First Grade News

Dear Families,

In Hebrew, we started traveling through the state of Israel! We started in the north in the port city of Haifa, made our way to the Kineret and through the busy streets of Tel Aviv. Students wrote sentences in Hebrew of what we can find in each place and drew pictures of each city inspired by images they saw in photographs, videos and books. We look forward to continuing our traveling to new places in Israel next week. We also had so much fun celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut together.

This week in science we have been preparing for our caterpillar friends. We learned about their metamorphosis process and went in depth into each stage of their lives—egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. We also learned how to take care and keep out caterpillars happy and healthy. We’re so excited to meet our new friends!!

In music, first graders have continued to explore tempos through their study of Camille Saint-Saën’s Carnival of the Animals. This week, they got to know the 5th Movement, The Elephant. They learned about the tempo allegretto pomposo. We also talked about the English word, pompous. Students had fun moving to the 3/8 beat like hefty elephants and dancing it with their scarves.

In phonics we have practiced the sounds of controlled R in words. We sorted words, put together mixed up sentences, and discovered rhyming words that contain ur, ir, and er. In writing we have continued to write about collections and our opinions about them. We did heavy “college” work by looking at what we are going to learn on an opinion checklist. We then analyzed another child’s work and our own writing piece to see if we wrote our opinion “well”. We look for reasons, endings, getting our readers attention and telling details about our opinion. It was hard work, but first grade did real college work!

Shabbat Shalom,

The 1st Grade Team