Pumpkin Patch!

It was a beautiful day for us to go to the pumpkin patch. The clouds burned off while we were there making for a warm afternoon visit. The students were SO excited for each part of the field trip. They were excited about baby chicks, other animals, the hayride, picking the perfect pumpkin, seeing carved pumpkins, running around through the "night walk" and the snack Mr. Hentze so kindly gave us. Thank you to the parents who helped me out! I also should say that I was so proud of ALL the students. They had wonderful manners, followed directions well and had smiles on their faces all day! Enjoy these adorable pictures! :)

All About Trees!

Hello students and parents! I apologize again for a delay in posting. Some of you know I was very sick this week and I am finally feeling like I have some energy! Hopefully today marks the start of being "back in a routine" with a weekly post made by Friday each week.

For the past 3 weeks we have been studying trees! The students have had so much fun during this thematic unit.

This unit included:
- Several books on trees
- "Adopting" a class tree (right outside our window!)
- Bean in a cup experiment (To learn about roots.)
- Building a tree by assembling the parts in our tree journals
- Celery experiment to see how sap moves through the trunk to branches and leaves
- A search for items that come from trees
- Leaf rubbings
- Bark rubbings
- Tree observations
- Finger painting the seasons of a tree
- Fall watercolor leaf art

Take a look at some pictures of our work and us observing our tree!

I hope you have already heard a lot about our tree unit! Ask your students to share more! You can go on nature walks at home to see the beautiful fall leaves, look at different kinds of trees, collect leaves and so much more.

Next week it's off to the pumpkin patch! I look forward to sharing pictures from our trip with you next Friday. We will also begin a 3-week unit on being healthy. Be on the look out for ways you can help support your child as we learn how to eat right, exercise and prevent the spread of germs! (We don't all need this cold I have!) Have a wonderful weekend!

Daily 5 (Or Daily 3) in Room 4!

Hello Students and Families!

For those of you who check the blog regularly, I'm sorry for the later than normal post! I have been wanting to create a video highlighting Daily 3 in our room. It just took a few extra hours than I normally spend on a post, so here it FINALLY is!

Enjoy seeing your students in action and hearing what they have to say about Daily 3! Learn a little more about this program we use daily. Ask your student to share more!

This Thursday night is Curriculum Night! It starts at 5:30. I hope to see all of you then. Tomorrow morning is Dads and Donuts and Wednesday is Moms and Muffins. I hope to see you then as well!

Kevin Henkes Author Study

Hello! For the past 3 weeks we have been working hard and having fun as we studied Kevin Henkes. The students did a fabulous job. Below we will take you through our journey.

First, we learned about Kevin Henkes by reading a bio and watching a video about him on his website. We made this list of things we learned and posted some pictures of him in our room.

As we read books we filled out this chart. Students were getting very good at identifying the main character, setting, problem and solution in each story.

Here are all the books we read by Kevin Henkes. (We didn't fill out the chart on a few of them.)

For Chrysanthemum we did a Name Art activity.

(By Bryonna)

For Sheila Rae The Brave we drew a map of the crazy route she took from school to home.

(By Calley)

For Lily's Purple Plastic Purse we wrote about our prized Possessions.

For Jessica we drew pictures leaving "empty spots" for our imaginary friends like Kevin Henkes did.

(By Rebecca)

Some others:

For Wemberly Worried we wrote about our worries we shouldn't worry about.

(By Aiden)

For Julius The Baby Of The World we did a scrapbook page about Lily. (This was our third book we read with Lily in it.)

(By Nolan)

To wrap up the unit we worked hard to illustrate a scene from our favorite Kevin Henkes book and wrote why it was our favorite book. (They are all hanging in the hall now and they will be up for Curriculum Night on October 3rd for everyone to see!)

(By Hailey)

Look how hard they worked on their final projects:

We looked back at the books for inspiration!

We worked hard on our writing!

We are even working on backing our own work.

We had a wonderful time with this unit! Ask you child was his/her favorite book(s) were and why! There are many other wonderful books by Kevin Henkes we didn't have time to get to. Enjoy this wonderful author's work!

We're Busy Learners!

It's been a busy week for us! We continue to learn new routines and practice and practice and practice already learned routines. They are doing so well! I'm excited about all the blog permission slips I'm getting back! I am waiting for a few more and then will be able to take more pictures during our learning. Here are some pictures to highlight what we've focused on this week.

We added our pictures and names to our word wall. This room is becoming more and more ours!

On Monday we learned our first piece of Daily 5 (Or what we call Daily 3).  This part is Read To Self. Students made this I-Chart below. The I stands for Independent. We are learning to become independent readers.

Each day we practice Read To Self 2 times. We are working on building our stamina. Each time we start I set a timer and we see how long we can ALL be reading. (It's very hard to get 23 first graders all on task at the same time!) We measure our stamina on this staminometer:

Monday we made it to 15 seconds!

Tuesday we made it to 45 seconds! (We stayed at 45 seconds on Wednesday.)

Thursday we made it all the way to 2 Minutes!!!!

We will keep up the hard work! When we get to 3 minutes we get to choose our own spots to sit and read! When we get to 10 minutes Mrs. Bowers gets to start meeting with students one-on-one!

We learned about our second part of Daily 3 on Tuesday, Work on Writing. The students created this I-Chart below:

They are doing a wonderful job at Work On Writing so far. We learned one strategy this week. "Stretch out unkown words." We will learn another strategy next week. (Pictures of those to come next week!)

Last week, this week and next week we are working on an author study unit about Kevin Henkes. The students have listened to several books written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes. They are getting really good at identifying the setting, main characters, problem and solution. With each book we have done an activity. Below are a couple of the activities. A full post on our author study will come at the conclusion!

Name Art after reading Chrysanthemum.

Drawing us and our imaginary friends after reading Jessica.

Next week we will work even harder each day on reading, continue building read to self stamina, work on writing, finish our Kevin Henkes unit and of course, have fun while we learn! Enjoy your first 3-day weekend of the year!

Our First Day!

Whew! We were busy today in room 4. Today was filled with so many routines, morning work, 3 read-alouds, 3 recesses, lunch, music, writing, choice time, friendship salad for snack, a class web exercise and a school tour. Your children were troopers! I was amazed at how well they did. The first day is tough, but so are the next two.

A few fun/silly facts:
- First student to ask about recess: 8:30
- First student to ask about lunch: 9:00
- First student to ask about going home: 10:30

*The reason these make me giggle is because I expect them to ask. Your sweet children just came off of summer break and before that, they were only in school for half a day. This transition to a longer day is so difficult, but it will get better each day. (I was hungry, too!)

Here are my favorite parts of our day:
- ALL students worked hard and had smiles on their faces!
- I learned that several kids also like chocolate chip cookies like me! :)
- I heard about their favorite summer activities.
- How excited the students were about our Friendship Salad!
- Starting to learn more about each student.

Here are what the students said when I asked them, "What was your favorite part of your first day of first grade?"

“Having lunch.”

“Having friends.”

“My favorite thing was recess.”

“My favorite part was having lunch.”

“My favorite thing was recess.”

“I liked playing toys.”

“Playing.”

“The whole thing.”

“I liked music class.”

“I liked recess.”

“Lunch.”

“Recess.”

“Snack.”

“Snack.”

“My favorite part of the day is when we were playing on the purple play structure.”

“Choice.”

“My favorite thing was recess.’

“I liked snack and lunch.”

Thank you parents for sharing your children with me. We are going to have a fantastic year!