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First Grade News

We can’t believe the year is drawing to a close! We had such a wonderful, productive and joy filled year of learning. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks.

 

We finished our class read aloud, “Charlotte’s Web.” First graders were deeply invested in this story of friendship.

 

In Science we compared and contrasted our classroom environments and animals using venn diagrams. Our science journals are full and ready to go home next week!

 

In Writing Workshop, first graders wrote and published “Who Am I” animal riddles. They learned to think about all the special characteristics of animals such as their habitat, diet, sound they make, and appearance.

 

In Social Studies we honed our reduce, reuse, and recycling skills by making recycled paper, and reusable market bags out of old t-shirts. First graders used their market bags at our classroom shuk! We started to study reusable energy by reading “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” the true story of a boy from Malawi who built a windmill out of discarded materials to bring power to his village. Soon we will make our own solar ovens out of pizza boxes!

 

To celebrate Pride Month, we read “Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag” and learned about what each color of the pride flag symbolizes by going on a scavenger hunt for each stripe of our own flags.

 

In phonics we began to study uppercase letters. We looked at books in our classroom and notices that uppercase letters not only start a sentence but are used for names, the letter “I,” at the start of dates, and to start and end a letter to someone.

 

We finished our money unit in math. In this unit first graders drew on much of the learning they did in math all year, such as addition, subtraction, skip counting, and real world word problems. To celebrate the end of this unit, each first grader was allowed to spend one pretend dollar at “R and J’s Ice Cream Shoppe.” They had to calculate how much their treat would cost, and how much change they would get.  

 

In Hebrew the first graders have been busy preparing for their shuk (the Israeli market). We learned about the Israeli money (shekels) and made some of our own to use in our shuk. The first graders decided about what kind of fruits and vegetables they want sell and buy in our shuk and for how much money we are going to sell them for. We also decorated signs with the names and prices of the fruits and vegetables that we are going to have in our shuk. They even made fancy arnakim (wallets). We had our special shuk on Thursday, which was a lot of fun! First graders used Hebrew to buy and sell different fruits and vegetables. Students also practiced their money math skills, as they took turns selling and purchasing food items from one another and giving change. Once all their goods had been purchased, first graders had a feast on their delicious treats! 

We also learned about Shavuot! On Shavuot we are celebrating the time that we received the Torah. We spoke about how the Torah has rules (The Ten Commandments) that keep us safe just like rules we have at home and school. We read a story in Hebrew about way God choose Mount Sinai for the Jewish people to receive the Torah.

 

Art with Iviva

In our last few art classes this year, we learned how to weave, something we had tried in kindergarten and needed more time to understand. We also learned how to mix neutral colors with acrylic paint as a start to painting self portraits. We learned that we can combine all three primary colors to make brown, adjust the hue by adding more yellow, red or blue; lighten the hue with white and/or yellow; and darken the hue with black and/or blue or purple. It turns out that mixing paint to match our exact skin tones is a lot harder than we thought. We will be re-visiting this process in the 2nd grade as we continue to celebrate our identities and the breadth of our community while learning more about color theory and painting. Please enjoy photos of our processes below.