We had a great week in first grade as we had our first field trip to The One World Theater.  The theater is actually a Tuscan style villa so I told the class this counted as our Italy field trip!  The show was very well done and the children were well prepared to hear the stories.  When I asked the class some of their favorite things about the day I received responses ranging from the 3 snacks, the car rides, no homework and some actually did say the play!  We saw the musical production of The Teacher From the Black Lagoon and Other Stories.

     On Chinese New Year each student presented their independent projects about China.  What I thought would take 30 minutes took all morning as they each had a lot to say and share about their Chinese topics.  We broke up the morning with rice cakes with red preserves and later after Hebrew I served them Chinese noodles in a bowl with chopsticks.  They loved it and want my recipe……secret……..I made it up. Serve in a bowl with chopsticks.  Even our pickiest of eaters ate it !  We had some kids eat 3 to 4 servings!  In Math we wrote numbers in Chinese and wrote our own math problems.  We made dragon tangrams and explored with new polygons.  We talked about some Chinese inventions and wrote sentences about them.

    On Friday our reading groups all had more topics about China and each group talked about fact vs. opinion.  We underlined supporting details and some of us had pictures to draw.  We had a guest speaker to our class from China who talked to the class about growing up in China and then answered their questions.  We painted Chinese fans with watercolors to finish off our week of China.

   During a recess we had a tug of war with the other first grade class to “tie” into our study of force and motion.  We also tried to fly  a kite.  Kites were invented in China and it went along with Force and Motion. Attached are a few photos of this week

Congratulations to Isaac Orf on winning first place in first grade creative writing at PSIA.

Looking forward to the new week  with a lot more fun and learning.