Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

In first grade, it is the egg! It is time for our favorite science unit of the year; The Life Cycle of a Chick! Our twelve fertilized chicken eggs arrived today and have been set in the incubator on our counter. Each first grade classroom has its own incubator and dozen eggs. In about 21 days we should hear these four classrooms filled with the sounds of many peeping chicks! Today our class watched the two video clips below, one being an imovie I made last year explaining chick hatching in first grade, and the other being one of my favorite Youtube clips of a chick hatching from an egg. We learned about the incubator, care of the eggs, and what to expect over the next month as we wait for them to hatch. Stay tuned for much more chick information and photos to come!

Chick Hatching Clip

Mrs. Kelly's Class 2013 chick imovie

Mexico

Our class is wrapping up our study of Mexico! This has been a wonderful unit of study, made even better by our pen pal partnership with a class from Monterrey, Mexico, with whom we have been emailing and Skyping for several weeks. Throughout our reading and study during the last month we learned about weather, food, clothing, holidays, animals, mapping and geography, native people long ago and people in Mexico today, and much more! Student's "lap books" (their folders full of work from the unit) will be going home tomorrow so that you can ask your child about many of the interesting things they learned.

The week before break we made Amate bark paintings in the style of some of Mexico's native people's. Some of the photos below show students working on these. The original Amate paintings we used as examples are pictures painted in bright colors on paper made from the bark of Amate trees. We used brown paper and fluorescent paint to model our paintings after the originals. Students chose things found in nature such as birds, cactus, the sun, etc and painted them in threes on their paper. We will hang these on the wall outside our classroom for a while before sending them home.

One of the essential questions in our unit of study has been, "How are we and the place we live similar to and different from Mexico and its people." Now that we have learned so much about Mexico and met people there (through Skype and email) we took some time to make a Venn Diagram listing similarities and differences we have noticed between the people and places! It has been wonderful learning for us to see that we have so many things in common with our neighbor to the south but also many things that make us unique. You can see the beginning of our Venn Diagram work in one of the photos below. There are also photos of kids working on parts of their lap books including maps, the Mexican flag, passports, and more!

Make a slideshow design

School-wide Meeting

Today is the middle of our school spirit week and we had a school-wide meeting! You will notice most people wearing our school colors (blue and green) in the photos below as our spirit activity today. Please have a look at the "upcoming events" section of the blog to see what the themes are for the other days this week.

During today's meeting Mrs. Mazda shared some digital reports her students had created using a great app called Haiku Deck and Mr. Antonicci lead the school in an activity. We learned that through our "drink more water" wellness challenge this month (where students have been keeping a water bottle at school, filling it up, and trying to drink more water), as a school, we have drunk more than 1,000 bottles of water so far, both leading us to be healthier and saving that number of disposable water bottles from going into landfills! Go UMS! We also learned about this year's reading challenge for April break. Students will bring home blue reading logs just before vacation and can record the number of books they read each day during break. They should then bring the reading logs back to school on the Monday or Tuesday after break. Each class is going to see if they beat the number of books read during the February break reading challenge and two students from each class who return their reading logs will get the chance to win tickets to a Lake Monsters baseball game as part of a raffle! Be on the lookout for reading logs at the end of this week.

Hola Mexico!

Today our class had our first Skype meeting with our pen pal class in Monterrey, Mexico! For the last few weeks our two classes have been emailing back and forth asking each other questions, sharing information about life in our towns, and sending some photos. We created a list of questions that both classes wanted to know about each other and today we got the chance to share our answers through Skype, which was so much fun! Our pen pal class is a class of Kindergartners at a private school where they speak English at school, but Spanish at home. Despite the fact that we sound different and have very different names, we discovered that we are actually very similar in many other ways. As it turned out, our answers to the questions we asked were almost all the same! We plan to keep emailing, Skype again after break, and are going to send each other a post card with pictures of our home state.

Here was the list of questions both classes wanted to know about each other:

What activities do you do after school? (we both said we have playdates, do homework, play outside, play video games, and go to the library)

What are your favorite toys? (kids in both classes said that they like stuffed animals, dolls, action figures, and Skylanders!)

What kind of pets do you have? (both classes said dogs, cats, birds, fish, hamsters)

Where do you go on vacations? (both classes said beaches and Florida! The other class said that sometimes they go to Texas since it is quite close to them or come to the USA to go skiing because there is no snow where they live)

Do you use iPads at school? (both said yes)

What do you do on weekends? (both classes said visiting family, having play dates, going to parks, hiking, playing outside)

What games do you play at recess? (both classes said soccer, going on swings, slides, and playing make-believe games)

How do you get to school each day? (both said school bus or car)

Do you wear uniforms to school? (they do, we do not)

Do you invite friends to your house in the afternoons? (both said sometimes)

Response to Literature

Throughout the month of April our class has been learning about narrative nonfiction and working on writing in response to literature. During the winter we spent several months focused on learning about informational nonfiction texts ("all about" books with information on a topic and books filled with facts) and have now shifted our focus to narrative nonfiction, which the kids describe as "true stories," or nonfiction texts that read like a story rather than a book filled with facts.

At the same time we have started working on writing responses to these new books, rather than just discussing our thinking about them. This is something students will be doing more and more of as they move on in their school years. Each week this month our class focused on a different narrative nonfiction book, writing different types of responses to it each day. Some of these include asking the "w" questions, "who, when, where" as well as deeper questions such as "what was the main idea of this story," "what were some supporting details," and "why do you think the author wrote this book?" We have written predictions about what might be coming up in a book followed by our answers about what ended up happening, and we have also started writing about character. We are learning about character feelings, character traits, and how to find evidence in the text to support them. For example, if students wrote that a character was sad or a character was curious, they would then have to find evidence in the text to prove that the character was sad or curious. Finding evidence to support our conclusions and being able to adequately answer the question, "how do you know?" is a large part of the new Common Core State Standards. Response to literature is one way that students are beginning to work on this skill in first grade! You will see some response to literature sheets from this and last week's work coming home today.

Writers' Share

First graders are wrapping up a wonderful writing unit focused on writing nonfiction. Today, students in our class got together with students in Ms. Barnett's class for a celebration of their writing. Each student spent much time writing and editing their latest nonfiction writing piece and today got the chance to buddy up with a student from another class to share it. Students took turns listening to their partner read, then asked questions and made comments about the writing. This was a fun way to wrap up our latest writing unit! Our first writing unit of the year focused on writing personal narratives, the second was this unit focused on writing nonfiction, and the third and final unit of the year is a brand new one (aligned with the new Common Core State Standards), focused on introducing the students to opinion writing! Stay tuned! Below are photos of the two classes sharing their writing.

Free picture slideshow created with Smilebox

Mexico

First graders have begun studying Mexico! When we studied mapping earlier in the school year we learned where Mexico in on the map and this week we talked about borders and using passports to travel to other countries. I showed the class my real passport and the kids made pretend passports as well as a packing list of things they would need to bring if we were going to visit Mexico (there are some photos of them working on their passports below). We have also been comparing weather forecasts here and in Monterrey, Mexico, connecting to our previous weather unit, and helping us to notice differences between where we live and Mexico (today's forecast in Monterrey was 100 degrees!). We chose Monterrey because, as an exciting new element to our Mexico country study this year, we have a buddy class there! Technology is now helping to form a global community and this year I used a wonderful teacher resource called ePals to connect with a teacher in Monterrey Mexico. She teachers a kindergarten class there and for the past week our two classes have been emailing back and forth, learning about each other, and comparing/contrasting life in Colchester, Vermont to Monterrey, Mexico. We are planning to have our classes Skype next week and are very excited about this incredible opportunity to learn by meeting kids in the country we are studying! It makes our unit so much more meaningful. Stay tuned for more on Mexico!

Free photo slideshow created with Smilebox

Spring Colors in Symmetry

First graders just finished a math unit introducing geometry during which we learned some about symmetry. Around the same time we decided that it was time to send the snowmen packing (at least on the walls) and get some spring color up in our hallway so we did a art project incorporating our new knowledge about symmetry. Students made butterflies and dragonflies with symmetrical bodies and markings, then painted them in warm and cool colors, highlighting their symmetrical markings in black. Below are a few photos. Can you tell that we are ready for warmer weather?