Math Centers

Our math centers have been focusing on coins and 10s and 1s.
One of the games we have been playing you could play at home. Just take a bunch of coins and put them in a circle. Each person takes turns taking a coin (after the first person you have to take a coin from one end). When all the coins have been taken you figure out how many cents you have. The person with the most cents wins.

There are a couple of great websites for practicing with numbers up to 100. One of the sites is Give the Dog a Bone. At this site you have a blank 100s chart and you have to click on the numbers it shows.

The other site is Describing Numbers on a 100 Chart. It requires similar skills.

Writing Workshop

We have had some fabulous books shared at the end of our writing workshop each day. These students are wonderful authors!

Science!

Students have been searching for pictures of plants, animals, and people. (We have talked about the fact that people are actually animals.) Soon we will take the pictures and sort them in some special ways (more later).

Library Fun

We have been learning to use grolier.com during our time in the library. This is a fabulous website full of information about just about everything! We have looked up animals and seen some great pictures. You can use the website at home as well.

Valentine's Day

The snow also caused us to miss Valentine's Day at school. Such a thing is quite tragic for first graders. So, we talked with our fourth grade buddies and decided to celebrate together a week late.

We always have a great time with our buddies. For Valentine's Day we made special cards for the custodians. They have worked so hard for the past week and a half clearing all the sidewalks, parking lots, and even along the street to help kids get safely to and from school. We wanted to give them a special thank you and let them know how much we appreciate them.

We also had fun with magnetic letters spelling the words Valentine's Day. We used the letters to see how many words we could make. Some buddies worked together to make more than 20 words!

100th Day of School - Finally!

The 100th day of school was delayed again and again by the snow. Before the huge snowstorm we had the 99th day of school and then we were home for the next 7 school days. So, upon our return on Tuesday we celebrated! Due to the two hour delay we had less time than we would have liked, but we had fun anyway.

Ms. E. brought in cookies with m&ms on them. With 17 students and 3 teachers and 5 m&ms per cookie, we had 100 m&ms. That was the yummiest part of our 100th day.

Timelines

We've started a brief study of timelines. The first thing we did was to create a timeline of our school day. It's a great reminder to have hanging up in our room to remind us of our daily schedule.

The next lesson we did was looking at a timeline of one year. We looked at the type of precipitation, temperature, and seasons throughout the year.

After that we used a book, When I Was One, to look at a timeline of a little girl's life. This way we had exposure to a variety of timelines. For homework, students should be creating a very basic timeline of their own lives.

Money - Counting Coins

One of our math objectives in first grade is to count coins. Students should recognize pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters and know the value of each. They should also be able to determine the value of collections of pennies, nickels, and dimes (quarters don't come in until second grade).

After spending some fabulous time sorting real coins and counting them (from the Haiti Penny Drive) we used toy coins to 'purchase' items. The students did a fabulous job determining what coins to use to buy different things. They are all quite good at it. They could help you out when shopping!

Computer Lab

We spent our time in the computer lab last week working on creating images that show what we want our classroom to be. As we are halfway through the year it's a great time to step back and think about the community we have and the community we want. We'll spend more time working on these and thinking about our ideal classroom environment. Hopefully we'll manage to take these images and create a movie to share our vision.

Getting Ready for the 100th Day of School

We've been preparing for the 100th Day of School since the year began. Of course, right now we have no idea when that day will be! The day we return after all this snow will be the 100th day.

We have taken pictures of items from the first day. On day one we took a picture of 1 thing. On day 2 we took a picture of 2 things. On day 3 we took a picture of 3 things. And so on.

We haven't managed to keep up each day so every once in a while we have to catch up with a few pictures.

As the year has progressed the students have become more sophisticated in their counting of the items. You will notice they are grouping items in 10s to make the process easier.