Vocabulary Hats

Hello families!  The students and I had a great time sharing and talking about our vocabulary hats on Friday.  Here are some pictures of them.  They were fantastic!  Great job everyone!

Bat Bulletin Board

Here are a few pictures of the bats we all made in first grade last Friday!  They did a great job with them!

First Graders are Batty for Bats!

This week we read some non-fiction books and articles to study bats. The students wrote bat facts.  Look for this piece of writing in their Friday passbacks.  After we read about bats, the boys and girls started asking more questions about bats that were not able to be answered from the non-fiction sources in our classroom.  This prompted a discussion on how to do research and where to find other sources.  Today when we visited the computer lab, we did some internet searches together on the Smartboard to find answers to their new questions.  We found some great photographs and information. We were able to find most of the answers to their questions.  For example, fruit bats eat mostly bananas and mangos and bats can be as small as your hand or some have wing spans of up to six feet. 

Back in room 4, the class made their own bats out of construction paper by tracing their foot for the body and their hands for the wings.  We will be adding them to a bat mural outside our classroom.  The bats in the mural will be sleeping during the day and hanging upside down of course!  We now know that some bats sleep under bridges, in trees, caves, and in old buildings. The students enjoyed making, tree branches, bridges, and spooky clouds for the mural.  We were amazed by the fact that some bats can fly 60 miles per hour and can eat 1,000 mosquitoes in one hour!
Next week we will be reading Stellaluna by Jannell Cannon, a fictional story about a fruit bat who falls out of a tree and lands in a bird nest.  Have a bat-tastic weekend!
Mrs. McAuliffe

Coin Rhyme

This is a little rhyme that we say during our daily calendar activities in first grade to help remember the names of the coins and their values.  Today was the 25th day of school and the students were so excited to hear the quarter part of the rhyme for the first time.  Ask you child to do the hand motions:

Penny penny easily spent,
Copper, brown, and worth one cent.
Nickel nickel thick and fat,
You're worth five cents,
I know that!
Dime dime, little and thin,
I remember you're worth ten!
Quarter quarter BIG and BOLD,
You're worth twenty-five cents
I am told!

Try having your child count coin amounts at home.  Start with combinations of like coins and then mixed coin combinations.  For a challenge give them an amount and have them try to show it to you using the fewest amount of coins possible or try having them making change.  Have a great long weekend!
Mrs. McAuliffe

Science Notebooks

The students in first grade are working in Science Notebooks as an extension of our existing Science kit curriculum.  During each investigation students are involved in some form of data collection.  Data collection can be a graphic organizer, a drawing, a chart or table, a graph, or observation notes, etc.  For the lesson on sifting, the data collection was a sample of three types of river rock they separated using screens. 
On the day following the lesson, students re-visit their data sheet and draw conclusions about the experiment in writing.

Here is a picture of one of our binders open to a data collection page with the writing on the opposite page:

The students discussed what they noticed about the samples.  One student noticed that the glue made the sand turn hard into a rock.  This led us in a discussion on sedimentary rock formations.  Students used magnifying glasses to look more closely at the samples.  One student made the comment  "But Mrs. McAuliffe... I don't see anything... just smaller rocks."  Exactly!!!  I couldn't have said it better myself.  This was the point of our lesson.  Sand and gravel are smaller versions of the pebbles in our sample because they all came from the same river bed and broke up over time.  Don't you just love first graders???  They "rock"!