Christopher Columbus and Science Buddies

In Social Studies, we discussed about who Christopher Columbus was and why he was so important.

 We learned that Christopher Columbus had 90 men on his voyage and had 3 ships. Santa Maria was the biggest but his favorite was the Nina.

We had our first Science Buddies this week! Science Buddies is when we meet up with a 5^th grade science class and the become the teachers and teach us about science. This time, we made ooblek and the 3 stages of matter. 

The 5^th grade buddies were so sweet and made each child a welcome card along with little gifts. Our first graders really felt loved and can’t wait to go back to learn some more science next month! 

Soaring Skyward, Toy Party, Apples, Mid-Autumn Festival, Compass Rose, Word Problems!

Get ready for a long post. Things have been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to update the blog so this post will be two weeks worth of learning.

In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, the kids wrapped up their 5 senses activity by using apples. They tasted it, looked at it, measured it, smelled it, and even weighed it. They also learned about Johnny Appleseed and did their September writing.

What a busy Friday it was last week. We had Soaring Skyward and Mid-Autumn Festival on the same day. I was at school from 6:45 in the morning until 9:30 at night. In class, we watched videos and read books about different myths of Mid-Autumn. Our next big event will be Lunar New Year. I will be sending home a costume form soon so we can order clothes for our show in February. I need it back as soon as possible because these costumes are coming from Vietnam so we need to place orders so all costumes can be made in time and shipped back to Austin. We will probably start practicing our dance starting in November. I’m still searching around for costume designs and picking out a song for our performance.

 Soaring Skyward was such a busy and hectic day but most of all, it was FUN! Thank you all for sending your kids to school in our tie-dye shirts, tennis shoes and a lunch. We have already started planning for next year’s Soaring Skyward AND Mid-Autumn Festival!

Both classes earned enough links to touch the floor to earn a party. Skalaban’s kids picked a ice cream party and my homeroom picked a toy party. The links on the right is Skalaban’s and the one on the left is my class. Skalaban’s kids actually were a lot behind but caught up and beat my class. In the picture, you can see that my class only needed one more link to earn a party and they were able to do it the next day.

We started word problems this week in math. I love doing word problems because reading the problems works on the kids’ reading skills, builds vocabulary and it brings out the artist in them! Look at how cute these pictures are! We only worked on addition problems this week. We will be doing subtraction this upcoming week.

 We worked on our Original Works art creations yesterday. This is a school fundraiser. Looks at these owls : )

 Mrs. Cormack, our Spanish teacher, taught us body parts in Spanish this week through songs and dancing.

In Social Studies, we learned about the compass rose and also different bodies of water.

Meet our new class pet!

Fact Family, Hispanic Heritage, US Constitution and Food Pyramid

We ended our unit of fact family this week and switched out our watermelon math with our fact family math. This upcoming week will be finding missing addends.

We took our second Vietnamese sound check on Friday. We worked on these words for two weeks by drawing flashcards, practicing on our white boards daily and writing sentences in our journals. Next week, we will have the sight words of “see, love, like, go, eat and drink.”

In Social Studies this week, we learned a little about Hispanic Heritage and about the US Constitution. Next week, we will learn about Mid-Autumn Festival and maps.

In Health, the class has been learning about healthy foods and the food pyramid. 

Second Week of September

This week was a crazy week. Monday we had Spanish, Tuesday we had library, Wednesday we had our first guidance lesson, and Thursday we had computer lab. In math this week, we practiced subtraction. We learned that when we subtract, we take away and our number gets smaller. We also practiced by doing warm-ups on our white boards.

In science this week, the kids continued their  senses unit. They played different guessing games with their nose and hands to guess what was in the cup Mrs. Skalaban filled up. On Friday, they used their sense of smell and tried guessing what was in the cup. Mrs. Skalaban had different things like brown sugar, balmsamic vinegar and etc.

This week, we continued learning about colors and different family members. We did an activity that will be laminated and going into our first grade end-of-the-year book. They wrote a sentence stating which color they like the best.

Thank you everyone who has turned in their first grade fee. We will be doing lots of fun things in first grade. We will be ordering shirts soon to get ready for Soaring Skyward. If any parents would like to join us on Soaring Skyward Day, you’re more than welcome to! I’m not exactly sure what is schedule is like that day yet but I can give you a copy once I get one.

It’s going to be a busy day on the 29^th because not only do we have Soaring Skyward, but we also have our fun celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival. Tickets will be $3 a person and kids get free lanterns.

Families, VLA Sight Words, and 3 Addends

In math, we have been working on adding 3 addends. We have been using different manipulatives in the room to help us get the correct answer. Some kids like the challenge and are trying to do it with mental math.

We worked on sight words in VLA and took our first sound check this week. We also wrote in our VLA for the first time this week. The kids were to write a sentence using their sight words. We have been practicing this since the first week of school on our white boards. 

We read the book A House is a House and made houses with our family members. Come by the room and check them out hung outside of our classroom. 

In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, the kids wrote about why their family is so special.

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to the 2017-2018 school year! As the week went on, the kids are getting used to their first grade schedule. Mrs. Skalaban and I kept our homeroom for the first two days and we started switching classes on Wednesday. There's nothing like starting a school year with the solar eclipse and ending it with a hurricane! Stay dry out there.

This is a picture of the kids doing their first math activity on the first day of school. This past week, we worked on recognizing numbers and counting. My goal was to have each kids fluently count up to 10 in Vietnamese. Next week, we will be working on recognizing dot patterns and using ten frames. We will be learning how to compose numbers to equal to 10. 

We read the book Lacey Walker, Nonstop Talker which was about an owl who never stopped talking. She talked so much that one day she lost her voice and learned that when she stopped to listen to others, she could learn so much about them that she never knew before. As a class, we talked about how we could be a good listener and what a good listener looks like.

We explored math centers this week. We’re having a little difficulty cleaning up quickly and quietly but we will continue to work on it!

 We worked together as a table to create our “golden rules” poster in class. The kids did SO well working together and not arguing. Before I handed them the poster, we talked about how we could take turns so everyone was able to participate. 

In social studies, we learned about how to be a good citizen in class. We used our SS spirals for the first time this week and drew two pictures of how we are a good friend.

In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, the students learned about scientists and the different kinds of scientists we have.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to e-mail me, call me or even leave notes in your child’s daily folder. I check folders every day.

I am also looking for someone to help me stuff daily and Monday folders every Monday morning. If you are interested and willing to help, I would really appreciate that! 

Happy Summer!

I can’t believe the school year is already over and it’s officially summer. One reason why I love first graders so much is the insane growth they make academically throughout the year. While cleaning the classroom yesterday, I found some old things we worked on during the year and couldn’t believe how far they’ve come. Please keep reading, writing, and practicing math over the summer!!! On the last day of school, I showed them some websites they could go on during the summer to continue reading. These websites are on a blue sheet of paper that was placed in their daily folder. It was funny because on one of the websites, they saw a category list of “scary and disgusting” and they REALLLLY wanted me to click on it so I did…and let me say, there are some books over some really scary and disgusting things. One of the books we clicked on talked about how a tribe in Africa makes their houses out of cow poop. The book also had pages about bat caves full of poop, worm poop, nasty landfills, and etc. They were so interested and disgusted at the same time. Although it was disgusting, the book was pretty informational.

Teachers had to go to a professional development last Friday when students had off and they showed us this video. I thought it was really interesting to see how much summer learning really makes a difference in a child during elementary school. I don't necessary think it's an income issue, but it's more about the support at home, which unfortunately not all children are able to get.

https://youtu.be/ZolcNG3GVCs

There’s also a June and July calendar of activities the kids could do over summer break just in case they get bored. It was stapled to an end-of-the-year letter.

On Thursday, both Mrs. Skalaban and my class had a bead store BLOWOUT. They could buy whatever they want with all the beads they had left. I should have taken a picture of all the toys laid out on the tables for the kids to buy but it was so insane I didn’t have time.

 We had our very last Vietnamese sound check on Wednesday and the kids did pretty well. If the kids want to keep up with their Vietnamese, they can use their Vietnamese flashcards that we worked on all year long or go to www.ilearnviet.com to practice. The username is ttran and the password is austin. Please keep the flashcards as a good resource for home. I spent a lot of time putting these together every week or two for all 42 students.

 Here is a picture of the kids during “puzzle day.”

I hope everyone has a great summer!!! Thanks for a great year!

Meet-the-Teacher is August 17 from 4-6

First Day of School is August 21, 2017