Fun Fridays!

We love Fun Fridays in Room 7! Why do we call it Fun Friday? We read scholastic news, play math games, have some free writing time, and even some extra time to have the occasional dance party! This group continues to make me smile, here are a few pictures of our Fun Fridays! Have a great weekend!

Busy Past Two Weeks!

Hello Room 7 Families!
I have loved getting to know all of your children! It has been an awesome first two weeks together and I am so excited for what is to come working with your children as I fill in for Mrs. Kelly!

Here are a few updates regarding curriculum.

Reader's Workshop: I am so impressed by the reading that is happening! We are awesome readers! We have begun a new unit that focuses on Literary Nonfiction. These books provide true information but are also written like a story.

Writer's Workshop: We have begun a new unit on opinion writing. We are learning how to give opinions, provide reasons for our opinion, and then put it in writing using sentence starters to organize our opinion.

Math: We are super busy in math these past two weeks! We are working on using greater than and less than symbols to make a number story true. We are continuing our number scrolls, measuring with cubes, and working with place value as well.

Social Studies: We have jumped right into a new unit about Maps. We have been exploring different kinds of maps, what important details maps include, and how they help us in our everyday lives.

Thank you all for your support, patience, and flexibility. Mrs. Kelly and baby Henrik are doing wonderful and I am looking forward to visiting them next week!

Sing along and Party

This week we had our annual UMS holiday sing along where the whole school gets together and we sing songs about the different December holidays that the kids have been practicing in music class. The teachers always end by singing/dancing to Jingle Bell Rock up front. This was all recorded and posted on Facbook live via the UMS Facebook page if you would like to see it!

Thursday we had our classroom party where families joined us for some food and a craft at the end of the day. We had lots and lots of family members join us! Thank you to everyone who came! Have a wonderful week off next week!

Hanukkah and Las Posadas

For the last two weeks our class has been learning about different December holidays celebrated by people we know! We first learned about what Hanukkah is, read some good books, ate latkes, looked at a Menorah and made our own hand print version, and played Dreidel. 

Next we learned about Las Posadas, which is a Mexican holiday celebrated the week before Christmas. In the spring we study Mexico during our social studies time so we have already been learning about some Mexican Holidays. Around Halloween time we learned about the Day of the Dead and this month we learned about Las Posadas. We read some books, looked at a poinsettia and made a related craft, and watched a video about the holiday made by a partner class in Mexico! There is a first grade class in Monterrey, Mexico that my class always partners with during our unit on Mexico and we got to meet them a little bit early this year through the video they sent to us! When we study Mexico we will email and Skype with them to learn about each other.

This week we learned some about Christmas! Have a wonderful school break and a happy holiday!

Check Out Our Solids and Liquids Padlet

We wrapped up our unit on solids and liquids today and created this Padlet to showcase some of our understandings!

Oobleck

First graders have been learning about solids, liquids, and gases during our science time over the past month and a half. We are starting to wrap up our unit now and today we made our own Oobleck! We read the book Bartholomew and the Obleck and then created our own version of Oobleck to experiment with a liquid that seems to have some solid properties. We used this as an additional opportunity to discuss the properties of solids and liquids as well as measuring and how measuring liquids is different than measuring solids (as we have been doing in math). Kids will be bringing their Obleck home today in a little bag!