Holiday Greetings & Reading Comprehension Practice at Home!

The couple of weeks leading up to Christmas was a busy time for First Graders.  A HUGE thanks to our Homeroom Mom - Angela Hall - for organizing & implementing a fantastic Holiday Party for your children.  There will be a 2nd classroom party coming soon (February 14th) - so please lend a hand to help in some way when she contacts you all!  It will be here before we know it.  Here is a gathering of pictures & video made into a little iMovie for your enjoyment!  (Loving the iMovie app on iPads!)

Just a reminder that the first day back is January 7th for students (Tuesday) and please help them to return their Friday Folder (Red) signed by you!  Report Cards will come home Wednesday, January 8th.   There will be mid-year Reading & Writing assessments done during January during the regular school day (no early dismissal days for this testing session.)  Please understand that expectations and academics begin to increase rapidly for your child this 2nd semester of school.  Continue to work each night on reading and asking comprehension questions about what they are reading.  Your child can write out the answers or verbally tell them.  Some ideas are:
Fiction Comprehension Questions
l) Retell the beginning of the story.
2)Retell the middle.
3) Retell the end.
4) What was your favorite part - why?
5) Who was your favorite character - why?
6) If there was a problem in the story - what was it and how did it get solved?
7) Did you make any "connections" with this story?  (Connect to self, text or world?)

NonFiction Comprehension Questions/Activities
1) Ask your child to write/tell 3 new facts they learned from the book.
2) Ask your child to write down any words they did not know and to try and guess their meaning by using text clues or picture clues.
3) Ask your child to write their own nonfiction book about a topic that interests them.  Include "captions" for pictures.

Happy New Year and can't wait to see the kids again on January 7th!

Snow Days, Telling Time & Happy Birthday!

I know we will hate having to make up those Snow Days... but it really is kind of great to experience real "winter weather" down here in Texas!  I hope everyone survived safe and sound!  Besides talking  A LOT about snow, ice, sledding, snowballs, etc.   we did find some time to begin to learn about telling time both digitally and with an analog clock. We are practicing time to the hour, half hour and beyond on our classroom analog clocks, "Tell Time" iPad app, and good 'ol fashioned partner games with a classmate. Here are 2 short videos of students in action telling time!

Also this week we had a "dual birthday" - mine and Ayah's on December 12th!  I don't usually advertise when I turn "39" each year (haha!) ... but had to send out a big Thank You to Ayah's mom who not only sent in cupcakes for the students to enjoy, but a giant sheet cake for all the teachers and staff to have a slice on my behalf!  I never received so many "Happy Birthdays" before in 1 day!  Thank you to Ayah's Mom and everyone for making #39 (again, hahaha!!) such a fun day for us!

We have a fun and exciting week coming up and I will be sure to post on this blog over the holiday break.  I hope everyone has a safe, happy Winter Break - and to those of you who celebrate Christmas  - I hope you have a very Merry one!

Hello December!

It is still the season of Fall -- and First Graders were supposed to go outside on Friday (December 6th) to observe and take pictures of a late fall day around campus --- but instead everyone was home with our first Snow Day in several years!  WOW!  You gotta love Texas!    So, since I was stuck in the house all day,  I decided to play around with "iMovie" and created a little something from our Gingerbread Project.  Enjoy!

Students are learning to really explore the world around them and to group things into solids, liquids and gases.  They are learning to describe the "properties" of things around them -- (color, size, shape, texture, etc.) -- and this is an excellent skill to practice at home!  

We are also measuring items with non-standard units -- and we made a candy cane art project -- discussed how this is a "solid" type of matter and they used different nonstandard units to measure their candy canes. They took lots of pictures and are working on a slide show using the iPad app 30 Hands.  Here are a couple pictures of ways we measure in First Grade:

Students know that if they do not have a ruler or tape measure around that they can always use "units" of some sort to measure -- as long as the units are the same type and size!  (This is another great skill to practice at home!)

And here are a few RANDOM pictures from the week: