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14 Oct 2021
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First Grade News

Dear Families,

It was a busy week in first grade!

This week in writing workshop we started our small moments unit. We are learning to think about true stories that have happened to us and finding a small moment in the story to tell about.  We are finding the beginning, middle, and end of our story and working with a partner to plan our book. First graders have worked on sketching out their book, writing labels, and writing on the line to match their picture.
*At home, have your child practice finding small moments (seed stories) in their day and telling the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  An example is “I walked in the living room. My brother jumped out from behind the couch!, I jumped in surprise and we laughed.”. First graders are used to telling BIG stories (watermelon stories).  An example is “I went on a plane to Israel. I gave my uncle a hug. We went swimming in a pool.” This is a challenging concept for them and the more they practice thinking and telling, the better they will get at generating stories and planning their books.
In social studies, we have continued exploring our identity as we create our self-portraits.  We read “Why am I Me?” by Paige Britt, “The Color of Us” by Karen Katz, and “The Skin You Live In” by Michael Tyler. We have explored the similarities and differences of the colors and shapes that make our faces, and others’ faces. We celebrated what makes everyone unique and special. We sketched our faces, learning about proportion, traced in sharpie, found our skin color with a combination of red, yellow, and brown crayons, and created a resist with watercolors!

This week in math, we worked on counting backwards, and figuring out what is “one less.” Students are developing new strategies, and figuring out what works for them. 

This week, our “Thinking Problem” was:

There are 3 apples on a plate. One kid eats 1 apple. Then, another kid eats 1 apple. Then, another kid eats 1 apple. How many apples are left? How do you know?

Students quickly agreed there were no apples left, but then came their challenge! Each partnership had to think of 2 (or more) different ways to figure it out. Some of our ideas were: Count on your fingers; make an equation; make a movie in your head and watch the apples; group the kids together as a set of three and match it to the apples; and more! We will do many more of these Thinking Problems. The goal is to strengthen our critical thinking and reasoning skills, and explore different math strategies. 

We also learned a math game called How Many are Missing. Each pair of students got ten unifix cubes and a cup. They took turns hiding some of the cubes under the cup, and asking their partner to figure out how many were hidden.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters reish, 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), tar (searching) and tamar (a date). We added more words to our word wall – rakevet (train), bakbouk (a bottle), batzal (onion), bayit (house), balon (balloon) and barvaz (duck).

In Tefila, 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 how Tefilin look like.

In Parashah, this week 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.

 

Shabbat Shalom,

Liz, Talia, Ilana, and Noa

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