Busy 1st Graders: January 2011

Holiday Party Fun

Thank you to everyone for your generous donations for our classroom Holiday party! It was a HUGE success and the kids were all very excited and had a great time. We did make little snowmen out of marshmallows and here are just a few pictures of what we created... and then they quickly disappeared! :)

Our next class party will be for Valentine's Day! There will be more information to come in February!
Thanks for visiting!!

School-wide Holiday Sing-a-long

Thanks to everyone who participated in our school-wide Holiday Sing-a-long. It was great to see some of the parents there to sing with us! Here are just a few pictures of the class right before we started singing.

In addition to the singing, our school hit our goal of collecting 2,500 cans for the canned food drive so the Principal Mrs. Curcio, our lead teacher Mrs. Foster and the executive board of the Student Council all received pies in their faces. Here are a few photos of Mrs. Curcio:

And Mrs. Foster also getting a pie in her face...

The kids were so excited about this and it was probably the highlight of the assembly, but they sure were great singers, as well! Thank you for your canned food donations. Our class turned in 128 cans!!!
Thanks for visiting!

Writing a story...

We did our first whole story as a class in December. With our writing program, I believe that children need to be able to "say it, before they can write it". This is essential for first graders because they will forget what they were going to write, leave words out, or write an incomplete sentence. So with every story we write together, we will have hand motions to "act out" the story. Using the graphic organizer you will see below we draw "icons" (not pictures because 1st graders will spend all their time drawing, so an icon is a QUICK picture to represent what we want to say). There are actions (or hand motions) for this story, so pull this up on the computer, click on the image to make it larger and ask your child to tell you our story from December! I'll add the text in the caption of the picture just in case they need a prompt. We begin with the elements of a story:

Every story has a setting and a character.
The setting tells us when and where.
The character can be a person or an animal.
Every story has a beginning, middle and end.

One snowy day at the North Pole, a reindeer searched for Santa.
Next, he visited the workshop.
In the end, an excited reindeer found jolly Santa.

After working on developing all the elements of our story and making sure it has an ending. We practice and practice and PRACTICE saying it before we begin to write. This was our first FULL story and I have to say that I was VERY pleased with their writing. Here are some samples of their work!! AMAZING!!!