This week started off very exciting because we began to count down to the much anticipated Fall Fair.
On Monday, we began really discussing goals for our first grade year. Throughout the week, we worked with Mrs. Maggart and discussed our feelings about each subject area, (even grading ourselves on our Self-Report Cards) and what our goals may be in these areas. We discussed how in order to meet, or reach out goals, we must think of the steps we are going to take to make this happen. We are excited to share all of our hard work, thoughts, and plans with our parents next week during our beginning of the year Parent-Teacher Conferences.
We began our unit on identifying the beginning, middle, and end of stories and how important it is for us as authors to begin writing pieces with this same 3-part plan in mind. We will continue with it more next week.
In Reading Round-up, we were introduced to another activity: Working on Writing. When we have this activity, we get to visit the writing table and choose to write a story, letter, or make a list. We really had fun experimenting with writing letters and were excited to seal them in envelopes and present them to our families and friends.
We also learned more about making inferences: using what we read and what we already know (our schema) and making a guess or inference about what the characters are doing or feeling. A great book to use to make many, many inferences is No David. We had so much time looking for clues and making lots and lots of inferences.
This week, we were visited by the Round Rock Fire Department and we attended their safety assembly. We "earned our belts" in areas such as learning about evacuation plans, stop, drop, and rolling, how to call 911 for help, and how important it is to remind our parents to test and maintain our smoke detectors. We had a great time and learned so much while laughing very hard at some of the funny skits.
In Math, we focused more on addition. We learned different strategies we could use to determine how much "one more" was or even how much "two less" was when we started at different numbers. We used our math tools to explore different ways to make one number and how to write a coordinating number sentence for our representation. We even learned a fun dominoes game that we enjoyed playing with our buddies as we used these strategies to find a domino that was "one less" to make a connection.
Science was full of exploring this week! We learned more about properties and describing different forms of matter. We made a fun flip book and tried to describe the properties of an object so our buddy could guess what was inside. We also learned that we can change the properties of matter! We created a flip book to help us remember what happens when we add heat or freezing temperatures to different states of matter. Then, we experimented with play dough and all of the ways we could change the proprieties of this solid.
We even tried a fun experiment with a bowl of water, a napkin taped to the bottom of a cup, and a little bit of scientific exploring. We put the cup straight into the bowl of water and...the napkin stayed dry! We learned that it was air (or gas) that was between the napkin and the water, keeping the nakin dry. Cool!
One day, Mrs. Maggart showed us a magic trick. She had three different containers with different colored liquids inside. She asked us to use our eyes and predict which container we thought held the most. Then, we gathered around to pour each containers' contents into measuring cups. And guess what? They all have the SAME amount of liquid in them! We learned about how liquid takes the shape of whatever container it is in and sometimes, that can trick our eyes. What a fun experiment! Mrs. Maggart has even more experiments in store for us next week, all from this cool book!
On Friday, we were all ready for our class election in Social Studies. We were voting on a class representative for our Student Leadership Council. Our candidates gave wonderful speeches and some even created amazing posters. Finally, we made our decision and took our turn at the polls, voting on our ballots for one candidate. We placed our ballots in our ballot box. Mrs. Maggart counted the votes this weekend and it was a tie...Skylar and Sarah are our Tiger Team Student Leadership Council Representatives. Yay!
Finally, Saturday arrived and it was time for the Fall Fair! What a blast! Mrs. Maggart even got a few fun pictures of some of the events!
Now for a three-day weekend and back to school on Tuesday!
Love,
