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First Grade News

Next week we will be going on our neighborhood scavenger hunt. This week we started learning about some of the people we may meet in our neighborhood: community helpers. Community helpers are people who work to help our communities. Examples include doctors, sanitation workers, firefighters, and letter carriers. First graders made community helper trading cards and played community helper bingo.

 

As part of our social emotional work, we’ve started to discuss feelings. First graders made a feelings word wall in English and Hebrew. We read books in both languages about feelings and discussed how people may have different feelings about the same situations. We also talked about having more than one feeling at the same time. We will continue this work on feelings over the next couple of weeks.

 

In Math, we finished our unit on addition facts 0 – 10. We worked on all different strategies for solving addition problems such as counting on, using number bonds, and drawing pictures. We started our unit on subtraction facts 0-10, and began to learn new strategies.

 

First grade writers work on the final two steps of the writing process this week: revising and editing. They learned to reread their work and look for places they can add more. With a teacher, they used a checklist to check and see if they spelled snap words correctly, did their best spelling, and used ending punctuation. They also write titles for their stories and made covers. We hope all of their stories will be published next week, and plan to have a mini publishing party!

 

In Science first graders finished decorating their science journals. Our first science unit is on weather. First graders shared their knowledge about the weather they see and feel and graphed their favorite weather.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters alef, lamed, yud and hey and we added lots of new words to our word wall. We also went over all of the letters that we have learned so far and realized how much we have learned in such a short amount of time! The first graders were so excited to be able to read their first full sentences in Hebrew.

In Tefilah, we started learning the Amidah. The Amidah has 19 parts and we are going to learn all of them. Our first graders are definitely up to the challenge! During this prayer we need to stand, by standing we show respect (kavod) to god. This week we learned the introduction to the Amidah, “Adonai Sefatai Tiftach.” which we ask god to open our lips and mouth in meaningful prayer. We also had some of the 8th graders came to our classroom to show us what tefilin look like, which was very exciting.

In Parashah, last week we learned the Lech Licha story where God tells Avraham to leave his home to go to a new land. We thought about how Avraham might have felt and realized that he had a lot of faith and trust in God. This week parasha is parashat Vayera. We read the story about Avraham and the three angels, who came to tell Avraham that he and Sarah will have a son. Avraham invited them into his house even though he didn’t know them. This is an example for hachnasat orchim (welcoming guests). To show our appreciation to all the staff members who help to make our school such a welcoming community, the first graders made them a beautiful thank you cards.

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