First grade news

Dear First Grade Families,

We loved seeing you at the tekes today.  It was really special for the students to share what they have been learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In Reading this week, we continued reading books by Patricia Polacco.  This week we read the book Mr. Lincoln’s Way, a book about how to treat one another and how our words can make people feel.  In our guided reading groups, we have been working on writing complete sentences and zooming in and finding evidence from the text.

In Math, we began a unit on shapes.  We learned that two dimensional shapes our flat and three dimensional shapes are solid.  The students were very excited to see three dimensional shapes in the real world!  We discussed which three dimensional shapes slide, roll, and which stack the easiest.  Next week, we will continue our exploration of three dimensional shapes in the real world and classifying and identifying these shapes.

Our Social Studies and our Writing this week was cross-curricular.  We continued learning about the March on Washington and how there was segregation when the march happened.  Students discussed how “If I Had a Hammer” was a song about bringing people together.  Each student wrote a verse of the song about how s/he would “fix” a problem in the world.  For example, If the problem was pollution, a solution could be to plant more trees. 

In Science we continue to learn about temperature and thermometers.  Students worked in pairs to identify different types of thermometers and their uses.  We all went to look for the thermometer and heater in the school fish tank and guess how warm or cold the water needs to be for the fish to live.  Ask your scientist to see if s/he remembers (70-80 degrees)!  We also learned how to read a thermometer.  In their science journals, each student had a temperature to read on a thermometer, identify if it was hot or cold, and draw a picture of what clothing they would wear for that particular weather. We look forward to sharing our results next week.

In Hebrew this week, we learned the letter gimel and a new vowel which makes the “Oo” sound. We also spent time learning about clothing and what we wear.  We learned the verbs lovesh (to wear, masculine) and loveshet (to wear, feminine) and students wrote sentences describing what clothing they are wearing.

In Yahadut, we continued working on our siddurim and learned another prayer from the amida called, mikabetz nidchei amo yisrael, which is about community. We spoke about why it is so important to be part of a community.

This week’s Parasha is parashat shemot.  We learned about the story of baby Moshe and how he defended the Israelites even though he appeared to be an Egyptian.  We spoke about the concept of slavery.  We also thought about how Moshe got upset when we saw people being mistreated, and we discussed how we should treat other people.

Shabbat Shalom,

The First Grade Team