What have the 1M O.W.L.S Been Up To?

We had a super time at Jenkinson's Aquarium! We had a tour guide show us all around the aquarium and we went to the Touch Station and actually got to touch a sea urchin, seastar, and a horseshoe crab. Then we went into the aquarium's classroom and learned even more about penguins. We all got to meet an African penguin named Onyx up close. Thanks so much to Ms. Taylor, Mrs.Payami, and Mrs. Mansukhani for chaperoning. The children and I really appreciated all of your help. I have posted some pictures from the trip as well as a short video that is a part of the Smilebox below. Enjoy!

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The First Grade had a great 101st Day of School! They did such a fantastic job on their 101 t-shirts! We did lots of fun activities that centered around the number 101. It was a fun day! Here are some pics of their ADORABLE shirts!

The children have been having such an enchanting time during our Fairy Tale Unit! We have read different versions of The Princess and the Pea, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rumpelstilskin. We also read a few different fractured fairy tales, which the children LOVED! We have been continuing to work on retelling a story, Rising and Falling Action of a story, Problem and Solution, and we began analyzing fairy tale characters and making inferences. We made piggy glyphs, wrote to characters, participated in Reader's Theater, and sequenced the events of fairy tales. We have also continued working on using decoding skills and reading with expression. We also began creating our own fractured fairy tale puppet shows during Literacy Centers. Ask your child about it. They had a blast! We used a really neat app on the iPad, called Sonic Pics to do a digital retelling of a story. This week we will make a digital story based on the fairy tales that we wrote ourselves!Then the children used a rubric to make sure they used expression, literary/story language, and that their story had a beginning, middle, and end. It should be a lot of fun!!When we are finished with the digital stories I will email them to you... Stay tuned...

In Math, we finished working with 2D shapes. We learned about symmetry, congruent figures, and polygons. We made polygons out of straws. We began working with 3D shapes. We learned the attributes of 3D shapes and we sorted the shapes by whether they could roll, stack, etc. We went on a 3D shape search around the school.

In Writing, we finished up our Three Little... stories and worked on the special digital storytelling project which I mentioned above. We also have been working on using the 1,2,3 FCA, which means retell the story in the correct order and the 2D FCA, which means add 2 details about the topic.

We began our Quilts theme, which will be integrated into all subject areas. We learned what a quilt is and how it is made. In Social Studies We learned how quilts played a part in the Underground Railroad and we learned about the different quilt squares and their meanings. The children were fascinated by this. We used 2D shapes and each child created a symmetric quilt square in Math. The children also created their own quilt squares and named them too. We read many wonderful books about quilts such as The Quiltmaker's gift and Clara's Sweet Freedom Quilt.

I found a great website called Sum Dog. It has fun Math games to reinforce Math skills. I created a username and password for each child to use to play games. I will send home the user name and password to you on Tuesday. Please let me know what you think of the website. I tried it out on my son and he enjoyed it.

Have a great week!!