First Grade News

Happy Purim! We’ve enjoyed a week of celebration and kindness. On Purim, we read the book “Uncle Willie’s Soup Kitchen” and then decorated and filled bags to send to CHIPS, a soup kitchen and shelter in our neighborhood.

First grade writers continue to work on their realistic fiction series books. We set goals for our writing, learned about introducing our character in the first book, and about adding dialogue to our stories.

In Math, we continued to learn how to tell time to the hour and half hour, and then began our unit on numbers to 120. Second graders came to share their math strategies with us! We learned some new strategies for addition and subtraction.

In Reading, we’ve been learning about vowel teams. After looking at words with vowel teams, we noticed that the first vowel usually makes it’s long sound like in the word “boat.” However, we need to be careful when we’re reading because sometimes vowel teams do not make a long sound like in the word “learn.”

Our classroom neighborhood is nearing completion! Over the past two weeks, first graders have painted their structures, built cars for the neighborhood, and added citizens!

In our Hebrew classroom, we learned about Purim. We read the story of Purim and got to look at a very small megilah that belongs to the first grade. We also spoke about all of the things that we do to celebrate Purim – giving Mishloach Manot, gifts to the poor, reading the megilah, and of course, having fun and eating! We read Purim stories, played games and sang lots of Purim songs.We also learned the Hatikvah – the national anthem of Israel. We spoke about the meaning of the word tikvah (hope) and we shared things that we hope for. We will end our morning Tefilah with Hatikvah.

 In Tefilah, we learned new prayer from the Amida called hamachazir shechinato litziyon. The first graders had a wonderful conversation about where they believed God was and times when they have felt God’s presence.

We had so much fun on our field trip to Chinatown NNORC. The first graders sang lots of Hebrew song and we even got the chance to learn how to count from 1 to 5 in Chinese.