First Grade News
Hello Families,
In the Hebrew classroom this week, we started traveling through the state of Israel! We started at Kineret , then made our way, and visited the port city of Haifa. Students wrote sentences in Hebrew of what we can find in Haifa and drew pictures of the city inspired by images they saw in photographs, videos, and books. We look forward to continuing our travels to new places in Israel next week. We learned about the omer, the time between Passover to the next holiday, Shavuot. Every day at the end of tefilah we count how many days we are into the omer. When we reach the forty-ninth day of the omer, we will be ready to celebrate Shavuot! We also talked about Yom Ha’atzmaut – Israel’s Independence Day which we will celebrate together next week.
In writing workshop, our opinionated 1st graders have convinced us which item in their collection is the best! They line up their collection, compare the same thing on each item (best memory, shape, pattern, most fantastic outfit, etc.), pick the best item, and give us reasons why. We learned that we must convince our readers by giving many reasons, examples, and details. To convince effectively, we are learning to say transitional phrases and words such as “for example”, “I think that because”, “also”, and “another reason is”. At home, please point out when kids are trying to convince you! Practice giving reasons and examples for an opinion. This language will help us develop our writing.
Our readers are going on adventures in fiction! Before we dive into a storybook, we remember to take a sneak peek by looking over the cover, title, table of contents, blurb, and inside of the book. We think about who the story is about, where it takes place, and what might happen. We also are keeping up with our characters by noticing when the setting changes and predicting what might happen next as we read. 1st graders are continuing to practice retelling their stories (or what they read so far) after they read by telling about who is in the book, where they are, and a big thing that happened. Retelling is a challenge as it is tempting to tell the whole story. Please practice this when reading at home and in conversation after seeing a movie.
In math we have explored calendars in more detail and noticed patterns and the order of the days and months in the year. We created our own birthday month calendar for this year paying special attention to how many days the month had and what day of the week our month began. We also reviewed ordinal numbers to help us discuss specific days on the calendar and how we order our collections in our opinion writing. Examples are “My birthday is the 2nd Tuesday of April” and “This is the 3rd best seashell because of it is pearly and has swirls”.
Check out our pics!
Shabbat Shalom,
Liz and Ilana
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