Pizza Party

I hope you heard about our pizza party on Friday! As described in an earlier post, students earned their "tree chart" reward and voted to have a pizza party. What a great way to end our week!

Quarters

We spent some time today learning about quarters and reviewing coins in general. It was fun! We started with "cross crawls"--a way of getting our bodies involved in our learning. Ask your child to teach you about cross crawls and to count by 25s while doing so! :-) I will try to remember to take a quick video of us doing this tomorrow so you can see/hear what it's all about! Counting by 25s obviously helps when counting quarters, which is why we tried MANY activities to help make this stick in our heads--cross crawls, chanting "25-50-75-One Dollar!", playing a game called "Pop" using counts by 25, and singing our coin songs. We also used the Smartboard to practice counting coin combinations with a mix of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. It was great to hear students explain their thinking on how they count coins. It's very interesting how different their approaches can be and they still come up with the correct answer. We learn so much by listening to others' ideas! 

Pizza Party!

Hooray! Students filled our fishbowl to the designated line and now earned a pizza party! Students voted on three choices for how we could celebrate their accomplishment. As you can see below, the vast majority wanted a pizza party. So, tomorrow afternoon, we'll have a pizza snack! Way to go, everyone! This reward was earned through the marbles students add to the fishbowl when they "stay in the tree" for our classroom behavior plan. If they stay at the top of the tree they contribute two marbles to the bowl twice a day; one marble if they are "dangling" on the bottom of the tree. I am proud of everyone for working so hard to add marbles to our collection! We emptied the jar at the end of the day and started again...this time the line will be a little higher, but I don't think it will take TOO long to get there! :-)

Four Winds: Winter Twigs

We had another wonderful Four Winds lesson today, thanks to Mrs. Rasher (Scott's mom) and Ms. Bates (Ian's mom). Students learned about trees in winter, specifically how to identify various trees just by looking at twigs with no leaves. They became pretty good at this! Ask your child something he/she learned today! 

The ever-popular puppet show

Students learned about twigs with alternating and opposite bud patterns. I didn't know about this before, so I learned something new! 

Olivia volunteered to become a twig in persona and in costume. :-) She did a fantastic job!

Author Study: Mo Willems

Our trip to the Flynn Theater to see Knuffle Bunny prompted an impromptu author/illustrator study! I was planning to read and do activities related to the Knuffle Bunny books all along, to help students get ready to see the play. It became clear quite quickly that everyone wanted to learn more about Mo Willems and his books. We have greatly enjoyed his "Elephant and Piggie" books in the classroom since the beginning of the year, and the "Pigeon" books are favorites of several students in the class. So, we are digging a little deeper into the work of Mo Willems!

On Tuesday, we put on our "theatrical hats" and did some drama activities related to Knuffle Bunny. Students enjoyed using their bodies and faces to show emotions and using pantomime to act out excerpts from the story (called "solo acts"). We also used a stuffed rabbit--a stand-in for Knuffle Bunny--in some of our activities. Why I did not take out my camera and video camera during these activities is a mystery. I guess I was just too busy having fun with everyone!

Today, students LOVED learning how to draw the beloved "Pigeon" that shows up in many of Mo Willems' books. We used the how-to found on the following website to guide our efforts:

http://www.pigeonpresents.com/activities/pigeon_draw01.pdf

Here's one of the many FANTASTIC drawings students created:

I have many more activities in mind, so there will be more fun with Mo Willems books to come. 

This is Mo Willems. He writes and illustrates great books that help make students enthusiastic about reading! Thanks, Mo!

Our trip to the Flynn Theater!

Our trip to the Flynn Theater was a success! I really enjoyed the play, Knuffle Bunny, and many students had rave reviews as well. I took some photos on the bus and in the theater as we waited for the play to begin, but I could not take any videos or photos during the performance due to etiquette/theater rules. If you are interested in seeing/learning more about this play and the author of the Knuffle Bunny books (Mo Willems), please visit these websites:

These two websites from the Kennedy Center (the theater company that brought this show to the Flynn) include videos and photos about the show. These would be great to look at if you want to get an idea of what the play was like, since I could not take photos of the actual performance.
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/kc-connections/knuffle-bunny.aspx

http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/family/ontour/season.cfm#bunnyslide

Mo Willems' website: http://www.mowillems.com/

Some of these photos did not turn out very well, but I figured you'd want to see them anyway! :-)

On the bus...

Eagerly awaiting the start of the show...

 

UMS kindergarten and first grade classes attended this show at the same time--we took up 2/3 of the balcony section!

 The bus ride back to school....

Check out our bear t-shirts!

Our bear t-shirts were completed last week--hooray! Thanks to many people's hard work, we have great t-shirts to wear to celebrate this year's school-wide theme: Be Enthusiastic About Reading (B.E.A.R.). Thank you, Mrs. Derry, who designed the shirt and carried out this project during art class. Thank you to the many parent volunteers who washed the shirts and those who ironed on individual bear designs. Wow! We wore our shirts to our school-wide meeting yesterday and will wear them again for our school musical performance in April. More details to come soon about that!

Smile!

Be silly bears!

I guess I should be in a few of these...

We wore our bear t-shirts for guidance yesterday too. Mrs. McCleary taught students about an "apology of action"--showing you're sorry rather than just saying it. 

Observatory Field Trip Postponed...

Unfortunately, our trip (scheduled to be Wednesday, February 16th) to the the Saint Michael's College Observatory will need to be postponed.  There is currently too much snow surrounding the observatory and covering the dome itself.  We will let you know when a new date is set! 
(This notice was sent home via your child's green folder yesterday, but I am posting the news here to make sure everyone knows!)

Photos from our wonderful Valentine's Day...

It was a great day! I hope you enjoy the photos...

A free photo slideshow by Smilebox

The slideshow from today's "We Love to Read and Write" Celebration!

Hi everyone!

We had a great celebration in our classroom today. If you were not able to make it (or even if you were), here's the slideshow that I created of your children's reading and writing progress throughout first grade. They have worked so hard! :-)