Las Posadas

First graders are learning about different winter/December holidays since there are so many! We recently learned about Diwali (which is celebrated by two of our classmates), and for the last two days we have been learning about Las Posadas. This is a holiday celebrated in Mexico (which is a country we will study later in the year) for the 8 evenings leading up to Christmas. We read some books about this holiday and created a poinsettia art project today after learning that poinsettias originated in Mexico blooming in December!

Later this week and next week we will learn about Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. As families let me know of other winter holidays celebrated by their families we are discussing those as well so please do let me know of any other holidays celebrated at home! We will discuss the new year when we return to school after break.

High School Choir Performance

This past Monday students in the Colchester High School chorus visited UMS and did a special singing performance of their holiday and winter-themed music for us. They will be having a concert at the high school this weekend.

More Opinions

Our class has been doing lots of practice with opinion writing! We read books such as, A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea, The Best Pet, and Spoon, all using text based evidence to support our opinions. Here are a few photos from reading/writing based on the book Duck/Rabbit where students had to decide if the pictured animal was a duck or rabbit then support their opinions from information in the text.

Mercy Watson

Our class has been reading the Mercy Watson book series and we love it! Today we looked at the Mercy Watson website. I am posting a link to it here so you can check it out at home!

Mercy Watson Website

Kiblogs

Students in our class have started blogging! Students are using a platform called Kidblog which offers them a way to practice communication skills (how to tell about one topic and also read/synthesize the information written by someone else and comment on it in a way that opens a conversation). Blogging also reinforces writing, spelling, and keyboarding skills for students and can be used like an online journal.

Kidblog is a private blogging forum and only allows people who we have invited to our class (such as family members) or made connections with (other classes we know) to see/comment on the students' blogs. It is therefore private and secure for the kids to practice with as opposed to a regular blog forum like blogger where anyone on the internet can see it. Later this week I will send out email invitations to parents so you can join our class on Kidblog and be able to read/comment on your child's posts. Being able to read comments from friends and family makes this writing experience so much more fun for kids!

Students may use their Kidblogs at home by clicking the Kidblog link at the right side of this blog under "Student Links," finding their first name in the drop-down menu, and entering their password, which is their last name starting with a capital letter followed by the numbers 1234. I moderate all comments so if a student is looking for a specific comment and does not see it it may be that I have not yet approved recent comments.

Happy blogging and be on the lookout for your email invitation to join us on Kidblog!

Opinion Writing

This trimester we are starting a new genre of writing. During the first trimester we focused on personal narratives (writing about true events in your own life) and now this second trimester we will be focused mostly on opinion writing. We began last week by doing different activities to explore the difference between fact and opinion. After identifying those differences we began talking about giving reasons to support an opinion.

On Friday we read the book Hey Little Ant in which a boy is deciding whether or not to squish an ant on the sidewalk! They talk to one another and the boy gives reasons why he thinks he should squish the ant and the ant gives reasons why the boy should not squish him. The book ends with a question asking the reader what they think should happen. Our class discussed the reasons given by both the boy and the ant and students then wrote their opinions. Our group was benevolent and most students chose to save the ant :). Students wrote their opinion and used details from the text to support the opinion they chose.

Word Study Game

Every morning we do word study work where we practice different spelling patterns, review sight words, learn about nouns and verbs, etc. On Thursdays we play games to review the words on our word wall.

This past Thursday we played a "beat the teacher game!" Kids sit with personal dry erase boards in front of the big dry erase board where I am. Mrs. Levi reads us one of the words we have been practicing and we all have to write it 5 times (in the four corners and middle of the board) as quickly as we can on our boards. The kids are working to beat me in how quickly they can write the word, my disadvantage being that I have to use the giant board! If any of the kids finishes writing before I do the kids' team gets the point. We keep score on the board and this gets pretty exciting! For our first attempt at the game the kids beat me 7 to 5.