1/24-1/28

We finally had a full week of school--almost. There was the uneventful two and a half hour delay. At least we got a little extra sleep.

This week we celebrated the 100th Day of School!!! Can you believe your children have been 1st graders for 100 days? It seems as though the school year is just slipping by.

We began the 100th day with a special breakfast of 100 pieces of cereal. Then we took a class picture with our really amazing hats that had 100 items on them. We completed a graph telling what we wish we had 100 of, and we sang a song about the 100th Day of School. Later in the day we made little words from 'one hundred days.' We also counted how many times we could write our name in 100 seconds, and we exhausted ourselves by doing jumping jacks for 100 seconds!

I'm looking forward to our remaining 80 days!

1/18-1/21

After being out of school for ten unexpected days, our class returned to school VERY excited! I think we all had cabin fever by this time. I hope everyone had fun in the snow, but by day four I was definitely ready to see it melt!

Our story for the week was Jan's New Home. We made many connections to this story, as so many of us have moved to new homes ourselves. We discussed how some changes are fun and easy, while other changes are scary and sad. Then we made a graph telling what changes and what doesn't change when we move.

Student work: Ruby and Jan's house

In phonics we learned about the /or/ sound, as in corn and fork. We also learned that when a word ends in s, x, ch, or sh, we add -es to make it plural (if the base word is a noun) or present tense (if the base word is a verb). I know that sounds confusing, but the class really understood it!

Our Helper Chart

In math we counted money. We even counted quarters (but only with pennies).

We also made snowflakes to decorate our window. We made really big snowflakes so we could easily cut the lines we drew.

In science we are learning about the states of matter: solids, liquids, and gases. We played "Mystery Bags." There were five bags, each containing a different item. Students reached into each bag and guessed what was in the bag and wrote their guess on their whiteboard. A few students got all of their guesses correct. We will continue to learn about the states of matter next week.

1/10-1/14

SNOW WEEK!!!!!!!

1/4-1/7

What a joy to enter our brand new classroom! We are truly blessed to have such a nice school to call our second home!

Much of the first week at GSES was spent learning our way around the school. On the first day back we took a tour of the school, even walking upstairs. The students 'oohed' and 'ahhed' the whole time, and they have continuously told me how nice our classroom is! They are learning their way around the school now. Lunch is so much quieter, and after we clean up, two students have the privilege of cleaning our tables! There are only two classes in the gym together for PE, so the students are getting more physical activity!

After acclimating ourselves to our new surroundings, it was time to learn! We learned about verbs and chose the correct verb to fit in a sentence.

This week we read Ruby in Her Own Time, about a little duck who leanred to do things in her own time. The class talked about how we all learn to do things in our own time, and we even made a chart!

In math we practiced telling time, and the class is really getting good at it!

We learned about penguins. Ask your child what (s)he remembers. We made cute penguins that are hanging in the hallway, but I forgot to take a picture of them.

On our first day back to school, we went outside to the front of the school and made a sketch of our new school building. Then we went inside to color the pictures. I put all of the sketches in a class book hanging outside of our classroom.