Grass Seed Day!

If you didn't know, we live in the Grass Seed Capital of the world. Last Thursday we had the privilege of local grass seed farmer Nick Bowers from Tydan Farms visiting our first grade classrooms. The students enjoyed a presentation where they learned how grass effects their lives. We learned that Farmer Nick makes grass, cows eat grass, cows make milk, which makes cheese, ice cream and so much more! He did a fabulous job showing our young students why grass is important and it connects to them.

After that we rotated through three areas. In one room we planted grass seed. In another we read a story about a boy who found out where each vegetable in his soup was grown and enjoyed a cheese stick snack. This story, Who Grew My Soup by Tom Darbyshire was given to us through Oregon's AITC, Ag In The Classroom. Outside we got to look at 2 huge combines and a disc. The students loved seeing the farm equipment! Take a look at some pictures below from our day!

Local news station, KEZI 9 came to watch and aired this clip from our day. Click below to see the movie:

Students Learn About Grass Farming

Here is what our grass looks like just 1 week later! Our hair is getting wild!

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Our Fluffy Visitor

This week we had a special guest visit! It was a very cute, sweet rabbit named Brownie. The students had fun asking questions about bunnies as well as petting, holding and feeding Brownie. Below are some pictures from this special visit.

aARgh! It's what a pirate says!

An important sound we teach in 1st grade is the sound 'ar' makes. To help kids remember this sound we refer to it as the "pirate sound." This year we decided to dedicate a week to a pirate theme to help our students learn and remember this important sound!

We read pirate books at read aloud time, read pirate themed books during reading groups, made pirate hats, made a list of 'ar' words, had a pirate themed PE game, wrote about what we would say, wear and do if we were pirates, went on a treasure hunt for 'ar' words, made a pirate to look like ourselves, illustrated a picture to go with a pirate poem and wrote a pirate story together.

Here are pictures from some of our pirate adventures this past week.

We created a list of many words with the 'ar' sound!

 We made our own lists of our favorite 'ar' words. We also created pirate hats we wore all week!

Then we used our list and our creative minds to create ourselves as pirates. I was impressed with their creativity. One student purposely left an arm off, claiming he was a one-armed pirate!

On Wednesday we answered clues from our treasure map and went out into our school to find our treasure. Below is an example of how the treasure looked throughout the school. Each 1st grade class had a different color of clues/treasure.

Here students are searching for their treasure!

Students returned to show off their clue and treasure!

We added our treasure to our treasure map!

To end our week we wrote a story together using what we had learned about pirates and our 'ar' words we found in our treasure hunt!

Hope you had fun enjoying our pirate adventure! Sorry for not posting in awhile, upon returning from spring break we were so busy with a unit on force and motion that I forgot to take pictures and blog! Hoping to get back to our weekly posts! :)

Elements of Art Part 2

Well... it's the first official day off for spring break and I just realized I forgot to post last week! We had a busy week right before break. Since we last posted the students have worked hard on two other art projects to end our art unit.

First students thought about their favorite outdoor place to create a landscape of. We had learned about background, middle ground and foreground. The students learned about perspective and took everything else they had learned about color, texture and shape to create these beautiful landscapes:

Our final project was crayon art. Students chose crayons in one of the following categories that we had learned about: Primary colors, Secondary colors, Monochromatic colors, Rainbow colors, Warm colors or Cool colors. Look at how amazing these turned out:

Elements Of Art

2 weeks ago I attended a tech conference in Portland. I told the students I would be learning new ways to use my iPad in the classroom. One app I learned about is called 30 Hands. It's a great, easy to use app that allows you to make video presentations with photos, drawings and your voice. I created a tutorial for how to use the 30 Hands app, with the 30 Hands app. Here is that tutorial:

It's a free app and you may want to download it for your child to use at home! 

They created a video presentation using 30 Hands to share about the first part of our unit on the Elements of Art. Here is their video: 

Didn't they do a wonderful job?!

Part 2 of our art unit coming next week!

Classroom Party

We are going to all share our item. We get to do favorite persons we like.

Everybody is going to call on two people. Everybody gets to choose which item they would like to pick. Our class party is so much fun.  

** All of the above work is by students. In our previous post you read, I thought them reflecting back would be a great idea. They did a wonderful job of reflecting. Great ideas were shared such as: Add more pictures. Make our words longer. Make it so all people are in the pictures and on the blog. Then when we got to planning I think the excitement of the topic was too distracting. No worries! We will reflect again and take a look back at some our favorite past posts to do a better job next time! In all fairness, we actually had 5 days of school this week, we were minutes away from a class party and we had spent an hour and a half without electricity today. We heard a squirrel and a transformer collided! :)

Choice Time

Everything below this paragraph was completely designed by students. I used an app called Edutopia on the iPad to take notes for them. I used a software called Reflector to have my ipad mirrored through my computer and projector so students could see how things were going to be, for the most part. When a student raised their hand to suggest an addition to the post, all I said was what do you want to say and where should it go? I was so impressed. I know they will get better each time! I took a screen shot of their plan. That is at the very bottom below then post.

We work hard to try and earn choice time because it is so so much fun.

We get picked by our sticks.

You get to play with your favorite toy. 

We get to color on paper. We get to play with blocks. 

We get to play Lincoln logs and Legos.

We get to play with geoboards.

We get to play dominoes.

We get to play unifix cubes. We get to play with foam blocks.

We get to play with puzzles.

These are the pictures.

We get to play with sentence puzzles.

When we are done with choice our teacher tells us. The teacher tells us to clean up when we're all done. Then we clean up quietly and safely. Then when we're done, we go to the carpet. When we clean then we wait until our teacher says a row.

We have fun playing blocks.

On choice time we can't move to other tables and don't do anything else. You have to stay where you are.

As you can see they worked very hard. I still think they picked the topic of choice time because they thought they would get choice time... Their faces looked sad when I said we we're taking only 2 pictures like they told me for the blog. Next time I suspect more picture additions buy them. :)