We have had an exciting couple of weeks with the talent show and Poetry Night. I want to thank all of our first grade parents for coming to our special
events. Please check out the video tab to see what we did. We unfortunately had several children out sick for Poetry Night, and we missed these students. However, I was proud of the rest of the class for pitching in and figuring out how we could make substitutions and still do our raccoon poem.
  We have been doing jelly bean math this week. We sorted jelly beans into groups and then compared the groups to see which had more and which had less. We also added groups of jelly beans and did skip counting (counting by 2's, 3's and 5's). Of course we did eat a few of the jelly beans. The red ones were cinnamon and quite hot. Whenever I saw a student making a face, I knew that they had eaten a red jelly bean!  We are doing a math egg hunt today. We made paper eggs and put math facts, clocks, and pictures of coins on them. I cut the eggs in half. One half has the problem and the other half has the answer. Each child has 10 problems and they will be looking for the eggs that contain their answers. The class is very excited to be having the math hunt today.
   We have been reading several versions of Peter Rabbit this week. Each child made a paper bag theatre with Peter's house on the front, Mr. McGregor's garden on the back, and the story characters on popsicle sticks. We have been acting out the story with our "theatres." The children are doing a fabulour job of retelling the main events in the story and are also adding many details.
  

   Please look at our Winter Program poems. All of the students came up with ideas and we put them into poems.

Language Arts:

           We have been working on blending a consonant with either the short Aa or the short Ee vowel. This can be  a difficult skill for children at this age.  Ask your child to tell you about the game we played called short Ee concentration.  We have also been reading books about pets as the word pet has the short Ee vowel in it. This coming week we will be reading  a  book called The Best Pet and each child will get a paper copy of this book for their book folder. This book has repetitive sentences and focuses on short Ee vowel words.   We are starting to work on descriptive words (adjectives).  We read the story Where the Wild Things Are  and came up with lots of words to describe the wild things.  We will be using these words when we write math word problems about our wild things.  We even made our own wild thing costumes.  Your can see pictures of these costumes under the tab "Our Wild Things".  During journal time I am asking the class to check to see if they are using capitals and periods.

Mathematics:

 The children practiced their math facts with spinner games last week and worked hard on reviewing the math addition and subtraction facts that we have been studying. We will start working on counting by 5's this week. Due to the fact that we have been counting nickels and groups of 5 tally marks, the children will have had some experience with this.   We will continue to work on measuring. Last week we used little air pumps to make foam rockets fly. Each child had 3 turns to see how far the force of the air (science) could move their foam rocket. We cut a piece of yarn for each child to show how far their rocket went, and the children will be measuring their pieces of yarn this week.  I am also going to be introducing the concept of perimeter.  We will be putting a "cage" of wooden blocks around our  wild things (students in their wild thing costumes), and then we will measure to find the distance around our wild things.

Social Studies:
  We are continuing with our Global Education unit on the Northeastern United States. We are also learning map skills and focused on the directions: north, south, east, and west last week. Next week we will be reading stories about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.

 I can't believe that October is almost over. I want to thank all of the parents who brought in pumpkins so that the students could carve pumpkins with their 6th grade buddies. Not only did the students work together to plan the faces for their pumpkins, but each pair of students also wrote a story about their pumpkin, estimated how many seeds they thought was in their pumpkin, and then counted the seeds. All of the students were involved in the project, worked on math and writing, and had a great time. I was even talked into roasting the pumpkins seeds so that we could have a healthy snack while carving our pumpkins.
   The class worked hard at writing 3 letter short Aa words this month. They learned to blend the first 2 letters of a word together to get one sound, and then added the final consonant. It is easier to put two sounds together rather than saying each sound separately and having to put the 3 sounds together. We played a fun game with small letter cards and "magic wands". The children thought of a short Aa word and then everyone made the word using their letter cards. We used the magic wands to help us blend the sounds of the letters together. During our language time we also read, sang, and acted out the story The Thirteen Nights of Halloween.The children worked with ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, etc., ) as we read this story. The students also worked on the plays Leaf Laughs and The Enchanted Pumpkin Patch. We had the lines for our play up on the Smartboard for the students to read as we acted out the plays. Doing plays encourages fluency (reading as if you are talking) which helps with comprehension. 
  For Social Studies we have been learning about fire safety. Each child has a booklet in their reading folder about fire safety that he/she can read. We also did some movement poems about firefighting that the children put in their poetry notebooks.  During Global Education the children went to different groups to learn about the Northeastern United States. Each group focused on a different topic. Your child will rotate through the 4 different groups throughout the next few weeks. The group topics are: tall tales of the East, products, national parks, and the Native Americans of this area. 
   For science we continued with our experiments about force and recently learned about inertia. The students learned that inertia means that an object at rest will stay at rest unless it is acted upon by a force. The children decorated paper airplanes and had a small witch that was supposed to take a ride on their plane. However, the class found out that when they flew their plane, the witch did not go with the plane and she just fell down to the ground. The force that we applied to the plane was not applied to their passenger. So, the witch remained at rest (inertia) and fell to the ground. The children were challenged to find a way to keep the witch and the cat on the plane without taping or glueing them on. The children tried making walls on the planes, putting on windshields, and using seat belts. Ask your child what he/she did to keep his/her passengers on the plane.
  

    It was great to see everyone at Open House. The class had a great time making patterns on their shirts or jumpers for the paper children. They were so  proud of their work! I made 3 copies of our September picture video and I will be sending it home for everyone to watch. Please send the video back after viewing it so that everyone in the class will get a chance to see it.
     We just did a Scholastic News about the way animals and plants change with the seasons. Ask your child about the picture of the "tired squirrel" that we saw on Scholastic  Interactive.  It was really adorable; someone took a picture of a squirrel draped over a round rock. The idea was to show that some animals work hard in the fall to gather food for the winter. Scholastic Interactive is a web based version of our Scholastic News. It has vocabulary, videos, and reinforcement games (quizzes) to go along with each issue that we read. We can even click on a little speaker symbol to hear the text read aloud.

   We had a great first week at school... even if we did miss the first day due Hurricane Irene. The students did lots of team building activities and worked hard to come up with our classroom rules. Many children brought in mystery items and we tried to figure out who brought in each item.

Welcome back to school.