Catching up from the last 2 weeks-- comparing numbers, place value, expanded form, science buddies, past vs. present, Dowser Dan and link party!

Last week, my class won their first link party. We have link parties when the link touches the floor. Mrs. Skalaban has quite some more links to go... My homeroom class voted for a “toy party” so we had our toy party. We haven’t voted on our next party yet.

I have slowly started setting out VLA centers. I feel like I am constantly prepping centers for class so if anyone has any free time, any help is appreciated. It would save me a lot of time if I could get someone to help me laminate and cut.

Sorry in advance for all the paper that’s been going home in their daily folders. I’m not a worksheet type of teacher, but we’ve been doing a lot of worksheets on comparing numbers. We also have been doing more bilingual buddies in math too.

When comparing numbers, I teach the kids that the alligator always wants to eat the big, juicy number. 

We have been doing a lot of place value this past month. Place value is so important because it teaches the kids that a number is not just a symbol or number but there is value behind that number. To save time, we draw a line (stick) to represent 10 and dots to represent ones.

New fun math centers!

We had our monthly science buddies on Thursday. Ask your child what they did with candy on this day. It's so cute to see how excited both first graders and fifth graders get excited to see their science buddies.

Last week, Dowser Dan came and helped us learned about the water cycle through songs, acting and posters. 

In Mrs. Skalaban’s, the kids finally finished up their unit on bats and wrote bat fats. 

We did our monthly Vietnamese writing on Friday. These get hung up on class for a little while and at the end of the year, it gets added to their end-of-the-year first grade books.

In SS, we learned about past, present, and future! We drew a picture of us from the past (baby), present (right now) and in the future (when they’re all old and wrinkly!)

 We received our class pet for the next two weeks. This time, they’re hissing cockroaches!!!

Mrs. Cardosa, our school counselor, came in and did a lesson on tattling. She taught when it is okay to tattle and when it’s a small problem that you can solve. She used the terms “tattling” and “reporting.”

Fact Family, Vietnamese Monsters and Soaring Skyward

 Every morning before we actually get into our math unit, we do “number of the day.” This works on different math strategies such as:

What two numbers can you add to make the number of the day?

What is 10 less? What is 10 more?

What number comes before? What number comes after?

How do you write it in word form?

What is the expanded form?

How can you represent it in base ten form? What does it look like with base ten blocks?

Thursday was number 37 and this is what our poster looked like. Each week, a student will have the duty of leading this and they get to pick a friend to help them in front of the class.

We did “bilingual buddies” for the first time this week. This is where each pair shares one piece of paper, each partner has their own colored pencil that represents their part of the work and the two friends work together to complete an assignment. I tell the kids if I see too much of one color on the paper, that means that friend is being too bossy. (Which the kids start to giggle for some reason...) For the most part, they did really well working together and not arguing. We did a fact family worksheet and they kids are really catching on math facts and fact families. Next week we will be comparing numbers.

We made monsters and worked on the phrase “I am a boy” or “I am a girl.” They got to create their monster and worked on the word boy and girl in Vietnamese. These will be our official sight words soon.

We worked on 6 new sight words. We will have our sound check this upcoming Friday.

 Soaring Skyward was a fun-filled day. The kids were pretty exhausted by 1:00 so I’m sure they went to bed early after getting home on Friday because I sure did. It was a jam packed day! Check out our memories we shared on Soaring Skyward day!

Hello October and Breezy Weather!

This week was CRAZZZZY. I feel like even almost 2 months within school, our schedule is still not settled because there’s always something new that pops up that we have to do. We started FIT (flexible instruction time) with the whole first grade last week. FIT is the first 30 minutes of school. What is FIT you ask? FIT the time the whole first grade disburses all at the same time to another first grade teacher’s class and gets ELA or math intervention. We group the kids by academic ability level so they are in the same class with other kids around their level. We do this Tuesday-Friday. Monday is used for a SEL lesson in the classroom which stands for social emotional learning. FIT happens from grades 1-5.

In math this week, we worked on subtraction numbers under 20. We also did word problems.

Frannie had 20 apples. She ate 6 apples. How many apples does Frannie have left? 

Lynn had 18 balls. She lost 14 balls. How many balls did she have left?

During Social Studies, we learned about Christopher Columbus. Ask your child what they learned about his voyage! We are still in the process of completing our Columbus packet.

 Also in Social Studies this week, we talked about the Presidential election. AISD students were asked to vote for a candidate that they want to be president. I kind of thought it was silly to make the kids vote for someone because they’re so young and they truly don’t understand the whole concept but 60 percent of both classes voted for Hilary Clinton. Click on the link below to watch what we watched in class to learn more about the candidates!

 Hilary Clinton

Donald Trump

Kid Friendly Election Video

We talked about how candidates have to go out and campaign to try to convince people to vote for them so we did a fun activity campaigning for ourselves with our own poster.

In VLA, we completed our unit of colors. We studied these words for 2 weeks and took our sound check yesterday. We will have a set of 6 new words starting Tuesday.

 The class received our second class pet on Wednesday. He’s a little guinea pig named Aristotle. The kids love him. To try to convince them to work quietly, I told them he only comes out to play when the room is quiet and it has somewhat worked. haha. We will have him for another week until he returns and we get a new pet.

 In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, the kids wrote spider facts in science. They are hanging on the wall in the back of the room by the bathrooms. Ask your child to share some interesting facts they learned.

Please sign up for eagle fest! We need help running our class booth!

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090949a9ad2aa2fe3-eagle

This week will be a busy week of conferences. On Thursday, we will be going to AHS to watch a play and then Friday is Soaring Skyward Day. Please feel free to join us on the fun Friday.