First Grade News

In Math we continued to work on addition and subtraction with regrouping. This week, first graders applied their math strategies to real world problems.

First grader writers continue to work on their realistic fiction stories. This week we started writing series. By looking at popular series books in our classrooms we noticed that series books all have the same characters, but have different adventures in each book. Many first graders decided to have their series take place in our classroom neighborhood. They made stick puppets of their characters to live in our neighborhood.

Our class neighborhood is complete! This week we put in the finishing touches and named it. Our neighborhood will be called “Starlingville.”

We read the third Irma Black Award nominee, “How the Cookie Crumbled: The True (and Not-So-True) Stories of the Invention of the Chocolate Chip Cookie” by Gilbert Ford. We learned about the woman who invented the chocolate chip cookies at the Tollhouse Inn.

In science, we set up our class aquarium. We observed freshwater snails and even held them. We will also learn about guppies. We are excited to take care of these fish and learn more about them.

In the Hebrew classroom, we had very busy week learning about Pesach! We reviewed the four questions and lots of first graders are excited to recite them at their Seders. We learned all about the ten plagues and learned a song to review the 10 plagues in Hebrew and in English. The first graders had so much fun making their own ten plague bags that they took home to bring to their Seder. We are looking forward to learn more about Passover next week! We also learned the Hatikvah – the national anthem of Israel. We spoke about the meaning of the word tikvah (hope) and we shared things that we hope for. We will end our morning Tefilah with Hatikvah.

In Yahadut, we learned a new prayer from the amida called, hatov shimcha ulecha naeh lehodot . In this prayer we thank god for different things and each first grader shared what they are thankful for.

We had so much fun on our field trip to Chinatown NNORC. The first graders sang lots of songs- all in Hebrew! Enjoy the pictures below.