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First Grade News

This week in first grade we welcomed the parents into our classroom at Back To School Night.  We enjoyed meeting everyone and speaking about the exciting year ahead!  The students loved writing letters to parents and receiving letters in return. Please look at the their work in the hallway: painted picture frames with first day of school photos, self portraits, and “What We Love” writing hearts. The students love to share their creations!

In math the students have been working hard on place value. We have been focusing on what number comes before and after, finding the missing number. We used the dice and the ten frame to develop our number sense from 0-10.  Students also reviewed and practiced writing the numbers correctly.

This week we learned some new strategies.One strategy that was taught was scanning  Students were excited to discover hidden pictures and scan the page to find the missing objects. This activity also correlated with math as we have been counting and scanning a picture. Another strategy that was taught was a listening exercise where students had to follow the steps in a guided drawing.  If they heard the step correctly, and had their eyes on the speaker, a puppy dog was created.  In this lesson we practiced eye contact, listening to the speaker and sharing our work with our classmates.

We began science this week.  To introduce the unit on weather, we read a poem by Shel Silverstein, called “It’s Hot”.  Students loved sharing about hot, warm, or cold weather, how it dictates what they wear, and drawing a picture of themselves dressed for their favorite weather.  Math was integrated into the conversation as students counted the number of classmates who preferred each type of weather, practiced writing the numbers, and compared the amounts according to “more than and lesser than” statements.  We read the book “My Two Senses” by Aliki to reflect on how we all use our five senses, and how scientists do in particular.  Here is the poem to read out loud with your child.  Enjoy!

“It’s Hot”
by Shel Silverstein

It’s hot!
I can’t get cool,
I’ve drunk a quart of lemonade,
I think I’ll take my shoes off
And sit around in the shade.

It’s hot!
My back is sticky,
The sweat rolls down my chin.
I think I’ll take my clothes off
And sit around in my skin.

It’s hot!
I’ve tried with ‘lectric fans,
And pools and ice cream cones.
I think I’ll take my skin off
And sit around in my bones.

It’s still hot!

In reading, we have continued reading books by the author Kevin Henkes. We learned how characters can connect from story to story, and how an author can sometimes be an illustrator. We also talked about how the character Lilly was feeling in the story and made predictions about how the story would end.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters mem, mem sofit and reish and what sound they make when we add the vowels kamatz and patach.  Then we practiced reading with all the letters that we have learned so far. We added many new words to our word wall like; michnasayim (pants), mechonit (a car), machshev (computer), menorah (lamp) and rakevet (train).

In Yahadut, we continued to learn about Rosh Hashanah. We spoke about the importance of wishing others a shanah tova (Happy New Year), and we made beautiful shana tova cards for our families. We started to learn the shema and the meaning of the prayer and we added another page to our siddurim.  Our siddurim are looking beautiful and we cannot wait to continue to fill up our pages with prayers.

Lastly, our class has been discussing the climate strike. In honor of the climate strike, we have begun a bigger classroom discussion about what it means to help our planet, and how we can take action even as kids in our classroom.  We learned that kids from all around the world were finding a way to communicate and come together and we look forward to many conversations about this subject.