Thursday, May 14, 2015

Toad, Frog, Pollywog!

Here's one of our favorite new songs that Ms. Bergeron and Mrs. O'Brien shared with us!



Developing Chick Embryo (animated)


          Check out this cool video that Grace's mom shared with us!

May 5th Newsletter

Dear Room 2 Parent(s),                                                 
     Happy May to all! We hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy some of the lovely weather we’ve had lately! The children have been soaking up the warmer weather on the playground, free of coats and boots…snow pants are but a distant memory for us all!

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We Love Whales In Room 2!

    Big whales, small whales, you name it! We’ve been learning about these graceful, gentle creatures for several weeks in class. We’ve read a wonderful array of fiction and nonfiction books, as well as some new poems and songs. Our favorites include “Blue Whale” and “A Whale Is Not A Fish.” We also really enjoyed The Snail and the Whale, Ibis, Humphrey: The Lost Whale, and I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean. We’ve had our hands on some artifacts from the New England Aquarium, including real whale teeth and baleen. We also played an echolocation game that helped us to learn how several types of whales find their food. We measured the lengths of a number of whales and recorded each length with masking tape on the floor in the cafeteria hallway. We’ve learned about common traits of all whales and have focused on a few specific whales, such as the humpback whale, the blue whale, the beluga whale, the narwhal, the orca, and the sperm whale. Some are known for singing songs and frequent breaching (humpbacks), some are known for being deep divers (sperm whales), some are fierce predators (orcas), and some are playful and smart (bottlenose dolphins). We also discovered that many whales migrate hundreds of miles each year to find food and have their young. Children found it interesting that toothed whales have one blowhole while baleen whales have two blowholes!
    Children wrote “All About…” books in Writer’s Workshop. Each child chose his/her favorite whale and used a graphic organizer to collect information about that whale from our classroom library. They used a variety of nonfiction books to research the following questions from the graphic organizer:

  1. Is it a toothed whale or a baleen whale?
  2. How long is the whale?
  3. What does the whale look like?
  4. What does the whale eat?
  5. What are some interesting facts that you learned about this whale?

Each student filled in the graphic organizer with the information he/she found and then created sentences using the information from each section of the organizer. We’re sure you’ll learn a lot about whales from the fabulous book that your child has brought home! We even made a whale mural with our fifth grade buddies! Each team created a construction paper whale to add to our watercolor ocean background that students painted. We’ve sure had a whale of a good time studying these amazing animals!

     If you’re looking for an extension to our whale unit, I’d strongly recommend the IMAX movie at the Museum of Science called “Humpback Whales.” It’s a wonderful journey through the ocean with these magnificent creatures~my first grade sons LOVED it!
    
The Life Cycle Of The Chicken
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   We hope you’ve heard about our unit on the Life Cycle of the Chicken. Our eggs have arrived from the farm and have been put into the incubator. Today is Day 6 of the 21-day incubation period. We’re sure you’ll hear a great deal about the life cycle of the chicken over the next several weeks! Former first graders have been asking since October WHEN the eggs will arrive, so you can imagine how exciting this unit of study has been for others and will be for these first graders as well!
    We’re also learning about another animal’s life cycle. Mrs. O’Brien’s and Ms. Bergeron’s classes study the life cycle of the frog and they offered to share some of their tadpoles that hatched so that we could observe them as they grew into froglets and then frogs.  It feels like we’re running a zoo in our classroom and the kids couldn’t be happier! Our class fish, Strawberry, also seems to be enjoying his new pals!

Literacy

    We encourage everyone to continue the valuable practice of reading with your child for at least 20 minutes every day. It’s so wonderful to curl up and  enjoy a good book together! We hope you are as proud of the progress your child is making as we are. All of the students in our class are making important gains this year, and encouraging your child to read both independently and with you shows him/her that you know how hard he/she has been working. We’ve been enjoying the “Piggie and Elephant” books by Mo Willems, using them to practice attending to print and punctuation while we read aloud. Children worked with partners to read several different books in the series; the smiles and giggles were endless as they flipped through the pages and experimented with tone, fluency, and pausing.

Math

    As their work in mathematics progresses, children are beginning to use larger numbers.  We have explored the system we use for writing larger numbers by focusing on the concept of place value.  For example, in the number 72, 7 is in the tens place, so there are “7 groups of 10” and 2 is in the ones place so there are “2 groups of one” or “two extras.” Children have used Unifix Cubes to represent numbers and to find the sums of two numbers. They also used place value to determine “greater than” and “less than” relationships.  We have also continued our work with addition and subtraction facts. Knowing basic math facts (with the sum of up to 10, or with 10 as the greatest minuend, i.e. 10-7=3) is as important to mathematics as knowing words by sight is to reading. Your child should begin to master many of the addition and subtraction facts by the end of the school year. Learning the facts takes practice. It’s not necessary to practice for a long time, but it is important to practice often as we do in class.
     We’ve also been working on telling time on the hour and the half hour, both with digital clocks and analog clocks. In addition to telling time, we’ve been focusing on identifying coins and counting the value of coins, including combinations of pennies, nickels, and dimes. We will introduce the quarter next week.  We encourage everyone to practice counting small amounts of money with your child; transitioning from counting by 25’s to counting by 10’s, to 5’s to 1’s when counting quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies can be tricky, so consistent practice is important.
     Later in May, we will focus on geometry. We’ll work with both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional shapes. Children will practice classifying blocks by their shape and size and will practice recognizing attributes such as number of sides and angles. We’ll explore 3-D shapes including rectangular prisms, pyramids, spheres, cylinders, cones, and triangular prisms. We will continue our work with place value, addition, subtraction, telling time, money as well. We will also be learning about fractions in June. Children will explore the ideas that fractional parts of a whole must be equal. We’ll introduce fraction notation and will label fractional parts of figures. We’ll also practice counting equal parts of wholes, and will identify shapes divided into halves and fourths.
                                           
                                                  Image result for celebration

Save The Date!
Please mark your calendar!
Room 2’s First Grade Celebration 
Friday, June 12, 2015
8:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.

We hope you’ll be able to attend! Calendars fill up quickly this time of year so we hope this helps to give you some advance notice. We’ll be in touch with further details in the weeks to come.

Other important dates for your calendar…

Wednesday, May 20th: Chicks (hopefully!!) Hatch

Monday, May 25th: Memorial Day: No School

Thursday, May 28th: Fifth Grade Play
(First Graders to attend)

Tuesday, June 2nd: Happy Hollow Concert
(First Graders to attend)

Monday, June 8th and Tuesday, June 9th: Book Fair

Monday, June 8th: Happy Hollow Picnic

Wednesday, June 10th: Rain Date for Happy Hollow Picnic

Wednesday, June 10th: Field Day

Friday, June 12th: Room 2 First Grade Celebration:
8:15 am-9:15 am

Monday, June 15th: Field Day Rain Date

Monday, June 22nd: Last Day of School

One final note: We’ve posted our Iditarod and Maple Sugaring newsletters on our new classroom website. You can check it out by going to the Happy Hollow Home Page, clicking on
·      For Students
·      Happy Hollow Classrooms
·      Grade 1
·      Ms. Weig’s Website

It’s DEFINITELY a work in progress, but a major milestone for a non-techie like myself! I will try to update it every few weeks or so and will continue to send home paper copies of the newsletter for the time being until I’m super comfortable updating without our trusty computer specialist Mrs. Crozier by my side!

As always, please let us know if you have any questions about your child’s day or about our curriculum.

Enjoy the week!
Take care,
   Lise Weig :) and Mary Ann O’Loughlin  :)