First Grade News

To celebrate Rosh Chodesh Adar Alef we are having Crazy Hat Day! Students are invited to wear a crazy hat to school on Wednesday February 6th. 

First grade Mathematicians continued to learn about graphing. They learned how to read pictures graphs and use tally marks to make bar graphs. We noticed that we use graphs in our classroom, such as our tooth chart, and our independent reading graph.

We’ve started a new writing unit: information writing. In this unit, first graders are working on writing nonfiction teaching books on a topic they already know a lot about. They’ve written books about soccer, gymnastics, school, kittens, and much more! We’ve studied the teaching books in our classroom and noticed that those authors use pictures to add details, anticipate reader questions, and use a table of contents to organize their work.

In phonics we’re working on reading carefully and looking all the way across words. To do this, we’re studying common endings such as -ed, -s, -er, and -ing. We learned that the -ed ending means something happened in the past and can make different sounds like /t/, /d/, and /id/. We also learned that y at the end of works can make two sounds; the long e sound and the long i sound!

In Hebrew, we learned the letter zayin and we now know all of the letters of the Hebrew aleph-bet! Our first graders are Hebrew experts! This is a very exciting accomplishment and we are looking forward to celebrating as a class community next week. We read and wrote lots of words this week. The first graders started making their own Hebrew words dictionary using our word wall and word cards. We also spent time learning about clothing and what we wear. We learned the verbs lovesh (to wear, masculine) and loveshet (to wear, feminine). Students spent time writing sentences about the clothing that they and their friends are wearing. We learned the words aroch (long) and katzar (short) and learned how to use those words when speaking and writing. The students also wrote about their hair and the color of their eyes using aroch, katzar,yesh li (I have) and ein li (I don’t have).

In Yahadut, we learned two new prayers from the amida. The first one is called shover oyvim umachniyah zedim. In this prayer we thank god for protecting us from danger. We spoke about who are the people in our lives that protect us every day. The second one is called mishan umivtach latzadikim. We spoke about what it means to be a righteous person. We also share about the good things that happened to us when we are doing good things.

In Parasha, we read the story of Parashat Yitro where the Israelites go to Mount Sinai and receive the Ten Commandments. We discussed the significance of each commandment and each student made a special Ten Commandments packet with illustrations for each of the commandments. We learned about Parashat Mishpatim. We spoke about more laws that God gave the Jewish people and what it means to be responsible. We thought about thing that we are responsible for at school and at home.