January Reading Challenge

First grade tracked our at home reading in the month of January. Our goal was for each student to read at least 200 minutes. All students met their goal, and many exceeded it! In total our class read 2,916 minutes in January! We celebrated with outside playtime!

 

 

A Creation

Enjoy this pattern block castle created by some of the students in our class! It was requested that I post it on our class blog. :) 

 

Science Day: Animals in Winter

On Wednesday our class had our first science day with Sue Harrington, a science instructor who comes to Southeast to do special activities with each grade level. We learned about how animals survive in the winter. Some animals migrate, some hibernate, some insulate, and some congregate. One activity that we did was to test how insulation works. We went outside and measure the air temperature. Then we compared it to the temperature of a student wearing a jacket, a student wearing 2 jackets, and students huddled together inside a "cave" that we made out of blankets. We found the insulation keeps animals much warmer than the outside temperature.

 

 

Happy Holidays!

I hope you all had very happy holidays and a wonderful New Year! 

My resolution is to post more regularly on our class blog, so stick around for some more news from our class in 2017! :) 

Holidays Around the World

In the month of December our class took a trip around the world with Globe Trot Scott. We got packages each week from Globe Trot as he visited different countries and learned about their holiday traditions. Throughout the month we read literature from different cultures, reflected on traditions that are similar and different to our own, and did a variety of holiday activities based on what we learned. This is one of my personal favorite units that we do in first grade. We had lots of fun as we learned about the world around us!

A huge thanks to Mr. Hartman who came in to teach about Hanukkah, Ms. MacKenzie who skyped in with her class of third graders in Denmark, Ms. Salvato who skyped in from Argentina, and Ms. de Sousa who shared photographs from holidays in Brazil!

Mayflower Postcards

It's hard to believe that it is already time for Thanksgiving break! For the coming holiday we studied the Mayflower. We read a magazine about the experience that children had on the Mayflower. We learned vocabulary words like "miserable" and "seasick." After, we created our own post cards being sent from the Mayflower. We each created a picture in Pixie (a computer drawing program) and then wrote a message on the back about what it was like to be on the Mayflower. We delivered our post cards to friends and teachers around the school, or brought them home to deliver to family.

Sink or Float

This week in science we tried to figure out why things float. First we made some predictions- we thought that things might float because they're flat, round, heavier than the water, light, have air inside, or because "they don't have a lot of stuff inside them." To test our theories we used a variety of fruit. To our surprise many of the the fruits floated except the grape and the mango. Afterwards we went back and reflected on our original ideas. We talked about some of the reasons that things float like shape, weight, and density. 

In the picture below students are holding up sink or float cards to predict what a piece of fruit will do.