Merry Christmas One and All!

On the last day before winter vacation began, we had a little party to celebrate the season.  Thanks to Angel, who brought in treats to share with the class.  We also had little cuties, apple juice boxes, hershey kisses, skittles and red and green MnMs.  We played sight word bingo with our MnMs and we had enough time to get in 5 winners!  One of the special surprises was hats-Mrs. Rudd made.

Everyone was surprised and our friends throughout the building loved seeing our hats!  The boys' hats had snakes on them and the girls' hats had frogs and hearts on them.  Here are the directions for making the hats if you are interested:

1.  Cut fleece length-wise to go around circumfrence of the head of person to wear hat-most kids were about 20" in length X 18" deep.

2.  Turn fleece inside out and sew middle third of the hat closed with a straight seam.

3.  Double hat over keeping the seam inside and then cut straight strips down from the open end of the fleece about 4-5 inches long each.

4.  Tie fleece in double-knots.

and viola!  You have your hat.

A special thank you to Mrs. Z-(my son's teacher) who originally made them with her class!



Our Christmas Tree Creation

During the first week of December, Robinson had a schoolwide contest to create a Christmas Tree with a Children's Literature Theme.  For our classroom, the children voted and the book they wanted to use was Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.  Here is our tree:

We used interactive writing(without sharing the pen)-teacher and students typing while students dictating on the smartboard to think through our beginning, middle and end of the story.  Then, we printed them out and added the sequence to the tree.  Everyone colored their own buttons and garland to add to the tree.  Last, we printed out the cover and added the trunk.  Most people liked our tree.  The winning tree was created by the students in 108 who used non-fiction stories about stars to decorate their tree.

And the Winner Is...

The children voted for their favorite picture book of the year since it's Picture Book Month.  Books like I Want My Hat Back and Enemy Pie were definitely mentioned as well as the non-fiction book Ants...

But this year's favorite picture book so far is...

 

 

Pete is so lovable and he's also very inspirational.  He's got a great attitude-"It's All Good".  He never cries or gets worried-just keeps walking along and singing his song...Thanks Eric Litwin for writing such fun stories about Pete!

Smiling about Ants today...

What a day...

We worked on Read to Someone today-it was our first "official" try at Read to Someone and we reflected on how we did after we read.  We did a great job and tried our best to read with a partner.  We practiced modeling it the wrong way and the right way-the funniest thing we noticed was sitting EEKK!

For science, we started working on our animal project where we'll be researching an animal of our choice and completing an information fair about our animals.  We can't wait to share our learning.  Our first story was called "Ants".  This book is loaded with amazing facts and interesting pictures.  -We noticed and talked about how two the non-fiction features of this text are the photographs and labels.  One funny part of the story that made us all laugh was learning that the aphids are friends with the ants-the ants like eating their "sugary poop".  The evidence in the text is on page 25 if you want to know more about it!

Our friend Mrs. Pramuka designed some awesome organizers to help us with our animal learning project!  Thanks Mrs. Pramuka!

In math, we worked on making tables to show data about parts of 10 and 5.  We used the smartboard to help us sort out our thinking!

We're getting ready to start a new topic in Math-topic 3 Five and Ten Relationships...

In Reading and Language Arts, we're moving on to our next curriculum mapping unit-Animals and Pets.  This week, we'll look closely at investigating animals that come from eggs, especially chickens.  We'll also discuss other farm animals and we'll read about a Wolf, who learns the importance of practicing reading.  Here's a vimeo link called "Chickens Aren't the Only Ones" http://vimeo.com/6240602

We will also continue our quad blogging project and look at the third set of class blogs (Mrs. Martel's class in Canada!).

Hoping to have a great week as we begin to learn about animals and pets-we'll be setting up a survey on our blog about choosing your favorite kind of pet!  Be sure to vote!

Have a great week all!

Quad Blogging Partner Project

This week, the first week of October is the start of our Quad Blogging Project with 3 other schools.  We will be visiting each others' classroom blogs a week at a time and commenting on the blogs with questions for each other.

Here is a map of where our quad blogging partners are from:
and our location too...

We are so excited to hear from our partners.  All of them are from different parts of Canada-two closer and one farther. 

We will also be participating in the "Signs of Fall" twitter project this month.  We'll be tweeting to the hashtag #anfomhar to show seasonal changes we notice.

All of this should be so exciting!  Can't wait to see how things turn out for us this month!

Reflecting and Looking Ahead

We have been busy this year!

Last week was great!  We celebrated Granparents Day with our parents and grandparents on Friday and did a special bridge building activity with them.  We were also surprised as our Smartboard was installed on Thursday!  Ya hoo!

As we look to the week ahead, we're excited to start the quad blogging project with Mrs. Belanger's Class, Mrs. Martel's Class and Mrs. Sarchet's class!  We hope to learn a lot from you.

This week, we will be starting a brand new pilot project with our curriculum mapping units.  Our first unit is ABCs and Friendship...we will introduce it on Monday!  We hope to learn a lot about ABCs and books made with Alphabet Themes as well as Names and Friends!

Great week ahead!

We are looking forward to an exciting new week ahead-our theme for the week is "Cats".  We'll be reading some silly cat stories this week...

We'll also be starting our "Star Student" of the Day!  Watch for up-coming posts about our stars and what they are thinking...

We're also looking forward to celebrating "International Dot Day" on Friday-make your dot and make your mark!  You matter!  See the youtube version of The Dot here.

We'll be rolling out week 2 of the Daily 5 and adding "Read to Someone".

We're going to continue our team points game...

In Math, we'll be working on making combinations of 9, learning about joining sets together and creating number sentences with addends, and sums.

We will also be working on learning about the weather in Science-our daily weather person will be tweeting the weather information.

We're looking forward to celebrating Family Reading Night with our trainers to teach parents about implementation of 100 Book Challenge at Home.

Which team are you for?

Which team are you for? Click this question and the link will take you to our poll!

Please vote in our poll!
Team Bear or Team Rabbit

I Want My Hat Back

With our theme for the week being hats, today's morning read aloud was I Want My Hat Back!  Most of the class immediately thought rabbit took bear's hat!  They also thought bear either sat on rabbit or ate him...this lead to a discussion about bears and what they eat-fish, berries, but do they eat rabbits?  We decided that we'd research that info...hmmmm.  The hat mystery continues tomorrow we will add a poll about which team to join-

Here is a link to the story I Want My Hat Back on vimeo
Which team will you join?

What a Busy Day!

Friday was a busy day-we had so much going on...

Here are some of the highlights of what we accomplished and experienced on Friday-

We worked on introducing the rhyming families of at, ap, ad, and am.  We practiced letter sounds for m, s, b, and short a.

We wrote in our journals about apples.

We practiced looking at sets of numbers and telling how many in all.

We also had a surprise Fire Drill-woohoo-out of the building in 2 minutes.

We also read Pete the Cat, Rocking in My School Shoes-and noticed that at the end, Pete said the same thing, "It's all good!"


We finished reading Enemy Pie.

Also, we started our "Chalk-a-bration" pictures but didn't get to finish-as we ran out of time at the end of the day...

Whew!  Good thing we have a 3 day weekend to catch our breath!  See you on Tuesday!  Get ready for books about Hats, Wind and Weather!

On the First Day...

On our first day, we read Pete the Cat, I Love My White Shoes, How Full is Your Bucket, and Enemy Pie.  We brainstormed a list of class rules and ate goldfish crackers for our snack.   

We rated Pete's story with a ":)" face.

Right before lunch, we went out to the playground to review the playground safety rules and review signals for the playground.  But the coolest thing was...

we got to observe a praying mantis!  So exciting!  Mrs. Rudd will be heading to the library to check-out books about it on the way home so we can learn more...and then "S" noticed that there was a picture of one in his insect book in his pile of books to read.

We had a great first day.

A First Post...

Getting Ready...Hello Robinson Community and other readers of our classroom blog news.  We hope to use this blog to inform you about the wonderful things that are happening in our world of Room 224.  We are looking forward to a fabulous year of learning as First Graders.

Here are some of the great things we have to look forward to:

• Using the Daily 5
• Reading our 100 Book Challenge-Oh, The Places We Will Go-Traveling the 7 Continents!
• Using PBS to support our behavior and grow our learning in the Common Areas and Classrooms
• Our Daily Twitter Tweets
• Book Reviews
• Slice of Life Weekly Challenges in our writers notebooks
• Skyping with authors
• Blogging and connecting with other first grade classes around the world

Hope you will join us in this new adventure!  We also hope to share our own blogs with you through the Kidblog.org platform.