Happy Thanksgiving From Room 103!

We have had a BLAST in our room learning all about the first Thanksgiving as well as current Thanksgiving traditions that we all share. We read many fiction books about turkeys getting themselves out of being the main course on Thanksgiving! So we did a fun little activity where the turkeys are holding up signs begging people to eat ANYTHING but turkey. The kids thought it was hilarious! 

On Monday we had a first grade Thanksgiving feast. We love to celebrate holidays as a first grade family here at Creek View. I let the kids choose if they wanted to be a pilgrim or Indian for the feast. We all sat together and enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving (snack) feast. And I have to say a HUGE THANK YOU to the moms that helped us set up for this. 

All week we learned about the differences between kids today and pilgrim kids. The kids did a writing activity comparing what they have/can do that the pilgrim kids could not do or did not have. 

Small Moment Stories and Celebration!

We just completed our second unit in Writer's Workshop. We learned all about small moment stories. Within those stories we learned how to write our sight words in a SNAP! I had written a few stories on large paper and left the sight words blank. The kids came up and helped me write their sight words in a SNAP! They were so surprised to see how often we put sight words in our stories. 

After practicing writing our sight words we moved on to adding better details to our stories. We talked about how we can write our feelings instead of just say 'it was fun'. We brainstormed many different words that could take the place of fun in our stories. 

Finally we learned how to add details to our stories by using our five senses. 

After about five weeks of writing we chose our favorite piece of writing and shared our stories together for a class celebration! The kids LOVED reading each other's stories as well as reading their own stories to their friends in a small group. Writing in first grade is so wonderful to see!

Growing Patterns, Counting by Two's, Even and Odd!

We have covered so much in math recently! We learned all about growing patterns;  a pattern that continues to grow and not stay the same as it repeats. We learned how to compare and identify the difference between a regular repeating pattern and a growing pattern. 

We also learned how to count by two's all the way to 100. Woo! That was a tricky one for some of us and we are still practicing every day. We had a little fun counting our eyes in the classroom by two's.    

Lastly we transitioned into even and odd numbers. We started with even numbers as they are the same as our count by two's numbers! By the end of last week everyone was AWESOME at identifying odd and even numbers!