First Grade Blogger

We can’t believe the year is drawing to a close! We had such a wonderful, productive and joy filled year of learning. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks.   We finished our class read aloud, “Charlotte’s Web.” First graders were deeply invested in this story of friendship.   In Science we compared and contrasted our classroom environments and animals using venn diagrams. Our science journals are full and ready to go home next week!   In Writing Workshop, first graders wrote and published “Who Am I” animal riddles. They learned to think about all the special characteristics... Read More

We read It’s Okay to be Different by Todd Parr and discussed all the different things that make us special. On Kesher Day, we created puzzles about ourselves; each piece represented something that makes us unique. In Writing, first graders published their poems and decorated them to display at our Siddur Ceremony. We also started writing “Who Am I?” poems. We continued reading Charlotte’s Web and learned about how spiders spin their webs. In Math, we began to learn about money. This week we learned the value of coins, and practiced counting money. When counting  a group of coins, we... Read More

After the break we started new writing, phonics, social studies and math units!   In Writing Workshop we started writing our own poetry. In our poetry unit first graders studied different types of poems. By studying other poems, they learned to look at ordinary objects with a poet’s eyes, use patterns and repetition, experiment with line breaks, and include specific language.   We read the book “shades of people,” and discussed all the different words we can use to describe our skin color like “sandy,” “gold,” “almond,” and “cocoa.” First graders then mixed their own unique skin color in art... Read More

After two weeks of perfecting, mapping, and playing in our neighborhood, first graders were ready to say goodbye and send it home. We named our neighborhood “Megahood,” because it had so many different places in it. As we concluded our realistic fiction unit, we had the opportunity to celebrate our published series books with our fifth grade buddies! Then, we had a mini persuasive writing unit! First graders drew upon skills learned earlier in the year during our neighborhood review writing unit to convince their classmates to vote for their favorite Irma Black Award nominee. Each first grader made a... Read More

Happy Purim! We’ve enjoyed a week of celebration and kindness. On Purim, we read the book “Uncle Willie’s Soup Kitchen” and then decorated and filled bags to send to CHIPS, a soup kitchen and shelter in our neighborhood.   First grade writers continue to work on their realistic fiction series books. We set goals for our writing, learned about introducing our character in the first book, and about adding dialogue to our stories.   In Math, we continued to learn how to tell time to the hour and half hour, and then began our unit on numbers to 120. Second... Read More

We’ve started a new genre of writing: realistic fiction. We’re studying the story “Henry and Mudge” by Cynthia Rylant as an example of the genre. Each first grader is using their amazing pretending powers to think of a character and imagine adventures for that character. We also learned to add dialogue, feelings and action to our stories.   In phonics we’ve been learning about contractions. Using our detective skills, first grader noticed that when two words are squished together to make a contraction, the apostrophe usually takes the place of vowel. We also started learning about vowel teams- two vowels... Read More