This week in 1st grade...

What we do all day...

Our Week in Pictures

It was a short and action packed week. Enjoy the pictures and have a great weekend!

                                     

New Additions!

We are welcoming some new additions to our classroom... FISH! As a part of our 1st science unit, we will learn about the needs of living organisms. Today in science we discussed the 4 needs of animals in an effort to ensure we could properly care for our fish. We learned they need food, water, air, and shelter.

For the next few weeks, we will observe, predict, analyze and capture data from our aquariums. In the aquariums we have platy fish, duckweed, algae, snails, and anacharis. We will try very hard to keep these fish thriving in our classroom. Ask your child to tell you all about the needs of plants and animals.

Social Studies

Today the students did a social studies lesson with Mr. Graham where they learned the word "attributes". Students started by coloring a simple picture of a house in accordance with different attributes. For example: If you have a brother color the door red. If you do not have a brother, color the door blue.

Once the students were finished coloring according to all the different attributes, it was time to compare! They looked for houses that were the same, similar, and different. This was a great activity to not only get to know the other students of the class, but to introduce our social studies objective of the week! Look for these in the green folders tomorrow and ask your child if they remember all the attributes! 

Ready For Anything and a HUGE THANK YOU!

The first day of school we read a book called Ready for Anything by Keiko Kasza. We decided that first grade would be challenging and different at times, but we would be open and READY FOR ANYTHING!

 

Well... today was one of those days were we had to be READY FOR ANYTHING! The combination of tornado warnings and a classroom that is in a trailer provided a very busy day of shuffling back and forth. The kids were so patient and attentive to directions that it made me very proud to be their teacher! At the end of the day we were able to still squeeze in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. We even accomplished it by staying "mostly" dry! I think after today our class really is READY FOR ANYTHING!



I wanted to give out a HUGE, GIGANTIC, MONSTROUS thank you to the parents who have purchased items from our classroom wish list. Today we received these:

They are awesome chair sacks so the kids can store their notebooks and folders right at their seats! SO WONDERFUL! The biggest downside to my online wish list is that I don't know who sends me all these amazing gifts! If you buy things for the classroom, please let me know, I want to give you a personal thanks as well! 

This week in 1st grade..

I hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend!  This week in 1st grade we are working on many exciting things. Now that the students are comfortable with the classroom routines, it is time to dive into our day to day schedule. 

Classroom Behavior

We have two different forms of  behavior management. The first form is our Behavior Clip Chart. This is used to track individual behavior. 

 Students are able to move their clip up and down on the chart in accordance with their behavior for the day.

Purple (Fantastic) Pink (Way to Go) Blue (Excellent Effort) Green (Ready to Learn) Yellow (Make Better Choices) Orange (Teacher’s Choice ) Red (Family Contact)

If a student ends the day on red, they will write a letter home. If this happens two days in a row, I will call home. For students who end the day on the Purple (Fantastic) or Pink (Way to Go), they will earn stars towards shopping in our Rewards Catalogue.

I love this chart because even if a student makes a bad choice, they are able to correct that behavior and move their clip back up. It is a great way to reinforce behavior positively!

Our second form of of behavior management in the classroom is our Brownie Points system. 

These points are earned as a whole class. When all the students are following directions and caring for one another, they get to add a brownie to our pan. When the pan is full, they will earn a class reward such as a extra recess or a game on the Smartboard. 

Writer's Workshop

We have completed our first week of writer's workshop. We worked on the process of THINK-WRITE-DRAW. We also learned the phrase "when I am done, I've just begun" to remind us that writer's are ALWAYS working. To end the week we learned about stretching out our words like rubber bands.

Math Centers

We had our first math center rotations today! The students were very excited to try our hands on activities and computer games. We will rotate through 5 math centers every two weeks. This allows for small group math instruction and time for many hands on activities. Our computer game we played today was a HUGE hit and you can find it HERE.