Bike Trip

We had an awesome first grade bike trip on the Colchester Bike Path today! Thank you so very much to all of our wonderful volunteers who helped make the day a success!

Field Day

June 6 is Field Day! Field Day activities will be taking place all morning at Airport Park, ending with a BBQ lunch there. I have recieved all BBQ lunch order forms for children and families in our class. Lunch will be staggered with two classes eating at a time, with Ms. Barnett's class and ours eating at 11:20. If you are planning to join us for lunch on Field Day, please meet us at the park around that time. Students will be bussed to the park and then back to school after all of our Field Day fun!

Planting Potatoes for the Food Shelf

Today all four first grade classes had the special opportunity of planting potatoes for the Colchester Food Shelf (which is also our neighboring building!). Earlier this school year all classes at UMS collected food for the food shelf then brought it over so that we could learn about what the food shelf does in our community. It is very special that we are able to walk right next door and collaborate with the food shelf in our town! Today we learned how to plant potatoes and planted them in a patch right behind the food shelf building, which you can see in one of the photos below. In the fall, when our first graders have become second graders, they will get to return to the potato patch and dig up all the potatoes to donate to the food shelf! Below are some great photos of our class in action!

This free digital slideshow generated with Smilebox

Book Buddy Bags

Please return all book bags from the first grade reading program to school next week. This week was our final week reading with parent volunteers and we thank them so much for coming in to read with us all year long! It is now time for all of the first grade reading program books to go back into the cart for summer!

Some Friday News!

Whew! What a week. We have done so much! Yesterday the whole school had a big 4 Winds Day to wrap up our 4 Winds program for the year (thank you so much, Jenn and Scott, for being our 4 Winds volunteers all year!) and today we had a fantastic assembly called Jump With Jill. Jill is a registered dietician and also a musician/performer who did a high energy, very entertaining and engaging presentation to the whole school about healthy eating. Make sure to ask your child about this and if you want to learn more, go to Jumpwithjill.com. Finally today we had our Chick Celebration where many family members came to meet our 8 baby chicks and see all of the wonderful projects students have done during this unit. Unfortunately I discovered too late that since I had taken so many photos of the chicks this week, my camera battery was dead for the activities today! This week was full of end-of-year work and a lot of fun!

We are in the newspaper!

Check out this week's Colchester Sun! It features and article about UMS students donating to the food shelf and one of the photos I took of our class at the food shelf is on the front page of the paper! I recieved mine in the mail yesterday so keep an eye out for it!

My Students Holding the Chicks!

This afternoon once our chicks were fluffed up and running around I let the students hold them for a photo. Seeing how carefully the kids hold them and how excited they are put a huge smile on my face and I am excited to share that with you! These photos are so adorable. Parents, if you would like me to email you a copy of the photo of your child with the chick to have on your computer, please email and let me know.

Customize your own picture slideshow

More Chicks!

Our class now has seven chicks fluffy and running around a big tank in our room! Five more hatched over night and were in the incubator when I arrived at school this morning. We have an eighth, late bloomer, who has been trying to get out of his egg since yesterday morning and finally hatched this afternoon. Below are some photos of our fluffy chicks running around their tank! They have been active and running around peeping while there is activity in the room but every time the kids leave the room and it quiets down all of the chicks go right to sleep!

Chick Number Two Has Arrived!

I just watched our second chick hatch a few minutes ago while I was doing some after school work! I got some great photos showing the process of his hatch. He had been pecking a little hole in the egg all day but once he made a large crack around the top of the egg the rest only took a few minutes. When the first chick saw him starting to push out, the first chick came over and started to help! You will see him pecking the second egg in the photos below. Our first chick has been alone all day and hoping for a friend. He is now making all kinds of excited noise and following the second chick all around the incubator though it seems that the second chick just wants to be left alone for a nap! "I just hatched! Let me be. I'll play with you later!"

A digital slideshow by Smilebox

The Hatch Has Begun

We had our first chick hatch this morning! Most of the kids were lucky enough to see our first chick hatch out of its egg as they came into the classroom first thing this morning. We have several other chicks beginning to poke their beaks out of their shells so we hope that tomorrow there will be some friends for our first chick! Please come visit them on Friday when we have our chick celebration. We are very excited to show off the chicks as well as the great projects we have completed during our chick hatch unit. Below are some photos of our first chick entering the world! He has spent his first day between sleeping and running around the other eggs making lots of noise encouraging his friends to come out! The glare in some of the photos is from the lid to the incubator. We leave the incubator closed to keep the hot, moist air in while the chicks are doing their work hatching. Once they are dry and fluffy we will move them to a big tank where they can run around.

Junie B. Jones

Mrs. Flanagan, our school librarian, let us know that Junie B. Jones will be performing at Barnes and Noble this Saturday, May 26th at 11:00am! Several of the girls in our class have been reading Junie B. Jones books during our reading block so if you have time this weekend it might be a fun thing to go see!

Chick Development

As we have been studying chicks, the children and I have been regularly looking at a website that shows a rough idea of what the chick embryo looks like each day during the 21 day gestation. The kids have been working on a Hatch Log, drawing what the embryo looks like every few days. I am putting the link below that will show you the embryo growth diagram we have been looking at. I also encourage you to check out some of the amazing videos available on youtube showing chicks hatching, with your child. We have watched several in class (all are a few minutes long). I have typed, "baby chicks hatching," into the search box to find them. Chickscope: Embryology

Weather and Moon

I have added two new gadgets to the side of the blog to go along with first grade units of study. We studied the night sky (and learned a lot about moon phases) and weather (we chart and discuss weather every day in class) and became interested in checking our daily weather report and moon phase so I added these to the lefthand side of the blog. Now we will always know what they are!

Candling the Eggs

Today we candled our eggs for the second time. We will do this once more on Friday when we stop turning the eggs in class. Next week is our hatch week so at that point we need to leave the eggs alone to watch what happens! Candling our eggs starts with putting the eggs, one at a time, on the overhead projector, sitting on a piece of cardboard with a hole in the center. We close the shades and turn out the lights in the room, then turn on the projector so we have light focused just on the egg. We slowly rotate the egg over the light and as the light shines through the shell we get a look at what's inside! Today we were able to see promising growth in most of our eggs! We could see a large dark area where the embryo is, the air space at one end of the egg, some egg white, and some veins inside the egg! A few of our eggs looked mainly clear when we candled them, which may mean that the embryo isn't developing. We hope to see more growth when we candle again on Friday and we are hoping that next week we will be able to say "Happy Birthday" to several cute little chicks! Below are some photos of students helping me candle eggs.

Chick Art

We are about halfway through our month studying chicks and the time is flying! We are working on lots of chick reading, writing, and different projects as we learn about hatching eggs. Every day we turn the eggs three times and every few days we are candling the eggs to observe the embryos' growth. We have been working on Chick Hatch Logs where we refer to a chart showing how the embryos look each day, then drawing what we think they look like in our own logs every few days. We are gathering much of the work we have done to go into "All About Chicks" books for the end of our unit! We hope you come to our Chick Celebration on May 25 to see the chicks and all of our hard work. Below are some photos of the kids making chick art. We cut out egg shapes for the body and our hand prints for the wings then added beaks, googly eyes, and some kids even added egg shells!

Customize a free digital slideshow

Guidance News

As you know, Mrs. McCleary, our guidance counselor, comes to our class each week to teach us about important topics such as bullying, personal safety, and friendship. Mrs. McCleary has just finished with the personal safety unit in guidance. Please check out her blog for more information about what was covered! http://umsschoolcounseling.blogspot.com/

Turning the Eggs

We finished the last of our weather projects today and are going to dive right into our chick life cycle unit. This will be our culminating science unit for first grade and is such a fun way to end the year! Last Wednesday we put 12 eggs in our incubator and the kids have been taking turns working as "Official Egg Turners," turning the eggs three times each day, as the mother hen would, to make sure that the chicks inside develop properly. We have learned that the eggs need to be treated very carefully and kept in the closed incubator at 100.5 degrees for about 21 days in order to hatch. Each day two children very carefully turn the eggs inside the incubator early in the morning, at lunch time, and during dismissal time. Other than these turn times we leave the eggs alone, though our incubator has a clear lid so we can peek in! Tomorrow we will "candle" the eggs for the first time, meaning that we will turn out the classroom lights and shine a bright light through each egg, one at a time, in order to see the developing embryo inside. Sort of like a chick ultrasound! We will candle the eggs three times over the next two weeks and should be able to watch the embryo inside getting bigger. Below are some photos of the Official Egg Turners hard at work. On your child's egg turning day he/she will bring home a badge that says, "I turned an egg today. Ask me how" so that you will know to ask all about it!

Personalize a photo slideshow

It's Chick Month!

Our class is wrapping up our weather unit this week and getting ready to learn about chicks! We have been learning about how the sun, wind, clouds, rain, and temperature are all major parts of weather. We have been graphing the daily weather and marking the daily weather all year and have been studying the weather more in depth for the past three weeks. This week we are learning about the water cycle. You can ask your child to tell you about the water cycle and the different types of clouds (we have been practicing learning the words cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus as well as what type of cloud each word describes). This morning each first grade class received our chick eggs! Nurse Kelly came into our class to clean our eggs, show us how to turn them daily in the incubator, and how to keep clean when handling so that both we and the developing chicks stay healthy. We have 12 eggs in our incubator and we will spend the next three weeks caring for them. About 21 days from today we should expect them to hatch! We will start learning all about chicks next week when we are all done with our weather unit. Here is a photo of our eggs in the incubator!