Animal Research

It's amazing that we are in the third trimester of our school year already but that means some very exciting things! One of my favorite things all year is our third trimester nonfiction and research unit! We have been learning lots about informational nonfiction and using text features to help us get information when we read this genre. We have also been learning about doing research!

We started our unit with a short, whole group research project on sea turtles. The class learned about using the kid-safe search engines "Kiddle" and "Kidrex," which you will find links to on the right sidebar of this blog. They learned about searching by key word and looking for specific information. After practicing as a group students paired off to research specific wild animals and they created very cool reports! Below are photos of them creating their reports and sharing them with other students in our class (they shared with someone who had researched a different animal). These went home earlier this week so hopefully you have gotten to see them!

We are now moving into a larger research project where we are all going to immerse ourselves in research about sharks!

PBIS celebration

We finished filling our champ band jar once again and today the class chose to draw on giant paper with their table mates as a celebration!

Artist in Residence

During the month of February UMS had a visiting artist in residence! Barbara from No Strings Attached Marionette company in Randolph came to school and made puppets with students in every class. The residency began with a performance for the school and was followed by students making puppets then doing their own performance using them. The puppets went home at conferences or if your family missed our conference days they will be going home today!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

This week our class has been doing lots of reading about MLK  and yesterday we shared a project we had done at our monthly schoolwide meeting. The kids all made a flap book with two different colored hands on the front (they chose out of all different skin colored papers) and inside they wrote "I have a dream..." about one way they would like the world to be better. Some of their dreams were, "I have a dream that everyone would be kind," "...that everyone would work together," "and
"...that no one would fight with their fists" (referring to MLK fighting with words). Everyone in our class chose to share their dream in front of the school and they did such a wonderful job! Here are some photos!

December celebrations

Thursday and Friday before December break we did lots of celebrating! Students made ornaments with their photo on them, we had a party, and we read a lot of books about different holidays. One of the annual favorites is pictured here. It's a book called How Santa Got His Job and it's a very cute story speculating about what Santa did before he became Santa and how all of his former jobs led him to the one he has today! I hope that everyone had a wonderful break!

Grinch Day

Today first grade classes had Grinch Day at school! We wore green and all of our activities today had a Grinch theme. We did a word study activity coming up with adjectives to describe the Grinch then we wrote how we would make the Grinch smile and made a Grinch face to go with it. We read the book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and wrote a reading response about the message Dr. Seuss was trying to convey in the book. During math we did Grinch word problem solving, a Grinch color by number 100 grid, and a Grinch themed dice game. Throughout the day our class worked toward earning a viewing of the old school Grinch cartoon movie and we watched it at the very end of the day! Today was a very fun day in first grade!