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First Grade News

The first graders this week have been busy writing, learning and playing.  We have loved seeing parents at school, whether it is during parent teacher conferences or the Hannah Senesh tekes (ceremony). Our class opened the ceremony by singing “Eli Eli” in Hebrew and English, and showed paintings they made which were inspired by the song.  They were rightfully, very proud of themselves!

In Writing, the students continued working on their journal entries.  In honor of our Hannah Senesh tekes we created our own journal entries and made them look old by staining them with tea.  We continued our writing by creating small moments based on experiences that already happened in our lives. This week we focused on making sure our small moments were about one moment – zooming in on the moment and making sure to add all the “itsy bitsy” parts.

In Reading this week we introduced our phonics mascot named Rasheed.  He is a lion that will be teaching us different phonics rules. We studied our names by clapping, stomping, and snapping the syllables.  We also looked at letter patterns in names.  For example, how interesting it is that at the end of Toby’s and Ruby’s names there is a “y” but that is not the sound that it makes.  We also learned that at the beginning of our name is an upper case letter and the rest of the letters are lower case.  Everyone enjoyed the guided reading small groups with a teacher, as well as independent reading with Raz Kids on the ipads.

In Math this week we continued our number bonds and will be transferring our knowledge of part part whole into addition sentences.  This week it was really exciting to begin to see all of the different number combinations we could make when making 10.  We used dominos and unifix cubes to help us make our combinations.

In Science we had fun acting out and guessing the science word wall words we have learned so far.  We will be creating a weather calendar in the classroom to keep track of the weather daily, using stamps and stamp pads.  We will observe three categories: cloud cover, precipitation, and wind. To practice, the class went outside to look up at the sky and feel the air.  Each student decided what type of cloud cover, precipitation and wind was present, and made a weather journal entry for the day.

In Music the first graders are learning solfège (do re mi) syllables and hand signs to help them feel pitches in their bodies. They make up their own patterns with the solfège symbols to create new melodies. They have also been perfecting the protocol for playing shakers and rhythm sticks in preparation for Orff instruments. And they have been enjoying singing and moving to “Eretz Yisrael Sheli”.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters nun and nun sofit (final nun) and kept practicing our reading and writing with all the letters that we have learned so far.

In Tefilah, we learned the first section of the amidah which is about giborim. We spoke about the meaning of the word gibor(hero) and the people in our lives that are giborim(heroes). We all agreed that our family members are our heroes!

In Parashah, we learned the Lech Licha story where God tells Avraham to leave his home to go to a new land. We thought about how Avraham might have felt and realized that he had a lot of faith and trust in God.