First Grade News

Hello Families,

In Hebrew, we learned the letters bet and vet and what sound they make when we add the “Ah” sound. Then we practiced our reading, and we were able to read and write lots of words with the letters that we have learned so far like; bat (a girl), bar (wild) and tar (searching). We added more words to our word wall – bakbouk (a bottle), batzal (onion), bayit (house), balon (balloon) and barvaz (duck).

In Yahadut, we learned about the V’ahavta prayer. We worked on learning the words of the prayer and what they mean, and that the prayer can be found inside of the mezuzah and inside of tefilin. We also had the opportunity to see the inside of a mezuzah and 3 different kinds of a Torah.

In parasha (the weekly Torah portion), we started to learn about the story of bereshit (creation), focusing on what God created on each day of the week. We started to work on a special project where we each made our own books about Beriat Haolam (the creation of the world) – it was so exciting and we can’t wait to continue to learn more about the creation next week.

In Music, our First Grade musicians have continued to learn the difference between beat and rhythm through games that allow them to feel it viscerally in their bodies. They use their rhythm sticks and shaker eggs to play along to rhymes and songs, as well as to create and repeat original patterns. They have begun to read quarter notes and eighth notes and to compose and play 4-beat rhythms using those notes. We also had a shaker egg celebration of Sukkot and Simchat Torah.

This week in Science was our first week in our second unit: weather. We were outside constantly—each day writing down data and graphing the weather. We used this data to create our own weather pattern charts. Through collaboration we were able to observe the weather and use our five senses to become better meteorologists. As a class we will continue to track our data and observe the weather—especially as the seasons start to change!

In reading this week we continued to discuss what makes a just right book and practiced exploring and reading easier, just right, and harder books in our book baggies using the 5 finger rule.  Next week, we will learn about our system to take books home for our weekly reading log.

In writing we discussed how find a small moment topic (a watermelon seed) from a larger watermelon story.  We are getting better and better at finding small moments!  Please continue to point out small moment stories and have children find topics or practice telling you the beg, mid, and end of a small moment story as you go about your day.  We also continued practicing being independent during writing time as we work through the writing process.  We also are using a writing partner to check in with if we want to share or have a question.

In partnership,

The first grade team

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