May Blog 1!

First Grade Highlights

May 15^th, 2018

Dear First Grade Families;

Can you believe we only have 18 days of school left?  This year has gone by fast because we have been having a blast together.  Your students are already looking older, showing maturity, and are more independent.  It is very exciting to see and be a part of their growth.

During Writer’s Workshop, the students wrote “Mystery Haikus”.  The reader has to guess the title after reading the poems. If you would like to read these amazing pieces of poetry, they are on display outside our classroom.

Our theme for May is Dinosaurs.  We have been watching the documentary series about prehistoric time periods on “Curiosity Stream”.  So far we have learned about various kinds of dinosaurs, dinosaur fossils, paleontologist, and sizes of dinosaurs and their teeth.  

Math activities in May focus on numbers up to 120, with students working with the 120 Number Grid for addition and subtraction.  The students have been practicing solving math problems in both the Calendar Grid and Computational Fluency workouts, and practicing forward and backward counting by 10s off the decade during number line workout.  The Calendar Collector encourages students to extend their concepts about fractions to quarters and dollar by thinking of a quarter as one-fourth of a dollar.  We collect a quarter a day and group the quarters into dollars to see how many dollars we can collect before the end of the school year.  Counting the days in school continues this month with an eye toward 200 and also summer vacation.

Announcements & Reminders:

1.    School will be closed on Memorial Day Monday, May 28^th

2.    The BPC Spring Concert is next Thursday evening at First Congregational Church  (Harrison and 27^th in Oakland) 6:00pm-9:00pm

3.    Minimum Day on Friday May 25^th.  *Please feel free to let your child sleep in on this day due to the performance the previous night.

Enjoy the photos below!

Mr. & Ms.K

Art

For our last project of the year, we are integrating our art focus with their classroom study of dinosaurs. We have made clay dinosaur sculptures, and they are amazing! While we are waiting for them to dry, we enjoyed our last free media choice day of the year. It was really fun to see where each child’s interests took them.

The First Graders are currently preparing for our upcoming Spring Concert on May 24th. Our theme for this year’s concert is Swing Music and we will hope to surprise you with our fun song choice! In preparing for this, I am using a hollow-body jazz guitar and we have been talking about the differences between electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

The Learning Garden had such an abundance of sage that the First Graders were able to bring some home as a gift from Mother Earth. I hope that your family enjoys the Butter Sage Sauce Recipe! Busy First Graders have been sifting, watering, weeding and planting, along with exploring and learning in our outdoor classroom.

Thank you, First Graders!