Take me out to the rain forest

Our Morpho Butterflies in flight

Our library book theme has been all about animals of the rain forest, and everyone loved seeing photos of the iridescent blue Morpho butterfly. We followed up by making our own. We also read several books about other rain forest creatures, including The Red Eyed Tree Frog which had brilliantly colored close up photos, and A Color of His Own which was a fun story about a chameleon.

Coloring and cutting

 

A few of our read-alouds

Using a Morpho blue color

Can't wait 'til they're laminated

 Friday was a beautiful day and a school community day to take a walk outside around the track. Lots of exuberance to be seen as we traveled around the track - we even took a few running races and a run around the bases of the baseball diamond!

Break time after our sprint

Ready to walk

Home run!

We began our language arts small group centers this week which included highlighting sight words in poems, listening to a story on CD, working with syllables at word work center, reading an online story on the computer, and sorting and matching rhymes, syllables, and words at the pocket chart center.

Syllable race cars

Sorting pictures by word ending sounds

Listening center

Starfall computer story

Highlighting poetry words

Our tooth poem

Matching beginning sounds

Clapping out syllables

Distinguishing between __at and __an words

Displaying our work

 We sing our sight words to tunes every morning and this week everyone had a letter to a word and had to search for friends holding letters they needed to spell their word. Nice job!

We spelled JUMP

Do you know our OF song?

Many letters to find in LITTLE

 Lots of reading is part of each day. Here we are in a reading group. We also began our sight word sentence booklets of ordering words in a sentence.

Our sight word booklet

Reading groups

Story partners

story buddies

 Math is marching along with rekenreks, number equations and number bonds, ten frames, and hands-on activities for making a number in multiple ways using manipulatives.

Robot race to 10

Wow! What order

Cube combinations for 6

Number bonds

Math partners

Picking a crd to make an equation for

Making a teen number

Rekenrek fun

Our combinations for 10

Who can make 10 first?

Who has the larger number?

Can you find the domino that matches our numbers?

Is it a tie?

Nice teamwork

Let's record this

Nice equation

Math work!

 Each day on arrival, we complete a morning work activity for a little practice and review. Then it is off to morning meeting.

Great counting and number printing

 Don't forget time for fun! We had our first indoor recess this week and the toy selection was a real novelty!

Cars anyone?

The week ended with some science vibrations and sound waves along with experiments in volume (!) and pitch. Our Sound Energy unit is not short on sound- head phones might have made my day... Tuning forks were a huge hit as the kids struck the tones and touched solid surfaces and water in bowls- only one (enormous) spill! They saw the water ripple in 'waves' and even got a smallish splash if the tuning fork touched the water just right. The following day we were on to rain sticks, xylophones for pitch, rubber band and box guitars, and tin can drums. One group of drummers broke out in a spontaneous song they all knew as they beat the drums. I guess we have a rock band in the making!

Check it out!

Let's make a guitar

Start up the drums

Can we see rice vibrate on top?

Lovin' these tuning forks

See any vibration?

Splash!

Tuning fork experiments

 First grade is a busy grade as you can see! So much to explore and learn. 
Another happy birthday child was smiling this week as we sang Happy Birthday to Karen! A couple more teeth have met the tooth fairy too - Scarlett and Nataly! 
Next week we have photos on the 18th, and you can return the photo envelope that day or any day before. Hope you have a wonderful weekend- I am looking forward to a quiet one!!

Mrs. Dagley