"Peek at the Week" April 13-17 & 21-24

Here is a peek at our last two weeks!

Math Workshop

We are well underway on our new unit: Geometry, Measurement, and Equal Shares!

We kicked off the unit by learning to tell time to the nearest hour and half hour.

We practiced reading, showing, and writing times. We focused heavily on describing where the hands on the clock are positioned when it is on the hour or half hour. 

Next, we began exploring shapes. We learned about rectangles, squares, triangles, and circles. First graders are expected to identify shapes by their defining attributes. Pretty tricky, huh? 

We learned all about rectangles first. Rectangles are a closed shape that have 4 sides and 4 square corners. (In later grades these will be referred to as right, or 90 degree angles.) Did you know a square is actually a special rectangle because it has 4 equal sides!

Next, we explored triangles.

Triangles are a closed shape with 3 sides and 3 corners. Some triangles have 1 square corner. 

We were able to describe similarities and differences we observed between shapes.

Finally, we looked at circles. Circles are a round, closed shape. They do not have any sides or corners.

Next week we will begin taking a look at equal shares!

Reader's Workshop

We started our second nonfiction unit. We are becoming 'experts' on a topic by reading both fiction and nonfiction books!

We are learning that the new facts we learn in our nonfiction books can help us understand fiction stories even more!

We have been busy collecting new facts and recording them in our reader's response journals.

We also spent time exploring the main idea and supporting details of our texts!

Be sure to ask your child the topic he/she is learning about!

Science 

We began our study on soils. We know that soil is important for plant growth. We spent time exploring soil and recording things we found!

This week, we began exploring how important worms are to soil. That's right, we have worms in our classroom!! 

We created compost baggies in order to study how worms decompose organic material. We be checking our bags throughout the next several weeks.

We are storing our worms in a box, because worms like dark places. 

What a great few weeks! I hope you enjoyed the weekend!

Love,

Mrs. Hogue

"Peek at the Weeks" March 16-20 & 23-27

We were busy bees in first grade before spring break!  Take a look at what we were up to!

Math Workshop

We started a new unit on data analysis. 

We started the unit by organizing data into categories. We cut out bugs and sorted them into different categories;

Wings/no wings

Color

Legs/no legs

We learned how to represent and organize data that we collected.

We then learned how to analyze data. Before we can talk about our data, we found it helpful to draw matching sticks. This way we can easily see what is the difference between each category! We worked on using our vocabulary words more, fewer, most, and fewest to talk about our findings!

Finally, we learned how to collect data. We came up with a survey question to ask our friends. Then collected, organized, represented, and analyzed our data!

Reader's Workshop

We learned readers are always on the lookout for new and interesting words when they read. This helps us to learn new and exciting words!

Although the it is fun to find interesting words, we quickly learned that it is important for readers to understand what tricky words means. We can use clues from the story to help us figure out a words meaning.

We practiced this with a story called Matthew's Dream. After we read the story, we worked with a partner to figure out what the words entranced, gazing, and emerged meant. We got to record out thinking on a copy of the page from the book! We used both the picture and the words to help us determine the words' meaning. We had some wonderful discussions!

Our last week was spent on fluency!  We thought about what makes a good audience reader. 

Each of us chose a just right book to practice reading out loud. We used everything we knew about figuring out tricky words in order to make our reading sound interesting. After practicing, we read our books to each other in a small group! 

Them, we recorded on reading on the iPad!

I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing spring break!