Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: January 26-30

What an exciting week it was! Half-Way Day and Bedtime Story Night were the highlights of our week. We had such an incredible time with all of the first grade teachers on Half-Way Day. In each room, first graders participated in an activity related to our special day. Ask your first grader to tell you all about what s/he did with each teacher. In our classroom, first graders selected half of a painting and then created the other half with colored pencils. Here we are showing off our incredible artistic abilities...

Bedtime Story Night was such fun as well. Each first grader rotated to three different rooms to hear a bedtime story or two. After all of the delightful stories, they headed into the lunchroom for muffins and milk. Thank you to everyone who provided items for this special event and to everyone who volunteered to send in items. Thanks also for such great attendance! We're proud that this Stormonth event is so well attended.

In Reader's Workshop this week we continued our focus on getting to know our characters. We continue to discover that the more we stop to really think about our characters actions and thoughts and also think about how those actions and thoughts are similar to or different from what we might do or think, the better we understand the book. Sometimes we even discover that there is a lesson for us to learn in the book. Be on the lookout for these lessons in books that you read with your child at home. Also be sure to check in with your reader about his/her understanding of the characters in his/her books by asking, "What kind of person is _____________________?" We spent quite a bit of time with the character Peter in Peter's Chair over the past few weeks. Ask your first grader to tell you what kind of person Peter is as well as what lesson they took away from Ezra Jack Keats' story.

In Writer's Workshop we continue to work on the finishing touches of our Book Character Series. First Graders have been very busy revising and editing their pieces and putting them in their book series boxes.We each also wrote our "Meet the Author" page for our boxes. Here are a few examples...

In math this week we continued our focus on place value by representing two-digit numbers as tens and ones, as well as learning strategies for adding (doubles, doubles +1, doubles -1, doubles +2 and doubles -2). Phew! It was a lot of hard work, but we were all confident and persevered even when it was difficult!

In science this week we first discussed what we knew about the term mixture. We then observed two solids: salt and gravel. After recording our observations, we mixed our solids together and observed our mixture. We then used a mesh cloth or "sieve" to separate our mixture. Ask your first grader to tell you what we learned from our experiment.