First Grade News

Dear Families,

This week, we celebrated the 100th day of school! Thanks for your help preparing our special 100-piece snacks! Students have been counting the days of school since the very beginning of the year, using paper clips to help track our process. Usually, we group them in sets of 10, to help us count faster and learn about place value. On this special day, however, we connected all of the sets and used them to limbo! We also made 100-Crowns. These paper hats each had 10 strips of paper on them. Each strip of paper had a collection of 10 things on it (for example 10 stickers, 10 snap words, 10 shapes, etc.). Check out pictures of our celebrations below!

In Hebrew, we continued to work on our family books. We also learned how to write the letters hey and kuf in script.

In Yahadut, we spoke about all the things that we do to celebrate Purim – giving Mishloach Manot, gifts to the poor, reading the megilah, and of course, having fun and eating! We also chose a character from the megilah (Esther, Mordechai, Haman, Achashverosh, vashti), drew their picture and described how they look and what they are wearing in writing.

In Tefila, 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.

In Music class, First Graders have continued their study of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and tempo. We have examined four movements of the piece so far: The Finale, The Aquarium, The Elephant and The Tortoise. First graders learned that Jacques Offenbach took the melody of The Tortoise and sped it up to turn it into the Can-Can dance, which they’ll be learning soon!

In Reading, we solved a serious crime!  A mystery person came and cut our snap words “into” and “outside” in half to make two words! We solved the case of the compound word puzzle by discovering that some words have two words squished together that have a new meaning. We explored many more compound words and learned how to find one word first to figure out the whole word. We also discussed how they can help us with our writing.

In Writing, we started our nonfiction chapter books! We learned how to plan our books by writing a table of contents to organize our topics.  We learned that great chapter titles are short, interesting, and break big topics up! You can look forward to reading teaching books about flowers, mixed martial arts, basketball, eggs, cats, video games, making books, and much much more!

Shabbat Shalom,

The First Grade Team