Tiger Team: The End of October

Dear Family,

With the end of October arriving and the beginning of November already come and gone, our first grade year is quickly flying by! Check out our photo gallery to see what we have been up to both inside and outside of the classroom. We are such busy worker bees, learning and growing each and every day!

Graphs, graphs, graphs galore! We have studies sorting, taking surveys, and creating various forms of graphs using all sorts of data!

We took a class survey and recorded our results using a tally chart.

Then, we were able to take our survey results and create a bar graph. Did you know that bar graphs can be horizontal and vertical?

Pictographs helped us see which we had the most of in our Tiger Team!

We practiced taking a survey by asking our classmates what their favorite lunch choice was.

Then, we took our results and created a bar graph, pictograph, and pie graph.

We read graphs and used data to answer our Question of the Day each day.

We got to choose our very own survey question and created a final project where we turned our tally chart into a graph(s) of our choice.

We are mathematicians each and every day! We learned all about counting on 1,2, and 0. We discussed all sorts of strategies.

We created our own count on addition stories.

We learned fun, new challenging math puzzples like this "Super Spoke" where we had to work backwards to determine what digit was missing from the squares.

Here we are working with our buddies to solve those puzzles!

Here we are working in our math buckets! We create our own vocabulary cards of our "math words" learned.

We practice working with numbers, like skip counting.

We play games with our buddies.

We work on creating graphs.

We work on our addition facts.

Reading Round-up! We have learned all about word work during our Reading Round-up time, a time for us to work on making, spelling, and reading words from books we read and words we learn to spell during Word Study each morning.

Here we are working on writing. What shall we choose to write today: a letter, a story, a list, or a poem?

We make time to read-to-self and enjoy reading the books we check out from our Tiger Team class library as well as books we have already read in our guided reading groups with Mrs. Maggart.

Here we go working on words. Look what words I spelled using WikiSticks!

Listening to reading is always fun! And because we have such amazing parents, we are able to have 8 listening stations so there is always a great book to enjoy!

Writers Workshop is our time to celebrate our writing and we have learned so much about writing various pieces. We learned about writing about a "small moment" or the seed of a juicy story!

For our writing benchmark, we had to write about a small moment:

We each brainstormed a small moment and added it to our watermelon.

Here is our completed product!

As we are working on our writing more and more, we have learned more about the writing process. After we complete a draft, we have learned about revising our work, editing, and then finally publishing.

Finally, we are ready to share our finished pieces just like real authors!

When we are editing, we are sure to check for those special words that get a capital letter.

Here is our growing genre board of genres that we can choose to write.

We even learned about writing an expository piece, a piece to show our knowledge of the facts we know about a subject.

As we learned to write an expository piece, we also read some by mentor authors. We learned to determine what the "big idea" or main idea of a piece was and pick out all of the facts that support the main idea.

Then, we worked with our table groups to read a non-fiction piece and determine the main idea and 3 facts. We created main idea kites to fly these ideas all over our classroom. Here we are sharing our finished work with the class.

And our kites are ready to hang! The facts make up the tail!

We have also been studying nouns and verbs. For nouns, we went on a noun hunt. Mrs. Maggart hid nouns all over the classroom, in some very sneaky places!

We also learned about action words: verbs. We practiced acting out different verbs. Then, we created our own action heroes and chose verbs that our action hero could do!

Finally, we searched the room again and separated the verbs from the nouns.

We completed our energy unit in Science and are quite the experts at identifying objects that produce these forms of energy!

We began to study magnets and explore with what kinds of objects are magnetic and which are not magnetic.

In Social Studies, we had so much fun having a mock election for president. Our candidates were duck, Grace, and our teacher. We cast our ballots, tallied the results, and created a graph. We even got to read some really funny books about elections!

We also learned about Veterans' Day and enjoyed making letters thanking our veterans for all they do for our country.

Of course we have to make time to have some fun! Red Ribbon week was such a blast with days like "silly hats" and even a magic show!

Look at his lovely assistant, Mrs. Gunn!

And what a blast we had with our 3rd grade buddies making our Boo Buddy Book Reports! Here we are creating the head of the main characters of our picture books.

And to complete our project, we turned our "treat" bags into the covers of our books. The "treats" inside our bags were filled with information about our books like character, setting, problem, solution, etc.