Happy Holidays!

We made it! We made it to day 80 of school and Winter break. I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and New Years! School will resume January 4, 2017. The whole first grade sent home a reading contest for the kids to participate in if they would like to have a hot cocoa party when returning back to school. The students have to return the packet on Wednesday, January 4^th to earn the hot cocoa.

The kids have finally earned 10 art bucks from Mrs. Worsham. I tried trading the art bucks in Monday but Mrs. Worsham was not there. I wonder what kind of party they will earn?

 We had science buddies last week with our 5^th grade buddies. The first graders looooove their science buddies. This time, the kids made snow, cut paper snowflakes and did a contest to see how long they could place their hand in cold blubber which was in freezing water.

The class made their science buddies some Christmas cards to say thank you and Merry Christmas.

We made reindeer bags and ornaments. Look at how cute these reindeers are.

 Santa Claus stopped by the first grade commons in the afternoon on Tuesday. Mrs. Skalaban’s children gave him a big ol’ hug and their Santa letters. Santa said he was going to read it on his way back home to the North Pole since there were so many letters to read.

Mrs. Neill taught us how to use the tablets our school had recently received. Since the kids know the rules of the tablets, we have been using them for math centers lately.

 We had a successful party on Monday. We had lots of fun stations. They kids did a great job transitioning from one station to another. We even had a book exchange towards the end of the party. Hopefully the kids will enjoy their new book during the break! Thank you to all the moms who came and helped us out during the party.

We had our Vietnamese spelling test on Tuesday. These were our words we worked on for a week and a half. They are the QU and PH blends. We will now start working on letter blends. Before, we practiced spelling basic words such as “play, toy, will, can, I, and, like, love, eat, drink…” to help us compose a sentence.

When we come back, we will practice the TR and CH blends.

See everyone in 2017!!!

Holidays Around the World

The class Christmas tree was set up and the students got to do a little “show and tell” with their special ornament they brought in from home. After sharing, they got to pick a spot and hang their ornament on our fabulous pink Christmas tree.

This week, first grade did a rotation on “Holidays Around the World.” Each teacher taught a winter holiday. The kids learned that not all countries celebrate the holidays the same way. Some countries taught were Czech Republic, Mexico, Vietnam, Greece, Germany, Israel and Sweden. Ask your child what they learned! The kids were really excited to be traveling every morning. They would come into class asking me where they were going to travel to that day. This whole week’s lesson will tie into our field trip to “Holiday Hereos” tomorrow. They even had their own passport stamped : )

These are some activities done during “Holidays Around the World.”

 Mrs. Cardosa did a guidance lesson on Wednesday about teamwork. The mission was to get the kids to work in a group to successfully make a tree that stands up without arguing. The only supplies they were allowed to have were 2 pieces of green paper, two pieces of tapes and 4 popsicle sticks. Most of the groups were able to get their trees to stand up. It really amazed me on some of their creations. I can tell some of these kids might grow up to be engineers! : )

We received our new class pet on Wednesday. He is a box turtle. If we’re quiet enough, we can hear him scratching his cage and trying to climb up. He will be with us for two weeks!

 If you haven’t signed up yet, please stop by the class to sign up for an item! We have lots of empty slots. We will be having our class party on Monday, December 19^th.

 Tomorrow, we will be going on our field trip to watch a play. Please have your child wear their class t-shirt!

Gobble, Gobble!

 Hope everyone enjoys their 9 days off! So glad the busy week is done with. All week long, the students had the opportunity to buy books from the Book Fair. I believe the school reached our goal of $15,000 so that’s very exciting. We also had our annual Grandparents Day Lunch on Wednesday. I forgot to take a picture of the kids in their adorable turkey hats. We spent the week learning about the first Thanksgiving, writing a story about a turkey with a problem and solution, talking about the life of the Pilgrim kids and the Wampanoag kids, what we are thankful for, and differences on our clothing now compared to the Pilgrims back then. Come check out some of our writings around the classroom.

We wrote our monthly Vietnamese writing to add to our end-of-the-year book. This month’s writing was “If I had a turkey, I would…” Some kids said they would eat it, go swimming with it, play with it, go to Target with it, go to the Dollar Tree with it, read with it, and etc.

We also took a Viet sound check on Friday over words that end in vowels. The kids did pretty well on the test. We took these words and included them into our writing in our VLA journals. It makes me excited to see how independent the kids have gotten in their journals when it’s writing time. I try to have them write once a week in their journals.

During math, we worked on finding missing addends. 

Mrs. Sklaban and I sent home homework for the kids to do over the Thanksgiving break. Totally optionally. It’s something fun to keep them a little busy over the break. It’s not the regular homework we usually send home each week but we hope that the kids pick 5 activities to do and return it on Monday for a little prize. For my overachievers, I told them they can do more than 5 if they would like!

In their folders on Monday, I will be sending home a field trip permission slip to go to the Zachary Theatre to watch Holiday Heroes. Please send that back to me ASAP. Also, I placed a little red slip about the students bringing in a special ornament from home and sharing it with the class on Monday coming back from break. We will hang it on our class Christmas tree and it will be returned before going on break again for Christmas.

Math World Problems

So this week in math, we worked on word problems. I mixed the addition word problems with the subtraction word problems and the kids had to figure out if they were going to add or subtract by finding key words in the problem. Some of their drawings were very cute. I remind the kids that they need to slow down to produce quality work and not rush through their assignments. Sometimes I’ll even reward extra beads to the student who produces the neatest work to motivate them. 

Soon, we will be adding and subtracting double digit numbers. Please practice math fluency up to 20 with your child at home whenever possible!

One more week until Thanksgiving break! I’m sure the kids are just as excited as teachers are : ) After the break, first grade does a rotation of “Holidays Around the World” where they will learn how a different country celebrates a winter holiday by each first grade teacher. Each day, the class will rotate to another first grade teacher’s classroom. They even get their own passport.

Halloween Party, Adding/Subtracting Ten and Vietnamese Writing

Nothing like having a party on a Monday at school! We had a fun time decorating cookies, pinning the bowtie on Mr. Bones, and make a spider from a lollipop. Thank you to Alice’s mom, Miles’ mom and Sophie’s mom for coming out and helping with the party!!! Our next party will be the Christmas party.

In math this week, we worked on adding and subtracting 10. We learned “the shortcut” of using our 100’s charts and either going up one row or down one row to find the answer. We also clapped backwards and counted back 10 boxes on our charts.

We did a fun activity where the kids made lamps. They got to pick their 6 lamp shades and had to write the answer on the light bulb underneath. 

The kids have been very noisy lately :-/ I decided to try Class DoJo to see if it would help them work quietly. Basically, each student gets a monster and they get points throughout the day if they are doing the right thing. Each time a student gets a point, it gives them a loud “ding” which they love hearing. I am testing out the waters as to if this will help them be less noisy but if it does, I will invite parents and parents will get to see their progress in this Class DoJo app.

 We will have our Viet sound check this Friday. We have been working on 6 words all this week and will be continuing to work on them this upcoming week. I haven’t told the kids yet, but we will be having “Vietnamese buddies” as well as “science buddies.” I have made plans to pair up with a 4^th grade Viet DL class and every month we’ll meet up with our buddies to do some sort of Vietnamese language arts activity.

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!