Week of November 7th Recap

       We have been studying United States Symbols and this week we finished up the flag and started on the Bald Eagle.

            One of the activities we did was describe the flag in mathematical terms. The kids did a wonderful job thinking outside of the box.

       We have been working on active listening and participation so for this activity I did one on our big chart paper and the kids followed along and filled in their own papers. 

7 red, 6 white
A 1st grade example

Sorry this one ended up sideways!
This is another example of our work.

      Since Veterans Day was on Friday we read a book about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and made a list of characteristics of soldiers. The kids then made their own soldiers (they turned out WONDERFUL) and wrote their own soldier characteristics. I am hoping to hang these in our hallway so stop by to check them out if you are in the building! 

Working hard on her soldier

Look how adorable all of these soldiers are! <3

His says, "soldiers are brave"

Love her hair :)

This is the list that the kids came up with after we read our book.
They had all of these ideas on their own! Such a great class.
    
Since we have been working on author’s purpose in writing I decided to work together to do a shared writing for Thanksgiving. The kids all had their very own whiteboards and we “voted” on which word to put into our story by having them write their words and hold them up for us all to see.  This was a great way for everyone to participate in stretching out words and working together on our story.

 

      
(Please ignore my spelling error! I didn’t notice it until AFTER I took the picture! I will be fixing it).

            We started our study of bald eagles by sharing what we think we know about bald eagles. We then read part of a non-fiction book about bald eagles and added to our new learning as well as moving some of our schema notes into the misconception box. We will continue adding to this chart next week.  

 This was the poem that we worked on all week. There was a lot of wonderful language for us to explore (crag, azure, wrinkled sea). We then looked for all of the sight words that we knew from the poem.

Our recipe for this week was bald eagles. How cute did they turn out? The kids put frosting on marshmallows and rolled them in coconut. I’m so proud of them for trying coconut again!

Made by a first grader. He did better than I did!
The "beak" is a dried cherry and he decided to split it open to make it look more real, GENIUS!

50th Day Celebration

      We had so much fun celebrating our 50th day of school! We had a big 50's celebration on that Friday.

      The kids dressed up in their 50's finest. :) Jeans, rolled t-shirts, poodle skirts and scarves abounded!

       The kids practiced their 50's dance moves-- here they are doing the swim!

      We talked about how 50 is 5 groups of 10. the kids used a 50's chart to help count out 50 fruit rings for a tasty necklace.

      This is a great fine motor activity! We only had a few necklace casualties. Once they were restrung we were all set to go!

      We used blue cardboard to separate our rings into groups of 10 to ensure each child had 50 fruit loops.

      Root beer floats!!! The kids loved this yummy drink as our Friday treat. 

      Check out those skirts! These girls are straight from the 50's!

      After being educated as to WHOM Elvis was (woah!) we had a sock hop!

      It was straight adorable to see everyone's dance skills. :) :) :)

      We ended the day with our own "stroll" dance. The kids had so much fun!

Pumpkins & Party time

      With pumpkins we got to try cooking many different pumpkin products, the kids all did really well tasting many different pumpkin things! Since I didn't remember to take pictures of everything here is one of the more interesting pumpkin recipes we did. :)

Here a student is adding vanilla pudding to
a can of pumpkin.

I believe it was 2 cups of pudding
to 1/2 large can of pumpkin

After the kids mixed it up like this we put them
into the little cups and froze them for pumpkin popsicles!
Most of the kids love them!

      Part of our science curriculum is sink or float. We took our biggest pumpkin and predicted whether it would sink or float. Many kids thought it would sink because it was so big!

      I had to find the biggest tub we had to fill it up with enough water for the pumpkin to float, but we got it to work! The kids were amazed!

      After we discovered pumpkins float we discussed that it was because they were hollow. We talked about other big items that float as well.

      We did observational drawings of the insides of our pumpkins. The kids had to work hard to draw ONLY what they saw. This is definitely a great fine motor skill and great science practice.

      When we were done doing our drawings the kids got to scoop out all the seeds to count how many seeds are inside a pumpkin!

       There were over 600 seeds in our tiny little pumpkins!!!

      We did a class pumpkin glyph to decide what to carve our class pumpkin into. We decided to make triangle eyes because most kids voted candy corn as their favorite candy. A square nose because most kids like Halloween stories with surprises. We had 5 teeth because we had read 5 pumpkin books that week.

      We put that pumpkin in a big jar with some dirt and are letting it decompose in our classroom to see if it will re-seed itself. It is looking pretty gross so I will try to post pictures later!

       We also had our Homecoming party that week before Intersession! The kids got to decorate their very own sugar cookies with J Hawk colors, red and blue!

      They had a ton of fun creating their very own masterpieces!

      Finally, we all got some great J Hawk tattoos to sport for Homecoming week!