Gingerbread Houses done!

Aww, your kids are so great!!!!!

Gingerbread Houses!

We did our gingerbread houses today! Thank you so much for sending in items for them!

We started with a PLAN. Of course, any well-built house starts with a plan, so students had to make two kinds before starting their houses: a money plan (they got 25 cents to spend) and a design plan.

Here is a table of girls working hard on their gingerbread house plans. For the day before holiday break, our class sure was quiet!




Here is a video (if it works on your computer) of a couple of students telling about the houses after they were done.

Gingerbread Unit underway!

Our Gingerbread Unit is well underway. We started by reading the traditional Gingerbread Man and acted it out. Students wrote about the beginning, middle, and end of the story to summarize it (see below.) (By the way, some of those are coming home unfinished. Rather than having a lot of unfinished work left in the classroom at this time of year, I prefer to send it home, and students can finish it there.) We then read The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and compared phrases from the stories. Next we will be doing some gingerbread art, math, and more reading of various versions of gingerbread stories: The Gingerbread Girl, The Gingerbread Cowboy, The Gingerbread Pirates, and Gingerbread Friends. We have also already started on our own versions of a gingerbread story. They are so cute! We have Gingerbread Mermaids, Santas, Reindeer, Spiderman, Fish, etc!

Lately

Here is a few students in our class having lunch in our room on the day of the Holiday Program. Thank you for coming!! Weren't they great?!


Mr. Durham, another teacher at Hyalite, brough in "Tik," his bearded lizard to share with our class. It was great to use Tik in our discussion of how living things have different body parts that help them survive in their habitats.

Holiday Items Needed

Hi! I hope your December is going more slowly than mine! I can't believe it's already time for the Holiday Program! Remember, Tuesday's performances (10:00 and 1:15) are identical, so I would love to see you at whichever works for you!

Our class is in need of some items for our gingerbread unit and for our holiday party. I will post the sign-up sheets on my whiteboard so you could sign up on Tuesday when you're here, or feel free to stop in when you're picking your child up from school too. If you aren't able to come but want to donate, just leave a comment here or send me an email at gia.laforge@bsd7.org . Thank you for your help!

Culture and Diversity Project

If you haven't had a chance to return the paper that tells how and when your family got to the United States, please send it in right away! I would like every student to feel included as we study geography and culture through a look at our backgrounds. Thank you!

Happy Thanksgiving!

This week was some major indoor recess! Please drive safely if you are traveling and have a very happy Thanksgiving!!!

Ice Cream Day

A couple of weeks ago, our class had a whole day filled with ice cream stories and activities. We read a story called Miss Jill's Ice Cream shop and acted it out. Then we read a book about how ice cream is made, cut it apart, and put the pages back in order for sequencing. We also read the directions for how to make ice cream and made it! They were thrilled!
Here is one student after eating her ice cream.


These two loved the ice cream so much that they copied the recipe.

This is how students planned how to purchase their sundaes.

We had so much fun!

Parent Teacher Conferences

Wow, I can't believe it is already report card time! I am truly looking forward to talking to all of you! See you this week!

Pumpkin Week

Here is a picture of a members of our class holding their pumpkins after we lined them up from biggest to smallest. Our biggest pumpkin weighed 15.5 pounds and our smallest weighed 2.5 pounds. We had soooooo much fun!!! We will still be doing more pumpkin activities this week as we finish up our living organisms unit and study a little more in depth about seeds. Thank you for your support!!

On Friday, all of first grade will be doing a whole day about ice cream that comes from the story in our anthology, "Miss Jill's Ice Cream Shop." We will be be sequencing a recipe, making ice cream, creating mini-books, retelling the story by acting it out, and using play money to plan for and buy our ice cream toppings. I could use a couple of volunteers this Friday afternoon after lunch to help with the math portion. Please email me or call me if you are available. I only need two or three volunteers, so please let me know ahead of time. The ice cream unit is a good introduction for a gingerbread unit we do in December.

Your kids are awesome!!!

Harvest Week

This week will be so fun as we do a lot of harvest activities! We will do pumpkin math all week: measuring, weighing, counting, describing, and writing about our pumpkins. We will have a harvest party on Friday afternoon at 1:30. Thank you for volunteering to donate items.

These are pictures from a while ago, but these are the last of our brown bag activities. They waited so patiently to be the last three to go! This week we will start Star of the Week, which is a year-long project where each student gets a week to be the star and does a show and share on Friday. We learn to write letters by writing letters to each star student!




Here is a picture of two students doing some plant observations.

Reminder

Remember, there is no school this Thursday and Friday, Oct. 21-22. Have a great weekend!

It was great to see so many of you at Back to School Night last week, both homeroom families and Walk to Read families!!! I am enjoying this year so much.

In reading, we are starting to talk about story structure this week, including characters, setting, and problem/solution. We will also begin to work on retelling stories. You can help by asking your children questions about the books they read like, "Who are the characters? What is the setting? What is the problem and how is it solved?"

Writing continues both in homeroom and in Walk to Read. All students are learning about complete sentences, topics, punctuation, and capital letters. Be a stickler about capital letters with your child! First graders should usually be able to determine when to use capital letters at this point.

In math, we learned how to tell time to the hour last week on an analog clock. This week, we are beginning to exchange pennies for nickels and count pennies and nickels together. This can be challenging for many students at first. If your child does not quite understand at first, keep practicing and make it fun. One of you could be the banker and the other can be the customer as you make the exchanging. It helps many students to use real coins as well as draw the coins out on paper as they start to count and exchange money. To count money, your child MUST know how to count by 10's, 5's, and 1's. (Later, we will also use counting by 2's for temperature.)

In science, we will continue learning about living organisms. We have already talked about plant parts and functions, life cycles, and survival needs. Now we will move toward animal classification, food chains, and animal/plant interdependence. Check out some of the websites on our school's library homepage for great games.

We also started more social studies. Social studies standards changed this year, and we have all new materials. There is a strong history focus, and we began by talking about a timeline (an average lifetime) all the way back to Columbus. We will continue discussing perspective, cultures, and history as we continue through People Who Made the Americas.

Of course call me or email me with any questions! Oh, and please remember to send a note or email if your child will be doing something different after school than usual. Have a great week!

This Week

I. love. my. class. Seriously. This is such a sweet group of kids, and I am so impressed with their academic skills already. Here is a few things we did this week.


Here is one group using pattern blocks during math to make patterns and designs. We were exploring our math manipulatives.

Here is one student playing with our math dominoes during FREE TIME. When the class is being exceptionally amazing, I put up letters on the board to spell FREE TIME. When they get all of the letters, we have free time, and they earned it already! Some students played legos, others played with dolls or colored, and others played with hot wheels cars. (If you are ever going to give any good free time toys to the thrift store, consider donating them to our classroom instead.)

Two students making shapes on the geoboards.

The base 10 blocks are a definite favorite.

More geoboards.
Another student revealing her About Me Bag.

We also planted seeds this week as well as made terrariums. Our first unit in science is all about living organisms: life cycles, survival needs, classification, etc. This unit is a lot of fun. Please plan to come to our room to see more on October 7.

Our Walk to Read program is ready for volunteers. Some have already started and more will be starting next week, but if you are available to volunteer, please contact me. We would LOVE to have you read with kids. Also, if you are available in the next few weeks for some simple (although boring) administrative tasks in the next couple weeks, let me know. I have quite a few things that need to be filed, cut out, torn out, or stapled. We will also be hoping to have a few chaperones for our Sept. 28 trip to the Bozeman Ponds. Thank you!!!

Your kids are amazing!! Thank you for the privilege of working with them.

Walk to Read Homework Explanations

Hi! I am your child's Walk to Read teacher. Thank you so much for muddling through the first week of homework and procedures! I waited to send out a welcome letter because I knew there would be some switching around after the first week, so thank you for hanging in there with me!

I mentioned making bags for "tricky words" (also known ask high-frequency or sight words.) Here is what I mean by making two bags. This is an easy way to keep track of your word cards all year and even add more that you find as your child reads to you. The goal is for your child to know over 100 of these tricky words by the end of first grade, but I think this group will know more like 200!! These are words that cannot be sounded out (like "the") and must be memorized. They make up over 60% of written text in English, so you can see the importance of practicing nightly!!! Keep practice short: 5 minutes or less. The other 15 minutes of reading homework should be your child reading to you or you reading to your child or both.

When I send short books home like this one, please have your child read it THREE times out loud to you. If it is difficult, try alternating pages with him or her: you read one, your child reads one, etc. Most of these books we will have already read in class, so they should be fairly easy. I ask that your child reads them three times because rereading is the best way to build fluency (reading like you talk), and that is a major focus in our group!

Remember, the reading bags need to come back EVERY day with reading record filled out with what your child read the night before. Please always return the paper books as these come from my own classroom. Some nights I will not send books home. Please read a book at home with your child and still write it down on the reading record.

Thank you for all of your hard work. I look forward to all of the growth we will get to see this year!!!

Please contact me with any questions or concerns! I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Fall Festival

I hope you had as much fun as I did at the Fall Festival this year! It was so good to see so many of you there! We had a wonderful turnout. The weather was perfect! This is my absolute favorite dunk tank picture. Mr. Brian is our room's custodian, and he was graciously dunked many times. It never stopped being funny!


My nieces playing games. They are second graders this year at Hyalite.


She is ready to start throwing and dunking!!


Mrs. Persons and Mrs. O'Shea