We had a fabulous week in our room learning and writing fables.  One of the stories on our field trip next week is Aesops fable The Grasshopper and the Ant.  We talked about what a moral means and then wrote and illustrated our own fable.

I introduced the class to the Mercy Watson series of books by Kate DiCamillo.  These are easy chapter books with great vocabulary, pictures, characters and story elements.  You should see the children’s faces and hear their giggles as I am reading.  Some of our children brought in their personal copies, one went to the public library and checked them out and I have 2 copies.  It has been so much fun to see them passing around all the books and reading them.  Once again the entire class completed their reading logs and have been asking me for the new sheet.   New Reading logs went home on Friday in their daily folders.

In math we celebrated the 100th day of school by counting, sorting and creating all things 100.  We made a paper mosaic.  We used our balance scale to measure 100 counters while counting and balancing.  We had some sculptures made out of unifix cubes in the shape of 100.  We sorted our chain links and grouped them by color, 10’s and connected them.  We are still sorting, connecting and counting.  We began to learn about 2D and 3D shapes.  Our vocabulary in math includes line segment, polygon, parallel, quadrilateral, vertex, angle, faces and more.  The kids started with creating the assigned shapes with colored sticks and then using a template(stencil) to make them on a piece of paper.  We went on a  scavenger hunt to look for 3D and other shapes that we see all the time.   We got to see the roof of the Temple Bnai Abraham being lifted and saw lots of triangles on the cranes, parallel lines on the roof and trusses underneath and many rectangular prisms.

In science we did our ramp experiments with different types of cars and friction. We had a tug of war with the other first grade class and talked about the forces of push and pull.  We did an experiment with gravity and each group had to try and make something to protect a glass ball from breaking when dropped. Turns out that this Jewish girl didn’t know the ornaments were plastic.  We learned that scientists need to repeat experiments to see if they get the same results.

Our class had a brief introduction to China as next week we will be celebrating the Chinese New Year. Instructions and ideas are in the Daily Folder  so if you want to start on the long weekend you can.  (This is a poster only as simple or complex as your child makes it,) We watched the second grade production of the American Presidents and they are all now looking forward to second grade.

We are looking forward to more fun next week!!!!! Force and motion photos 1ooth Day of School Adding weights to cars to see if a heavier car will go further      Creating a protective cover for our glass balls  and testing the impact from the second floor                                                        Sharing a random act of kindness

 

Lifting the roof at Bnai Abraham