Native American Games

Pam Holz, our Washington County Conservationist visited our classroom yesterday to show students that you can have lots of fun without much equipment during the Thanksgiving season.  Students enjoyed playing 3 different Native American games: Shoulder Wrestle, Pebble Drop and One Pebble Game.  Students were challenged in their strength, patience, and cleverness to win these games.  These fun games tied in well with our Social Studies work as first graders have been learning about the First Thanksgiving and how young pilgrim and Native American boys and girls were creative in making up games.

Pam showing the students how to play Pebble Drop!

First Graders trying to 'trick' their partners with the One Pebble game!

 

Students using the upper body strength for Shoulder Wrestle!

Authors at Work!

Over the course of this school year, we have been encouraging writing through the use of free write journals during work on writing as a center. We also plan weekly mini lessons focused on writing in our classrooms.  This week, students had their first experiences with one-on-one writing conferences. We were excited to hear all of our students' ideas and see the growth they have made in their writing already! Our writing this year has focused around the philosophy of 6 + 1 Traits for Writing.  Through a lot of discussion and modeling, we have elaborated on the traits that you would find in pieces of good writing.  We have slowly covered the writing traits of: ideas, organization, and conventions. We will be teaching the traits of voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and presentation throughout the remainder of the school year.

Short definitions of the writing traits are listed below:

Ideas (the meaning and development of the message)
Organization (the structure of the piece)
Voice (the tone of the piece-the personal stamp the writer leaves)
Word Choice (the vocabulary a writer chooses to use to make the piece interesting)
Sentence Fluency (how words and phrases flow together)
Conventions (the correct usage of grammar)
Presentation (the overall appearance of the work)

We are moving towards publishing a new piece of writing to be posted on KidBlog when they are complete. We will let you know when these pieces are posted on the blog!

Veteran's Day!

During our work in Social Studies this week, the students have had the opportunity to learn more about the national holiday of Veteran's Day.  We discussed the importance of our military and how soldiers help our country every day.  We also enjoyed the story, Saluting Grandpa (an explanation of the Honor Flights).  Students then brainstormed describing words for soldiers (e.g. protector, brave, strong, caring, amazing, nice, helpful).  Our school-wide morning assembly also allowed us the opportunity to see and hear about military artifacts.  Thank you again to the American Legion Veterans who came to share about this honoring day and a big thank you to our Veterans worldwide!

Happy Halloween!

Hoping your Halloween was full of more 'treats' than 'tricks'!  Thank you again to the first grade families for sending in paper products and goodies for this special day!!

50th Day

Wow....what a great celebration our 50th Day was in 1st grade!  Students were dressed to 'twist and shout' their way through the day and it was great fun to see everyone is their special attire!  Our morning started with 1st graders in awe of a 1950's video showing what school life was like many years ago.  Students also enjoyed hearing from a special guest speaker, Charlotte Morgan, who shared what life was like growing up in the 50's.  First Graders then challenged themselves to different 50's activities such as; how many bubbles they could blow, how many 'twists' twisted, how many bunny hops hopped, how many times they could hula hoop and how high they could count!  The young ladies and gents then put their writing skills to work as they sequenced the steps to making your own rootbeer float.  During math, students worked hard estimating how many tootsie rolls/fireballs would fit their 'records'.  Last, this fun day came to a close with music from the 50's, complete with a record player to play some of the oldies!

Charlotte sharing pictures and insight from the 1950's!

Bunny hopping, hula hooping, and bubble blowing action in 50 seconds!

Estimation and measurement skills hard at work!

A Step Back Into Time for the 1A Friends!

The 1B Class Enjoyed the Day in 50s style!

Mrs. Droll sharing music with the record player.