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)