Another Idea-Filled Week!

Hello First Grade Families!

What a hard-working week we had!  So many students were having "aha!" moments about themselves, in seeing themselves as workers.  Many thought about how to use time, what they need in order to concentrate, and how to organize tasks in order to make small, "do-able" steps to finish.  The work they are doing in the animal project is amazing.  I am learning so much too!  I can't wait for you to come to see their work next week.

Reminder: The sign up is out in class for next week's Student Lead Conferences.  The days are next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 12:45-4pm.  These are minimum days, so pick up is at noon!  We are making it informal and combining it with sharing the Interesting Animals exhibition.  Please sign up or email me which day your family plans to come!

The Interesting Animals project has been designed by the students through a process of discussions around the goals, the expectations and what the students want to get out of it.  Each student decided upon an animal that they wanted to learn more facts about.  The final expectation agreement is to create a realistic drawing of the animal and research 7 interesting facts to share.  They even discussed and agreed upon how the work would be organized on the wall.  

The research has been a great learning point for all the students.  Practicing listening to information that is read to them, synthesizing and finding your own words to explain what you just learned has been tricky.  In Parker's words, "This is hard!" But as the students each hone this skill, they are finding that they are able to remember their facts and share them with the group in discussions.  I know the students are very proud of their hard work! 

Math concepts: We are still practicing time and the use of coins a little each day so that we may find it is getting easier. We also spent some time looking into relationships between numbers.  I hope your child shared the tool we created to help us make connections between the numbers that work together to make 10.  We all use simple tricks like this to help us work out more complicated problems in our lives.  The extra piece of graph paper is for creating your own number connections or sharing math tricks you like as a family.  As always, we love to learn from each other, so don't forget to bring in your work to share!

Speaking of homework-We have been inspired by many friends bringing in inspiring work this week.  Ocean and Bridget have been on a roll writing poems.  Rainli wrote a crafting "how-to".  Addison made a web at home and sent in the photo to share, which inspired others to think about making webs again.   Joey share stories and information about the animals he learned about at the zoo and Ryan plans to share some photos next week!  

Henry's family shared a mystery fruit from their garden, which ended up being loquats!  We looked them up on Wikipedia.  This was a nice connection to the botanic information we learned last week.  Wiki said that most loquats have five seeds, so we checked when we had our tasting.  We had different findings so we graphed it! 

More measurement with our 8th grade buddies!  This week we graphed heights to make relationships between these measurements.  This was inspired by all the discussions about our animal wall.  When you can see a length in relationship to yourself it gives us more concrete understanding.

This week we continued to investigate and discover more about simple machines.  The students are just beginning to understand some of this, which has lead to some interesting discussions. Each student has shared what caught their eye in the videos, what questions they have and what does or doesn't make sense to them.

The students have been interested to think about what things in our lives include simple machines.  So far, they have come up with elevators and escalators, as well as our slides on the play yard. Can you find any simple machines at home?

Here are some videos that we watched parts of:

We watched the beginning of this one a few times!

This one made us think of our own theories!

We watched this one without the narration to see how pulleys work.

Well, that's a lot.  I hope it was fun to go through and not overwhelming.  There are just so many cool things to share because this group is so dynamic and curious.  I will see you soon at the park!  Love, Jennifer