Colorado and Problem Solving!

Hello First Grade Families!
Happy Autumn! How are you? I am well. My trip was lovely. I have never been anywhere to see the true fall colors, so I felt very lucky to be there, as well as to be able to have the time with my friend for her wedding. We worked hard on decorations and also had time to catch up and enjoy our togetherness.

Today I showed some photos from my trip.  The kids were interested in the old smelting ovens and the colors of the trees.  They also called the rivers were "real".  Not just like others they've seen?  It was neat to see their enthusiasm about nature.

Lately we have been exploring many concepts. The children are very curious about water and have been working on hypotheses and researching answers to questions they have.

We also got a lovely care package in the mail from our wish list. THANK YOU to Silas's family who made this gift! We got two new games and yesterday we began playing with them. One is on money concepts and the children were figuring out how to use our American coin quantities to make certain amounts. The kids were getting good at realizing that (for instance) you could use four dimes and seven nickles for 47 cents, but that also there are other easier ways to make this!

Our class council last week and this week brought up many issues the children would like solved. Since there are so many, friends decided to take one to think on more. Since they offered to come up with possible solutions, I will put their names down next to these. Here they are:

Balls getting popped on the yard: Ocean, Bryana, Kaylie.
People pushing: Rainli, Solomon and Milayna.
Having to wait for friends who are not with us at meeting times: Joey, Ocean and Niko.
People not letting others in the houses at recess: Ben and Rainli.
People hitting swingers because they are throwing balls under the swings: Peyton and Milayna.
People sliding down on others: Avery.

What solutions might these kids come up with? It is nice to see children offer to brainstorm ideas to better work their world. This is an important process for these children because they are learning to be their own problem solvers and are beginning to see that they have power to make changes in their society through their own suggestions and through their modeling of citizenship. It is always so moving to see children bringing up ideas of how others can work better and making their own class agreements. And they are so proud because they know that they made a difference.

Henry asked me to post the song we did in September. Here it is:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=we+all+sing+with+the+same+voice+sesame+street&view=detail&mid=645E7D0A61B84FC82CD4645E7D0A61B84FC82CD4&first=0&FORM=LKVR8


And finally, we are having our park date this weekend. I don't know if the weather will cooperate, but check your email for information, just in case we have a sunny weekend. If not, we'll do it at a later date!

Have a great week! Love, Jennifer

Back to School and our many interests...

Hello Families!

Thank you so much for making our Back to School afternoon so nice.  It was great to see the kids explaining the different parts of the day as they watched the slide show, showing their work to their parents and also telling their parents who all the students are in our class.  These kids have so many great ideas and are already becoming a lovely group of people who are so willing to help and collaborate.  I feel like they are going to make this a fabulous year!

Today we had a rainy morning.  This may be why we had so few friends come to school.  With only 13 friends here today, we made the day a little different.  We took the time to begin learning other skills, kind of like a club day.  Friends voted on what they wanted to start first (sewing, wire or watercolor) and sewing won. 

Today's activities included:

Identifying the parts of how a pie graph works.
What can color do to give information?
What information does the circle tell us?

The math challenge: making new ones and solving old ones. 
How do you write an equation? What are the parts? What makes it readable?
What strategies did you use to solve the math challenge you chose?

Following directions and identifying directionality through sewing.
What side is the thread on?  What length do you want your stitch to be and how do you make this happen?
How much thread do you have left, is it long enough for your next stitch?

Surveys: defining your questions and how using tallies effectively.

Adding to yesterday's journal entries on horses, sharing thoughts, knowledge or questions.
What are key words that go with our agreed upon topic?
What are the writing norms we need to follow so others can read our work?

Remember, our school policy about "no meaningful homework" is partly because we believe family time is important.  So if you find doing these activities at home is making life stressed, that is not what we wish for. We always hope learning will be fun and we wish you lots of important family connection time, so please make your homework decisions according to what works best for you as a family!

If your child is interested in homework, or likes to extend these activities at home, then these are great ideas to get you started. The children have also been creating -er and -ing poems and many say they'd like to do this also. So many ideas!


I hope you are have a lovely weekend!  Thank you for sharing your creative thinkers with me!  Love, Jennifer

Getting Organized!

Hi families!

How are you?  We have so much work going that we are working on structures for you to find out what they are up to.  Today we created a work in progress board for friends to keep track of what they are doing and what they want to do.  This has helped them do this without me!

There are so many things I could write about, it's exciting.  I will keep this short so I can push "publish"!

We got our math challenge wall started last week.  Friends write up math questions for others to investigate and solve.  This week friends put up multiplication challenges and we talked about grouping.  For example 7x2 is 7 groups of 2 or 2 groups of 7.  The kids have been realizing this is pretty neat.  Here are some images:

We have also been talking about our classroom management.  We are forming many brainstorms of ideas that work for our class, or things that will help us while we work.  Here are a few:

There are so many things to agree on, to figure out and to do to create our dynamic community.  We are hard at work on all of this.  I hope you can make it to our Back to School night to see what your child is up to.

Also, have you met Sandra?  She will be our Helper Teacher, as the children call her, for times when I will be in other teachers class to mentor them.  I hope you get a chance to meet her in the coming weeks.

COME ON  THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 22 any time from 3:30-6pm!

Have a great night!  Love, Jennifer

Beginning Explorations

Hello Families!

I hope you had a safe and enjoyable surprise three day weekend!

Today was  our first Explorations day.  Our two classes this session are Musical Theater and Stop Motion Annimation.  It should be a fun experience!

The first class worked on rhuthm and counting by fours.  The groups really kept each other on the beat.  The second class took this time to get to know a camera and to test different styles of camera angles, taking shots to see how they will come out.  We are so excited to see how these great classes unfold!

I will write more soon, but just wanted to share the class topics they will be exploring this session. Have a great week, Jennifer