First graders have begun talking about time. They are thinking about activities that last for one minute, a half hour and an hour. They used clocks with only an hour hand to estimate time. We ask you to start including time in your daily discussions. You might point out the time your child goes to bed, or the time of his or her favorite tv show. The children will work with both analog and digital clocks. You may want to challenge your child by working out how many hours your child sleeps each night!
A little snow didn't keep the first-grade students from spreading some love this week! The class was scheduled to visit Toni's Soup Kitchen on Tuesday, but the snowstorm caused a cancellation. The purpose of the trip was to deliver handmade centerpieces to brighten up Valentine's Day lunch tables for the guests. Even though the field trip couldn't get rescheduled before Thursday, the overall feeling of the class was that the table decorations must get delivered in time. The faculty was able to make it happen just as the guests began arriving for lunch on Thursday. Toni's Kitchen was very grateful for the heartfelt, holiday love.
All adults know one thing is sure, it is that children are curious. They wonder many things about animals, rocks, space, weather, and plants. First graders began a unit on nonfiction reading this week and discussed that not only are they learning to read, but they are also ready to read to learn! Children were significant in deciding upon nonfiction categories for classroom libraries and helped to organize books into bins. Children explored books with many different topics that sparked conversations about things they were each wondering and noticed. This unit focuses on recognizing the common elements of nonfiction books, as well as will continue to support the reading process. The classrooms are already buzzing with excitement about this new genre!
This week, first graders began their first math project! In our exploration of place value, first graders started making their own number scrolls. Number scrolls begin at -1 and eventually will go past 1,000! This week, students set a goal to reach 100 (or more) on their number scroll. With the first scroll complete, we looked at number patterns in the ones place, and the tens place. Some things that we saw were: each column has the same number in the ones place; you can count by ten by moving down one space each time, and the tens place doesn’t change in a row. We are looking forward to finding more patterns!
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