First Grade News

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 together that make one long vowel sound.

In Math, we reviewed all of our strategies for solving addition and subtraction problems. We also practiced solving problems in our heads using mental First graders started learning to tell time to the hour and the half hour.

We continued to learn about maps in social studies. First graders can identify the features of maps such as the compass rose and map key, and use those features to read basic maps. Our classroom neighborhood is under construction. First graders are using recycled materials to build a model neighborhood in our classroom. First graders used their knowledge of neighborhood needs and wants to decide what should go in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood has everything from a fire house to a zoo!

In Hebrew, we have learned so much about our families. First we learned how to say the Hebrew words for family members like; ach (brother), achot (sister), dod (uncle) and doda (aunt) and then we started a special project where we are making books about our families using pictures and Hebrew sentences.

In Yahadut, we learned two new prayers from the Amidah. The first prayer does not have words. We spoke about how the Amidah is a time when we can have a private conversation with God and make our own wishes or prays. Each student drew a picture of a personal prayer they’d want to share with God and during tefilah we leave a minute for each first grader to say their own prayer. The second prayer is Shomeah Tefilah. In this prayer we ask God to listen to our prayers. We talked about what it means to be a good listener and the importance of listening.

In Parasha, we learned about Parashat Pekudei. We learned about the completion of the building of the mishkan, and we spoke about how hard all the Jewish people worked together to build it. We also spoke about what are the things that make us such a special community. Since thisparasha ends the book of shemot we played a game to review the stories that we had learned in the book of shemot. It was a lot of fun and students remembered a lot of the details of the stories!