Telling Time, Robotics, and Donut Party!

This week, we started our unit on telling time in math. We have been focusing on telling time to the hour and half hour. Please reinforce these skills at home. It gets tricky when it’s to the half hour. We talked about how the hour hand should be halfway to the next hour.  This upcoming week, we will be working more on half hour and eventually we will get into quarter hour and even time to 5 minutes.

We started robotics this week during our computer lab time. The kids were really excited. What kid wouldn’t like to play with Legos and get it to spin by a motor?! The class learned how to assemble the pieces together and then by using the computer with some engineering to control the movement of the motor.

The kids did some cool dragon paintings in art class. I really wanted to hang them up in the classroom but the problem that each teacher faces is the problem of no wall space!! Suzanne and I are really big on hanging up the work of our children. When you walk into our classrooms, you will notice there are student generated work on each wall and every corner of the classroom.

My homeroom class finally earned their donut party this week. Every time I see everyone in the class is doing the right thing and working hard, I will add a link to our class link. When it touches the ground, we earn a party in which the class gets to pick. This past one they voted on a donut party. We’ve had popcorn party and root beer float party in the past. As you can see, Mrs. Skalaban’s class is really close to earning their class party. They are working towards a root beer float party.

 Yuuum! Donuts full of sugar!!!

REMINDER:

Please pack a sack lunch for your child this Wednesday (4-13-16) for our last field trip for the year. It needs to be disposable so we can throw it away after lunch. I’ve been checking the weather and it says it’s supposed to rain. We are crossing our fingers it won’t rain because a lot of the field will be outdoors! Also, have your child wear their orange tie-dye shirt and comfy walking shoes!

April Fools!

Hi everyone! Crazy to think we have entered April and there are only 2 months of the school year left. I will be sending home a field trip permission slip this upcoming Monday in the kids’ daily folders. Please have it returned by Friday.  This will be our last field trip of the year. First grade is so lucky we get to go on so many field trips throughout the year.

If you would like to purchase the official first T-shirt for the Vietnamese Dual Language Program, here it what it looks like! It is $10. Your child can wear their Summitt shirt or this shirt every Friday.

For the rest of the year, we will be studying different units over animals. This week, we specifically studied animals and their body coverings.

 We did our monthly Vietnamese writing to add to our end of the year first grade books that Mrs. Skalaban and I have been working on with the kids all year long. When the students receive the books at the end of the year, you will see the tremendous progress of the kids’ writing from August to May. Look at how cute my girls’ drawings are!

“My rabbit’s/bunny’s name is __________. It likes to eat _________. It likes to ___________.”

In math, we finished up our unit of measurement. We will move on to time this week. We worked on capacity, weight, and measuring with rulers/paper clips/snapcubes all within the last three weeks. This past week, we worked on word problems comparing the weight of the students in class and finding the difference. I brought in a scale so we worked with the actual weight of the students. Since the scale I brought in from home determines the weight of a person to the decimal, I taught the kids how to determine and round the number to the whole number. For example, if someone weighed 55.8, we would round the number to 56 pounds. I think they’re ready for the STAAR test now. Wink wink. That is definitely not a first grade expectation. The kids really caught on fast.

Our new sight words this week is a little harder. Instead of working on consonant blends in the beginning of the word, we worked on vowel-consonant blends at the end of the word. We will take our sound check this upcoming Friday. We usually practice the words for 2 weeks before I give them the sound check.