Fantastic Fish!

After learning about the characteristics of fish and writing about them in our animal book we did an activity called “A Great Catch”. We read words on fish shapes and then sorted them into nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They put the fish into pockets and then went “fishing” where they “caught” an adjective, noun, and verb and put them into complete sentences and illustrated their work.

     

After studying fish facts we used our animal graphic organizer to learn and research about different types of fish. They worked in small groups again and then shared their work. They did a great job and LOVE to share what they learn! They were very sharp researchers!!

 

Our ESU Pen Pals!

We had a wonderful surprise on Wednesday, May 11 when our pen pals from Emporia State stopped to see us on their way to their tournament in Texas. My oldest daughter plays softball for Emporia State and her team has done community service all year and one of their projects was to write to our class. They made cards for us and sent us treats all year and we made cards and pictures for them also and then I would deliver them when I went to games. It was a special day to finally meet our pen pals! They stayed for about 30 minutes and they talked nonstop!

     

Measurement and Fractions

We are keeping busy with Math and our topic of measurement and fractions. We incorporated some literature that made our learning even more fun. We enjoyed the story The Inchworm and then made these cute inchworms. We then went around the room and measured things with our “inchworm rulers” and recorded what we measured.

   

Then we made these really cute “fractionpillars” to learn about fractions. I got this activity from another teacher’s blog (http://thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com) and she had a freebie for it. Lucky us! They turned out so cute and were a great way to introduce fractions. We then made these caterpillars to show equal parts and how to divide shapes. 

Plants and Earth Day!

It seems like a lifetime ago that I worked on this blog. (and just realized that these posts are out of order sorry!) PLEASE forgive me…I just can’t seem to keep up with my own kid’s schedules these days. With one daughter wrapping up her college softball season and traveling to Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas City, and Emporia on the weekends doesn’t leave me much time. And my middle daughter wrapping up her senior year… I have been busy planning and celebrating her graduation and the excitement of her high school softball team making it to state! Tonight I worked on grades and now I am trying to catch up all the pictures from the last 3 weeks… a LOT of learning has been done! Here is what we did with our plant unit:

These were some of the centers: Place Value Flower Pots: they rolled place value dice of 100’s 10’s and 1’s and created the largest number they could and compared them to their center partner. They did sentence scrambles about plants.

Growing Base Words and making new words using suffix endings of –ing, –ed, and –s. Then they read words on vegetables and decided if they were ripe (real) or rotten (nonsense) words.

Our spelling rule was using the ending sound of y and we sorted words that made the long e sound using the y and the long i sound using the ending sound of y. Another center was “Time to Bloom” where they worked on time to the 1/2 hour.

One of our reading skills was learning about “homophones”: words that sound the same but spelled different. They matched these flower homophone partners. Our listening center was Franklin Plants a Tree. They did comprehension questions after listening to this story. This story led into our Earth Day Celebration.

  

We made these cute Earth Day Creatures to celebrate that all living things need to be taken care of and our part is to take care of our planet Earth!

We read the story The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle and made these plant posters to show what all plants need to grow.

 

We decorated our room with these cute flowers. We are all GROWING in First Grade!