Have a Wonderful Christmas Break!

It’s finally Christmas break which means we have 2 weeks off.  I hope everyone has a restful and fun winter break. Classes will resume back on January 5, 2015.

Thank you all for my wonderful birthday and Christmas gifts. You guys sure know how to make a teacher feel so special and so spoiled! I loved all my gifts! I received so many gifts that it took me 4 days to carry them all home.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!

So we had a tarantula spider for two weeks in the classroom. Here is a picture of the little fellow. We forgot to name it as a class. I believe we will be getting an aquatic frog when we return back from the break.

In science, we have been studying the unit of weather. The students finished their books, we practiced reading it as a class and I sent it home this week. When we come back, we will be learning about the moon phases.

This week was a really busy week. With only 4 days, we got a lot of things accomplished. We used our creativity and made reindeer bags. Inside the reindeer bags are supposed to be an ornament they made for their family in Mrs. Skalaban’s class. Hopefully your child gave you their gift!

We received a new girl on Wednesday and the kids are doing a good job making her feel welcomed. We now have 15 boys and 5 girls.

On Thursday, we had such a fun day. From a school wide Christmas Caroling in the cafeteria to Santa visiting our classroom…to our afternoon Christmas party! During the Christmas party, we had Christmas Bingo, making reindeer candy canes, and building a snowman on butcher paper. We even had our book exchange. For the book exchange, I ordered the kids books from the Scholastic book order. We wrapped it and decorated it and then during the party, we sat in a boy circle and a girl circle. We passed the book around and the book we had in our hand last was the book we get to keep as our present from our classmate.

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped me organize the party!

Unite for Literacy!

Mrs. Neill, our awesome campus technician facilitator, informed teachers about a website the students can access to at home. There are about 100 free books and they can be read in many languages, including Vietnamese!!! The text remains English, but it can read the book to your student in another language.

Check it out! It’s pretty cool!

Unite for Literacy

It's beginning to look and feel a lot like Christmas...

And so the countdown until Christmas break begins! Students are ready for the break and teachers too!

Last week, I wanted to review over our money unit we did weeks ago. I’m so happy to see how students are getting more comfortable and getting excited to count money. This is a very hard concept for a lot of first graders. If you have time at home, pull out some coins and practice with your child. Ask them what “the hair trick” is!

This week in class, we did lots of things for our money unit. We used dry erase boards for warm-ups, did partner work counting money, played with coins, and lots of games!

Every year, first grade does Holidays Around the World. Each first grade teacher teaches a holiday celebrated in a different country and the kids get to travel and get their passport stamped. These passports were placed in their daily folders last Friday. Ask your child what they learned! They were able to tell me lots of new things about different holidays after returning back to class. 

I like to decorate our door every month for the kids to enjoy. Here’s a little secret though…I was feeling a little lazy so I flipped the turkey we had for November over and made a reindeer.  Shhhh. The kids did not know it was the same brown paper used for the turkey for the month before.

 We’ve been getting some good  journal writing in their homework lately. We encourage the kids to write 4 or more sentences with exciting details. I like to tell my students each sentence needs to have 5 or more words. Suzanne and I enjoyed reading the stories from last week. Some of them were hilarious. We were sitting there laughing as we were grading homework. Suzanne grades the ELA portion of the homework and I grade the math portion. The kids will be excited to find out that we will not have homework next week. We figured we would give them a break. We also told the kids that for every 5 canned foods they bring this week, it will be a free homework pass for one day. 5^th grade is doing a can drive and collecting all the cans we can get.

Did you know Texas is the 5^th state in the country for the most homeless people?

I put up our class Christmas tree last week. Isn’t it cute?! I had a pink one last year but I figured when we have 30 boys and just 9 girls this year, the blue tree might be more fun. The tree is very pretty when we do our work and we leave the lights off. The tree looks kind of empty because some ornaments were broken when the tree got accidentally tipped over  :(

Silly Quote of the Week:

A: “Why don’t you want to eat that? Is it because it has too many calories or something?” (talking about dry cereal)

Dino Lingo

This year, I received a Vietnamese learning program for the kids called Dino Lingo. We have watched two chapters and the kids really enjoy it. As we watch, we read along what the words say. This really helps build vocabulary. The great thing is that you are able to find video clips of Dino Lingo on YouTube. Below is a clip of what we watched in class.

For fun, we also watched this video clip below. My homeroom class loved it so much, they wanted to take time away from their recess just to watch this twice! A few friends asked me to give me the name of the video so they could watch at home so I decided to post it on our class blog.