Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: April 2016

Hello Families!
Another week come and gone... how can it be that we have already made our way to May with still so much first grade learning to do?! This past week was brim-full of first grade learning. Here's a sneak-peek...

In Writer's and Reader's Workshop we continue to read and think and write and discuss and read and think... well, you get the picture! Our animal research is coming along quite nicely, and our goal is that our nonfiction chapter books will be completed next Tuesday! My, my, my are these kiddos ever working hard!

We organized our 3X5 cards then began to write each chapter.

In Math Workshop we composed 3-D shapes, ordered objects by length, and measured with length units. Next week we'll show what we know on our unit 7 assessment and move into our final Math Expressions unit: Two-Digit Addition. After that, we'll do a Money Mini-Unit!

We celebrated Arbor Day on Friday with a great assembly! One of our read-alouds this week was Our Tree Named Steve. It was a bit of a tear-jerker. Ask your first grader about it.

Our soil studies continued in Science this week and, boy, was it ever exciting! Our red worms arrived from California! We added our organic matter and our worms to our compost bags. Now we'll wait for 5 weeks while our worms are busy working. I wonder what will happen in our compost bags? Check in with your first grader to see what s/he thinks!

Having a peek at our red worms under the Hover Cam. There were so many, and they were very wiggly!

Adding organic matter to our compost bags.

One of our friends commented that his worms were surely going to have a HUGE dinner! YUMMMM!

Closely observing our red worms.

Making observations and discussing with a partner.

Taking good care of our new friends!

Having a good look before putting our worms in our compost bags.

Making a nice home right in our hands!

Recording what we put in our compost bags and what we think will be in those bags in five weeks.

Thanks for stopping by the blog!

Until next time...

Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars:

May 11: Early Release Day

May 20: Music Mini-Concert 1:50-2:20

May 25: Early Release Day

May 30: No School

***June 2: FAMILY PICNIC!
Tentative time frame is 11:30-1pm

June 9: Last day of first grade

Hello Families!

It's been a bit since I've posted - so sorry for the delay! I was sick in bed for the entire weekend last week then missed Monday and Tuesday of school. What a doozy that was! In any case, we had two wonderful guest teachers who took the helm alongside a group of respectful, responsible and safe first graders who all did a terrific job in my absence.

Here's what we've been up to the past few weeks:

Writer's Workshop & Reader's Workshop
We've been busy with our final nonfiction writing unit of study. The first bend of our unit found us working in book clubs, learning about a chosen animal. Our first bend focused on note-taking skills, paying attention to text features when reading nonfiction books in order to get the most from them, and collaborating with our book club members to plan for a poster project to display our learning.

We paid close attention to what nonfiction writers do.

Then we wrote what we noticed.

This work went hand-in-hand with Reader's Workshop where we were busy reading books about our animals, finding the key details and important information we wanted to include in our poster projects. We also spent time each day meeting with our book club members and shared our learning with each other.

First we sorted our piles of nonfiction books into categories.

Here we are doing our final sorting to ready our books for their new bins.

We were even in charge of working together to create labels for our new book bins.

Two of our friends used a koala book to be sure they spelled their topic correctly and to be sure their drawing looked realistic.

She did a great job making her owl look just like the one in her book!

Readers read their books, stopping along the way to think about what they learned.

All About Wolves

All About Lions

All About Sharks

All About Giraffes

Our second bend in our unit of study began this week. For this final portion of the unit, each child has selected a new animal to study. We have created folders with envelopes for each of our four topics: Habitat, Physical Traits, Food, and Babies. Our folders also include an Alphabox. Ask your first grader to tell you what the Alphabox is for and why it's important as we study our animals.

Science

We've begun our Soils unit, however, I haven't yet posted our photos from our "Gas in a Bag" experiment! Ask your first grader to tell you all about what happened!

WOW! This bag REALLY filled up with gas!

To end our Solids, Liquids & Gases unit, we celebrated with an edible experiment: Root Beer Floats! Ask your first grader to tell you what was the gas, liquid, and solid in this fun experiment.

In our new Soils unit, we have explored soil using our senses and then took our trip to the Schlitz Audubon. What a wonderful afternoon of learning!

We found rocks, seeds, roots, dead leaves, and even a spider in our soil! We found other things that we're not sure yet what they were. Perhaps now that we've been to the Schlitz, we'll have it figured out...

Collecting soil with an auger.

Turn, turn, turn!

Pushing it down into the soil!

We found lots of different things when we looked under rocks and logs. Ask your first grader what s/he found.

Miss Jean put a cup-full of soil in a friend's hands...

we all looked at it...

then she told us what was in it...

We were a bit surprised...

and a little grossed out! But our helper was BRAVE!

Hmmm... what was this?!

Collecting rocks on the beach.

Sorting our rocks into three categories: Sedimentary, Igneous, and Metamorphic. How can you tell which is which? What are their characteristics?

Miss Jean showed us how sand is made.

Shake, shake, shake!

Shake some more!

Keep on shaking!

We shook it REALLY well, and then... we made sand!

Look at this! Iron ore! It's magnetic! Then we found magnetite in the sand! Guess what? It DANCED!

We put a magnet in the sand and captured magnetite which we put on our paper plate. Then we put our magnet under the plate and made the magnetite dance! I'm having a bit of trouble with our video, but hopefully I can get it up and running at some point.

Math Workshop

During math, we've been busy with learning to tell time to the hour and half hour as well as with identifying and describing 2D and 3D geometric shapes.

We can combine shapes to make new shapes.

Finally, we've spent some time learning about Earth Day and how we can take care of our Earth. A fourth-grader came and spoke to us about a project that Stormonth's Earth Ambassadors are involved in. Each Stormonth student will write his/her idea for how to take care of the Earth on a paper leaf which will hang on the tree that the Ambassadors have created. We're excited to see our ideas and many, many others on the tree! In our classroom, we created an Earth Day display for our hallway.