Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: April 20-24

Hello Families!

Here's a sneak peek at the past week in first grade:

We spent Tuesday morning busy with some Earth Day learning! In reader's workshop we explored our latest Scholastic News issue "Bag or Jellyfish?" and learned about how our choices affect the environment. Ask your first grader to tell you what happens in these scenarios:

1. Throw the plastic bag on the ground.

2. Throw the plastic bag in the trash.

3. Recycle the plastic bag.

An even better option would be not to take the plastic bag at all and instead use a reusable bag when you go shopping!

Speaking of which, I hope many of you have been busy during the week checking your child's "Love the Earth Report Card." Please be sure to return this on Monday, April 27th.

On Wednesday, Earth Day, all of the first graders made a difference right here at Stormonth by cleaning up the grounds in the front of our building. Well done!

Here we are in our Earth Day crowns with the trash we collected outside. We decided that since our trash bag wasn't full, we would just dump the trash into our classroom trash bag and save this larger bag for another time.

After all, we now know what can happen to these trash bags!

Our time spent with the Scholastic News issue lead right into writer's workshop that day. We created a fun Earth Day project where we wrote about how we can take care of the Earth. Hopefully the kiddos were inspired to make the world a better place every day by being conscious of what they're doing.

For the rest of the week in reader's workshop we continued to focus on reading across genres to learn about our topics. In writer's workshop we continued to work on our nonfiction teaching books.

In math we have begun our geometry unit. We have started with telling time to the hour. Ask your first grader how s/he remembers which hand is the hour hand and which is the minute hand. We also created a class book called Time in Our Day where we each selected a time to the hour, wrote it in digital form, then drew a picture and wrote about what we do at that time. It would be very helpful for your first grader to begin focusing on clocks/time outside of school. During the upcoming week we'll begin telling time to the half hour.

Critter Crunch was a big hit this week! Thank you for supporting the 4th grade's project to raise funds for the Wisconsin Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

In science this week we created compost bags with soil, the organic matter we brought from home and some special guests: red worms all the way from California! We'll be observing our bags over the next several weeks. For now, they're tucked away in a dark cupboard so that the worms can get busy!