Quilting Cuties!!

First graders enjoyed many colorful quilting activities this week! We started the week with one of our favorite read alouds, The Quilt Maker's Gift written by Jeff Brumbeau and Gail de Marcken. It is a beautiful story reminding us about the importance of giving and sharing!

We were excited to welcome two quilting experts from the community into our classrooms! Deb and Gail shared many of their fabulous creations with our eager listeners, who asked several thoughtful questions in return.

Our young quilters enjoyed crafting their own quilting squares from colorful paper, which were pieced together into large friendship quilts. Be sure to check out our quilts hanging in the hallway of WE if you get a chance to come visit us! A few students shared some special quilts from their own homes and told us the tales behind their special blankets. This provided us some great practice for both asking and answering questions.  We also went 'sight word' hunting, coloring in a patchwork piece on our word quilt as we noticed these words in books.

 

Pizza, Pizza!

Our pizza unit was a definite hit amongst the first grade friends this past week!  We enjoyed reading many stories on the topic of pizza and visiting about variations of the beloved food.  The students did a wonderful job writing about their favorite kind of pizza and how they like to eat it.  To wrap up our pizza fun, we grabbed our chef's hat and made our own pizza bagels.  Ask your young chef what he/she cooked up for this fun activity!

Fraction Action!

The vocabulary heard throughout first grade this past week was halves, thirds, and fourths!  We had a lot of fun working through our fractions using a Hershey bar...yum!!  Students were given story problems that had them solving how they could share their chocolate equally with others.  It was great to see the powerful thinking their brains were doing as they maneuvered their treat to show fractions!  Of course after all of the hard work, the fraction evidence was devoured!!

Graphing!

Today the first graders enjoyed recording data and reporting data! Using movie themed pictures that were spread throughout the room, students were challenged to record and visually share their information through a graph.  We then looked at our graphs and answered questions using this data.  We will continue to work hard looking at different visual representations of information for the rest of the first grade year.

Eggy Fun!

As the Easter holiday is upon us, we took some time to get our hands dirty and attempt a 'yarn egg' to celebrate the season!  This was a great project that fostered teamwork and definitely taught us to persevere!  We were so proud of the first graders for their hard work with this project and the helpful friend they were to each other.

Spring Concert!

Despite the cold outside, we definitely enjoyed the lovely songs of spring Tuesday evening!  The first graders did a great job sharing their special songs and looked handsome and lovely at the same time!

Shape Fun!

Over the course of this week, students have enjoyed working with shapes throughout our world.  We were introduced to the term, polygon and the rules of polygons.  Students did a terrific job using their creative thinking with straws and twisty ties to build their own polygon.  Looking at 3-Dimensional shapes such as spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and prisms was an exciting time during math as well!  Marshmallows and toothpicks were our math tools to use, as students worked to create 3-D figures within the classroom.