a bit challenging, I was very proud of how hard everyone worked!



Science
We started learning about clouds this week!  We read a story called It looked Like Spilt Milk. 


In this story, there are clouds that look like many different objects.  We decided to create our own clouds by painting a mixture of shaving cream and glue!




Next, we learned about 3 types of clouds:
Cumulus
Cirrus
Stratus
We will go onto more detail about these types after break.  To help us remember these types, we met some new friends who are now hanging in our classroom.



Other News
First graders are collecting mittens for children supported by the COA Youth and Family Centers.  Please help us out by donating new mittens to our mitten tree!


I wish you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I feel so blessed to have each and every child in my classroom this year.  They are truly wonderful and special little ones and I cannot wait to see where the rest of the year takes us!  Enjoy your holiday!
Love,
Mrs. Hogue

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