Welcome to First Grade in room C-8 at CP Smith! This blog will serve as a way for you to follow along with the daily happenings of our classroom. Feel free to comment on the posts. Thank you for joining along with our learning!
What is Land Art you ask? Land Art is creative and fun and can be done by anyone. It involves making art and sculptures using materials you find in nature, such as leaves, fir cones, twigs, pebbles, rocks, sand and shells. Some examples:
This afternoon Mrs. Tourin's class joined us. We looked at some Land Art from http://landartforkids.com/section345789_116533.html and discussed how we can use things that we find in nature to make art. I also read Fall: Animals in Fall Preparing for Winter by Martha E. Rustad in preparation for our time in the woods tomorrow morning. I was excited to see some Kindergarteners already taking on the making of Land Art at our end of the day recess.
Last week Ms. Beth in the library read the book The Friend Ship by Kat Yeh. Then this week she brought in a big box and they made the Friend "Ship." It was great fun reading in the ship today with friends!
It was an awesome morning to spend time in the woods! We noticed some leaves changing colors and many green leaves still on the trees.
Our poem for this week is Fall Leaves
Fall Leaves
One is orange,
Two are brown,
Three look yellow
On the ground.
Three are green,
Two bright red,
One just fell
Upon my head!
Our first writing unit has focused on how to use shapes to draw. We have been working on using different shapes to draw body parts and then adding details. We discussed how sometimes stick people are okay but when we are writing stories the reader should be able to "read" the story through the pictures just like the books in our classroom. Students have been practicing drawing people out of shapes in their drawing journals. It can be a little tricky but that's why we are trying it out!
It was a busy Monday! This morning I read the book Over in the Forest: Come and Take a Peek and we learned about different animals that we might find in a forest. We learned that "kit" is the name for many baby animals such as beavers, squirrels, and raccoons. In Math we worked on making different combinations of 3 and at stations to count and identify numbers 1-12.
This afternoon I read the book Why Do Leaves Change Colors? and we talked about how as the days get colder and have less sunlight trees need to start prepare to rest during the winter. With less light the leaves will lose their green color (chlorophyll) and we start to see the colors that are "hiding" inside the leaves like red, orange and gold. When it gets colder the leaves eventually fall off except for evergreens like pine trees.
The folks at Allenholm Farm gave us a big bag of apples for the classroom and today we made applesauce. Kindergarten LOVED using the peeler, corer and slicer to prepare the apples. Together we wrote out the recipe.
This afternoon Kindergarten received their poetry journals and illustrated our first poem of the week. They really enjoyed coming up and sharing their illustration under the document camera. We ended the day with trying out our apple sauce!
It was a chilly and wet day at Allenholm Farm but we had a great day!
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Sorry for the lack of posts. I was away last Thursday and Friday at a District Writing Committee Conference. Yesterday and today have been busy! We have been talking a lot about the weather and how apples grow. Today I read the book Apples, Apples, Apples by Nancy Elizabeth Warren and we talked about what we expect to see at the apple orchard tomorrow. We also read our first poem of the year: Five Little Apples
Five Little Apples
Way up high in the apple tree,
Five little apples smiled at me.
I shook that tree as hard as I could.
And down came five apples,
Mmmmm they were good!
Each week we will read a poem of the week. During Reader's Workshop one literacy station will be illustrating the poem of the week. We will read the poem several times a day over this week so that students are able to "read" the poem independently and then can draw a picture that matches the words.
Today we also learned the sound /h/. The songs that go with all of the sounds from the Jolly Phonics program are available on you tube.
