Happy 2018!

I apologize for being MIA for awhile. I have misplaced my camera and life has been pretty busy lately. I do want to thank everyone for all my wonderful gifts for my birthday and Christmas. I was definitely spoiled! Here is a little catch up of what we’ve been doing.

In math, we worked on place value, drawing them and expanded form. Here are our cute little penguins we did while working on expanded form. These are hung outside of our classroom.

We did a lot of learning about how influential MLK Jr. was to our country and how he changed history. MLK is one of my favorite topics to teach in Social Studies. The kids loooove learning about him and how the world used to be so segregated compared to how it is today. It's something to be grateful for. We watched lots of videos and read lots of books. We even saw a real clip of his "I have a dream" speech!

In health, we learned about bones. We will do a writing about bones next week in class.

In computer lab, we have been behaving so Mrs. Neill let us have a party because we earned our 10 stickers. We got to explore legos, do Tux Paint and even get introduced to Dash and Dot!

We have been practicing our Tet dance for February 23. Our costumes have not came in yet so we're still waiting. The children are doing great learning the dance moves. It only took them about 3 days to learn it all.

Welcome December!

Sorry I haven’t posted lately. I was going to update the blog during Thanksgiving break but realized I forgot my camera at school so this will be a longer post for the last 3 weeks.

 It’s been awhile since we’ve had a class pet. We received Hissing Cockroaches on Wednesday. I’m just praying that they don’t figure out how to make their way out of the tank. One time, we had a corn snake escape its tank and later found on campus! 

 We finished our first Marathon Kids Log. These laps are ran during WOW time at the end of the day. This time around, I decided to do it individually so it’s more fair. It is a little bit more work but I didn’t feel like it was fair for the kids who are running almost a mile everyday compared to the kids who are not. I have placed them in their daily folders and will be marking their logs every day at dismissal. Everyone should have received their shirts during PE on Thursday.

We finally wrapped up our money unit this week. The kids are doing great counting mixed coins. This upcoming week, we will be starting on adding/subtracting 10.

Before Thanksgiving break, we learned about the first Thanksgiving.

 We made turkeys and wrote about things we are thankful for.

 We wrote about “If I had a turkey, I would…”

 Mrs. Sheri came and taught us a strategy called “statues.” This is when I call out a Vietnamese sight word and the kids think of a position they can do to represent the vocabulary of that word. The kids have to remember that when they pose, they cannot talk and they have to stay still. This activity also works on body control, which all first graders need ;) 

Our schedule was all out of wack this week. I barely had any teaching time with the students this week. We did a “Holidays Around the World” with the whole first grade so each day the kids would go on a rotation around and have a different first grade teacher teach them about a country. The kids really enjoyed this. Not only did we do this rotation that took up most of our mornings, but we had guidance, library, computer lab, CLI, and Spanish lessons two times this week. 

The students earned their 5 stars in the cafeteria to earn a party. They chose a movie/popcorn party on Friday so as they were working on decorating their Christmas tree, we were enjoying our party at the same time. 

Firefighters, Veterans, Counting Money!

We started learning how to identify coins and counting pennies, nickels and dimes this week. Most of the kids are getting the hang of it real fast. We will continue next week with identifying quarters and adding up coins. Ask your child about the "hair" trick we have been practicing in class to help add up money.

In VLA, we are working on words beginning in QU and PH. We will have a test this Friday over the words.

 For every set of Vietnamese words, we make flashcards which we use during journal writing time. These get laminated, cut, whole punched and put on hook rings.

We were lucky enough to have firefighters AND Veterans come present this week. Our Army soldiers are parents to a student in Mrs. Garcia’s class. They came and talked to us about what they do. They even brought us some pencils and prizes.

 THANK YOU VETERANS FOR YOUR SERVICES!

We talked about Veterans Day all week long. Ask your child what they have learned about the different armed forces, Veterans Day parades and characteristics of someone serving for our country.

I had scheduled some firefighters come talk to the kids since fire safety month was in October. Originally, we were going to do the presentation outside so the kids could get a tour of the truck but it was so cold that day that we ended up doing it inside the building in our commons. Not only did students learn a lot, but teachers did too! I learned some things that I had never known before. The kids really enjoyed having real firefighters teaching them about what they do every day and how to be safe in incidents of a fire.

Halloween Week!

This week felt like the longest week! We had lots of fun activities this week and we managed to squeeze some learning in there too. We stopped by the library on Monday and voted for our favorite pumpkin from the pumpkin contest. The winner was a Pokemon pumpkin.

 We had our Halloween party on Tuesday at the end of the day. About 2/3 of our class dressed up in their fun costumes. I meant to take a picture of the kids but I forgot. Thank you to all my mom volunteers who came out to help!!! Without you, our party wouldn’t have been so smooth. Also, I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to bring an item to contribute to our party.

We did a writing activity on what I should dress up for Halloween. Some answers I got were a cupcake, a kitty, a lollipop, a dog, and a princess.

We’ve been skip counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s for the past two weeks. Next upcoming week, we will start identifying coins and counting coins. Please make sure that you continue to work on skip counting by 5’s and 10’s at home. This will help your child count money for our next unit.

Our awesome science buddies stopped by to visit us and gave us a candy kit experiment bag. Since this month’s schedule is totally crazy, we will not have time to meet up with our science buddies at school so they made us a science kit to take home to experiment. The kids also wanted to make their buddies cards to give to them, which was very thoughtful and sweet!

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.