Author Visit

Today our school had a very special visitor! Author/Illustrator Chris Van Dusen came to visit and met with classes to teach us about his books and how he writes/illustrates! Chris is the author/illustrator of several books including the Circus Ship, and the illustrator of the Mercy Watson books, written by Kate DiCamillo. He is a resident of the state of Maine and illustrated the design on the Maine license plate as well as covers for the LLBean catalog! It was very exciting for everyone to meet the author/illustrator of some of our favorite books in first grade.

Turning the Eggs

The eggs in our classroom are a little more than halfway through their incubation process and we expect the hatch to be next Tuesday! All students have now gotten a chance to turn the eggs in our incubator and have gotten to candle the eggs with me (shining a bright light through them to see the embryo inside)! Definitely ask your child about this at home.

Our Trip to the Flynn

Last week all of the first grade classes took a trip to the Flynn Theater in Burlington to watch the student matinee, Dragons Love Tacos and Other Stories! UMS students attend a matinee at the Flynn once every school year which is lots of fun and a wonderful cultural experience for everyone! Here are a couple of photos of our class ready to watch!

Incubator Live Stream

All four first grade classrooms have eggs incubating in our classrooms set to hatch hopefully on May 22. Miss Ransom has a live stream video feed on her classroom incubator so you can watch the hatch in real time when it happens and then check out the chicks from home! This is the link to that live stream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raiksNHohcI

The Chick Unit Has Begun!

Our favorite and final first grade science unit has begun! Every May the first graders hatch chick in class as we learn about life cycles. Tuesday morning we got our fertilized eggs and Nurse Kelly helped each class clean them, set them in the classroom incubator, and she taught us about being safe and clean (good hand washing) when handling the incubator and eggs. Today (Wednesday) we started turning eggs (as a mother hen would do with her clutch) and started our 21 day count down to the hatch! We expect that the chicks will hatch around May 22.

On Friday, May 25 we will have a chick celebration during the last hour of the school day. Families are welcome to join us so we hope to see you there! You will be able to meet the chicks and see the work your children have been doing throughout our unit. The chicks will go back to the farm at UVM (for the 4H program) after school that day after our celebration.

Mrs. Kelly is Back!

We have had a busy month in Room 7!  Our time spent together is flying by!  Here are some updates about what we have been doing in first grade!

Reader's Workshop: We have been learning about Informational Non Fiction books and the text features that are provided to help us understand what we are reading. So far we have learned about maps, table of contents, photographs, and bold words. There are so many text features that give us a lot of information about non-fiction texts.

Word Study: Magic e!  We have been learning about silent e and how adding one to the end of a word can make the vowel say its name!  For example cap...to cape! This week we have begun past and present endings (ed, ing).

Writer's Workshop: Non fiction!  This is so exciting, I love this unit!  We are diving into non fiction texts and applying that to our writing. So far we have brainstormed topics we know a lot about, for example, animals.

Math: We have begun unit 7. Today we learned about defining and non defining attributes of a shape!

Social Studies: We have begun our unit on Mexico. We are learning about the weather in Mexico, the culture, and comparing this new information to our own lives in Vermont.


Reminder!  No school for students this Friday!