The Best Thing About First Grade Is...

Hi Parents,

Here is our last post of the year!  We made a video for the incoming kindergardeners of all the best things about first grade.  Our charge was to try to convince the kindergardeners that first grade is a great place to be.  We wrote our opinions, supported them with details, added video and sound via the "Book Creator" app and....voila!  What do you think???

Happy Summer!

Chris Paget

Stony Brook Field Trip!

We had a great trip to Stony Brook!  The weather was fantastic. We explored meadow, pond, and woodland habitats.  We learned about the animal and plant organisms that live within each habitat. Our guides taught us how to locate poison ivy, differentiate bird calls, and identify different evergreen trees. They helped us discover how each organism survives in its habitat but offering us a peek into their "lunchbox"!  Our day was a great culmination to our organisms unit. Many thanks to Melissa Moore and Misha Kilmer for sending me some great photos of our trip. 

Trick Word Practice!

We have been working hard to learn how to spell all 100+ trick words for our upcoming teacher check in. Here we are doing trick word aerobics!  Ask me to "cheer" for some of my trick words at home by their tall, small, and fall letters. 

Collections!

Thank you for sending in the collections for writing workshop. Here we are judging our collections by lining objects up from favorite to least favorite. We have learned how to write our opinions and support our ideas with reasons. Some of us even assigned booby prizes to our least favorite items!  We have shared our collections with others as well. 

Learning About Time

We are learning to tell time on both digital and analog clocks. Here we are building a clock with classroom supplies. Ask me to show you the parts of a clock - face, hands, minute marks, 5 minute marks, hour numbers. 

Curious Creatures

We had a great visit with Corey from Curious Creatures. He brought all sorts of animals and told us of their habits, personalities and other cool facts!

Rusty the corn snake. 

Yes that is Rocky the flying squirrel going down Corey's shirt!

We loved watching Sonic the chinchilla taking a bath in his dust bowl!

What do you know about presidents?

We worked in groups on a "write around" activity.   We shared what we knew about presidents and wrote our thoughts on chart paper. Each person in turn added their idea to the write around chart.  When we compared our ideas to the poster about what presidents do, we realized that we knew a lot! 

We will be researching presidents on the Pebble Go site and then moving on to 2 presidents in particular - George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We will connect our new learning to upcoming holidays (Patriots Day, Flag Day, July 4th...), units of study (American Symbols) and past learning (MLK).     

There is still so much learning to come and Room 13 is up for the challenge!