First Grade News

In preparation for this week’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Tekes, first graders have been learning all about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. We had many discussions about segregation, boycotts, strikes, and what life was like during the Civil Rights movement. They learned that he was a citizen, just like us, who noticed something in his world wasn’t right and he worked his whole life to change it. We listened to the song “With My Own Two Hands” by Ben Harper, and thought of ways we could be good citizens and help change the world with our own two hands.

In Math, we completed our first math book and moved onto the second one. We continued to learn about weight and measurement, and started to learn about graphing.

In Phonics, we continue to be word detectives. In the past two weeks, we solved “the case of the sticky letters” (3 letter blends, like spring), “the case of letter twins” (splitting apart words like puppet), “the case of words in disguise” (contractions), and “the compound word puzzle.” First graders are using all that they’ve learning about words in both their reading and writing.

In our lessons on feelings, we’ve been talking about how to keep calm when we feel angry. We learned a keep calm strategy. First you tell yourself to stop and keep calm, then you take a slow, deep breath in through your nose while you count to five. Then hold it while you count to two. Then breathe out to the count of five. We practiced this strategy after getting our heart rates up by jogging in place, and we noticed that it helped our bodies feel calmer. We read the book, “When I feel Angry” by Cornelia Maude Spelman and discussed other ways to keep calm, such as remove yourself from the situation, get a drink of water, or taking a walk.

In Science we learned about the water cycle. We practiced using the words evaporation and precipitation. We also learned about the different types of clouds: cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Each first grader made their own representation of clouds using cotton balls.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters tet, tzadik and tzadik sofit as well as a new vowel, which makes the “Oo” sound and we kept practicing our reading. We also learned about Tu Bishvat (the birthday of the trees) and spent time learning Hebrew words related to the holiday. The first graders draw beautiful trees and wrote the parts of the tree all in Hebrew. We started to practice changing words from singular to plural tense using different parts of trees. The first graders created two beautiful trees on our bulletin board. Each student described in writing what the tree has using different parts of the tree (leaves – alim, flowers – prachim, fruits – perot) and their colors. Feel free to take a look at our bulletin board at our beautiful trees. We also enjoyed reading stories about trees like, “What to do with a leave?” and “The Giving Tree”.

In Yahadut, we continued working on our siddurim and learned 3 more prayers from the amida.The first called mevarech hashanim. We spoke about the importance of taking care of our Earth and what can we do to keep it a clean and safe place. The second prayer is mikabetz nidchei amo yisrael, which is about community. We spoke about why is it so important to be part of a community and the third prayer called melech ohev tzedakah umishpat. We spoke about the rules that we have in our classroom and in America and how they help us stay safe and be better people. We have learned so many of the prayers from the amidah and we are looking forward to learn the rest!

In Parasha we learned about Parashat Bo, which is when Pharaoh tells the Israelites to leave Egypt and they pack up quickly and go. We spoke about why we thought that God choose to help the Israelites and what was so special about that time and Moses. We also learned aboutParashat Beshalach. This is when Pharaoh changes his mind about freeing the Israelites slaves and chases after them. The Sea of Reeds splits, the Israelites escape the Egyptians, and they celebrate their freedom. We spoke about what it must have felt like to feel free after having been slaves for so long. The first graders especially enjoyed watching the movie “The Prince of Egypt”.