The Year's End in Pictures!

I hope this blog post is finding you and your family enjoying the Holidays.   Please check out the busy week we had just before our Winter Break.  

Writing

We began the week with a fun Writing Assembly.  Each class was paired with another to share their knowledge of writing.   We collaborated with Mrs. Bornancin's Third Grade Class.  

We partnered up with the third graders and spent time reading each others' stories.  The third graders were mostly writing narratives at the time, while first graders were sharing their "how-to" stories.  

We compared and contrasted our writing and then wrote our observations on the snowmen.  

Students were amazed to see how similar their writing was, even at different grade levels!

Our Snowmen Venn Diagram

Our wall of Snowmen Venn Diagrams

Reading

We began practicing our reading fluency by performing reader's theater.  We have a couple more to hear when we return from break.

Another great reading!

Special Events

We were treated to a performance by the Middle School Jazz Band and Choir!

McDole alumni were present!

The choir sang beautifully, too!

P.E. 

The P.E. Skating Unit was a blast!

The class learned some new amazing moves.

Our skating improved with each lap around the gym!

Wow!  What skilled skaters we've become since the beginning of the unit.

The line was always filled with excitement waiting for each skater's turn to maneuver under the limbo stick.

Visitors

The High School Madrigal Singers came to the LRC to sing to the students.   Our class was filled with awe while listening to the lovely carols!

The Sing-Along

Mrs. DeGaetano read aloud Twas the Night Before Christmas at the 1st Annual McDole All-School Sing-Along.

McDole students and teachers enjoyed singing holiday songs. 

The Winter Party

The winter party was a lot of fun!

We  made ornaments and reindeer food.

We were all smiles!

Fun was had by all.

Throwing the Snowball at Olaf was a great game.

Pin the Nose on Rudolph was a crowd pleaser, too!

Thank you parents, for all of your help with the Winter Party!  The students had a wonderful time.  

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!   We will see everyone back here in 2015! 

December Details...

This December has been packed with learning.   We look forward to one more busy week before our Winter Break!  

Reading

Hmmm...What could be inside, waiting to be unwrapped?

We took turns tearing off the wrapping, bit by bit, so we could PEEK and PREDICT.  

We guessed that the package was indeed a book.  Little by little, more of the cover illustration was revealed.  We spied some colorful images peeking out.

In tearing off a bit more paper, we could observe earth colors on the cover.   Some thought they saw a tree.  We revised predictions when some of us saw what looked like striped fur.  We predicted this was a story about an animal.  

The final moment arrived.   What book was it?

Tiger in my Soup was the mystery book!  We used our predicting skills to uncover more meaning as we read the text.  

These are two books we've read to practice making predictions.   We have also enjoyed two books by Jeff Jarka called Love that Kitty and Love that Puppy.  Yesterday, we read Suddenly.  We used clues in the text and illustrations, as well as our schema and connections, to predict what would happen in each story.  

We have also been comparing and contrasting stories, making text-to-text connections.  We are smart thinkers!  These two stories had similarities and differences.  We made a Venn diagram to further explore them.  We discovered that both stories were about common fears.  In one story, the boy is afraid of the wild animals he sees in the woods, and in the other story he is afraid of the dark.  In the end, both stories are about overcoming our fears.

Fundations and the Spelling Bee

We are learning about adding suffixes.  

To mark up this word, we underlined the digraph (sh), underlined the base word (ship) and circled the suffix (s).  The suffix makes the /s/ sound.  We've been learning that sometimes the "s" suffix makes the /z/ sound, even though it is still spelled with the letter "s". 

This is another example of how we notice the base words and add the suffix to make the word plural (more than 1).

We mark up words as we read books to see little words, blends, and other key parts to help us decode words.  

We can find little words in big words, digraphs and chunks.

Wednesday was the McDole Spelling Bee.  We participated in our own First Grade Spelling Bee before we attended the real spelling bee during specials.  

Our first contestant!  

We had to spell the 23 focus words.

We also spelled words that we've learned in Fundations (ones with digraphs, double letters (bonus letters), and suffixes).  

Writing

This month we are learning about informational writing in the form of how-to books.  We are teachers, teaching each other about topics in which we are experts.  

We began the unit by exploring how-to books with partners.  

How to Make a Crayon was an interesting read.  

We began a chart about the craft moves used by authors of how-to books.  

The other day we read a funny story.  Some of us then chose to write the real version of how we would teach someone to clean our room.  These authors wrote their steps in numerical order.  

This is a class story we wrote just after returning from P.E. class the other day.

We wrote the most important steps, adding some quick sketches to help illustrate our explanations.  We also added numbers to help our readers follow the directions.  

Lastly, we added a conclusion to end our story.  We will work on revising some of our stories, being sure ours have beginnings, too.   

Math

Our math fact fluency is building!   This week we had many students reach their "all-time best" scores.  

*Remember to check our math blog on Wednesdays for math homework.  Click on the Web Wednesday tab for a fun online math activity.  This week's activity was about "The Hour of Code".

http://mcdolemath.blogspot.com/p/links-we-love.html

Science

We have been studying about rocks the last couple of weeks.  We are learning that rocks are all around us. They are made of minerals.  Boulders are the biggest, and rocks found in clay are the smallest. 

We have been busy being geologists in Room 224!

We have been using magnifying glasses to explore our rocks more closely.  

Some of the rocks we've been looking at are river rocks, and lava rocks, like basalt, tuff, and scoria. 

We also rubbed some of the rocks together.  The tuff rock is chalk-like, capable of making marks on dark-colored paper.   

We spent time sorting our rocks by their unique properties: color, size, shape, texture, and type.  

These rocks are being sorted by length. Yesterday, we spent time washing our rocks, noticing how some rocks changed in water.  We could see many details more clearly in the wet rocks.  We also chose one rock to record an illustration and sentence describing it.  



Enjoy your weekend!   We are off to more first grade adventures.