Gratitude!

Hello First Grade Families!

I hope you had a lovely weekend.  I did.  I have been trying to keep up walking more for exercise and it has been fun.  The image above is a rock I found on one of my beach walks this weekend.  Cool, eh?

Next weekend is our class park day!  Please check your email for this information.  I hope to see many of you out on Saturday!

I left school Friday feeling lucky.  THANK YOU to all the families who have been bringing in donations to the class recently.  (See images at the end of this post!)

Henry and Jenna's families have sent in plants, seeds and mystery fruit.

Joey, Ocean and Silas' families have donated lots of books and magazines.

Silas' family donated a cool microscope tool.

Taylor and Bridget's family loaned and donated some neat geologic artifacts. 

Peyton's family found and donated a neat cactus skeleton.

Bridget's family built our arbor, our second planter, and donated lots for our beautification project, as well as curious mystery animals.

Elliana's family donated new finger puppets and baby preying manta.

Ryan's family donated many things we still use daily: the Prisma pencil set and animal skeleton slides.

Hannah Eileen's family has been giving us lots of building advice and labor.

Ocean's family loaned us a great big light table.

And so many families donated books from the book fair!

I'm sure I will walk into our class tomorrow morning and realize there was someone I forgot on this list.  If so- SORRY!  So much giving to keep track of- amazing!

Thank you, also, to the families who have been bringing in cut flowers, doing our class laundry, dusting and filing!  Homework is another form of giving to the class because it inspires us all.  Thank you so much to those of you who continually bring in work from home.  It is neat to see what you are up to as a family or by yourself at home. Thank you, to each of you, for making our class so rich!  

Last week was full of beautiful experiences.  I am posting lots of images so that your child can tell you all about it.  First up, coin practice.  The kids are getting faster at sorting and organizing the coins so that they can count them in easy ways: by twos, fives, tens, which ever is best according to their worth.  Keep up this practice at home.  Practice is what makes it permanent knowledge!

I think a penny might have fallen off the table before the photo was taken for one of these...  Other math concepts we are still investigating are time and clocks, which has lead us to thinking about how simple machines work.  We will be looking into this more next week!

Last week we took advantage of the beautiful weather and got out to nature.  There is a nice little park with lots of labels for the plantings up the street from school.  The students thought it was interesting to hear the common and Latin names.  But how do we know how to pronounce Latin?  We walked up and made it a botanic walk by trying to learn some new names of plants.  Can you name any of these?

Our animal research continues.  Below you see the organization style that the class agreed upon: habitat location.  We had a discussion on the agreements that the students created for the project.  The seven questions the students agreed everyone would answer have proven to be hard for many.  This has been a great learning experience about how to design class agreements.  Due to the nature of many books and websites, it is not always easy to find answers for the specifics we came up with. The students discussed their difficulties and came up with new project expectations.  Now each student will find 7 interesting facts about their animal, plus the length or height.  The students can use the previous questions as jumping off points, but can write about other interesting things they learn.  This was a great learning moment and the project is on a roll again.  

Here are a few of their illustrations and below are images of our measurement wall.  This wall has brought up some neat discussions from each person's disbelief or amazement in realizing the true size of an animal!

Thank you for reading and discussing this with your child!

Enjoy your week, Jennifer