Coding in First Grade

Last Friday our 4th grade Learning Buddies from Mrs. Dadmun's class taught us how to use a coding program.  The children learned how to "write code" to move a turtle across the screen to a pond. 
 
Today, our technology teacher, Mr. Fleury continued teaching code to the children by working on an iPad app called "Lightbot." This app can be used on iPads or you can use it on a computer at http://lightbot.com/ .  

The kids are really enjoying learning this new technological skill!

KinderKonzert!

Today, all K-3 students in South Portland boarded buses to South Portland High School to see "Lighthouse Keeper: The Story of Abbie Burgess."  We heard the true story of a brave young girl whose determination and courage kept the lighthouse lit against all odds. The piece paints an exciting musical portrait of life on an island, the shifting ocean, majestic lighthouses, raging storms, and even silly dancing puffins.  Students were able to interact with the musicians from the Portland Symphony Orchestra string section, connecting music, literacy, art, nature, and Maine heritage.

Mrs. Mason, our librarian, had read Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie to the class.
We then made nautical weather flags which we were able to use as part of today's performance.

We also learned the song "Shine On Me," with Mrs. Osann in music class, which the audience sang along to at the performance.

 

Abbie Burgess narrated the story, accompanied by the beautiful string music of The PSO.

Everyone agreed this was a great interactive performance to get a glimpse into Maine nautical history, and hear some beautiful music.

Morning Meeting

We start each day with Morning Meeting.  There are 4 components to our meeting: Greeting, Sharing, Activity and Morning Message. 
Here is a snapshot of our meeting today:

Greeting: "Playing Card Greeting" the children were dealt a card with a number on it. When it was their turn, they counted that many children and greeted whoever they landed on. Children learn to make eye contact and greet their classmates in a friendly manor.

Sharing: Each child has a chance to share once a week. They can share 3 sentences about their topic, using bean bags to keep track of each sentence.

 They can then call on 3 friends who have questions, again keeping track of the questions with beanbags.

 Activity: We read a new poem each week (this week's is "Months of the Year"). Most days our activity includes reading the poem. We spend time visualizing, doing word work and adding movements to the poems. Today we were searching for the sight word, "and."

Morning Message: We read our Morning Message together (chorally). The Morning Message gives them information about the day to come and the children help correct mistakes or fill in missing information.  Often, there is also a class survey to answer as part of the Morning Message.

PJs and Pumpkins!

We had a fun day yesterday, wearing our PJs and counting how many seeds were in 4 different pumpkins.

We started by reading this book which helped us make predictions about which pumpkin would have the most seeds.


We then scooped all of the seeds out of the pumpkins.

Some of us didn't mind "getting into" our mushy gushy work...

 

...while others preferred to use spoons.

We organized the seeds into groups of 10 so we could count them more easily. 

We were surprised that even though each pumpkin was a similar size, they had very different amounts of seeds.  The least was 181, and the most was 703!!

It was a great day, having fun and doing math at the same time!!

Being a Writer

Our writing program in first grade is called Being a Writer.  We work on our writing 4 days a week.

On Monday, we read a book that gives us ideas for writing.  We brainstorm ideas and practice writing sentences.

On Tuesday, we start writing.  This week we wrote about animals we love, and met "Spaceman" which we use to remind us to put spaces between our words.

On Wednesday, we reread our writing, add words, and add details to our illustrations.

On Thursday, we share our writing with the class. Here you see Oscar, Neil and Batoul sharing last week's writing about what they like to do with a friend.

The kids listen respectfully, and make comments about their classmates' writing.  

Calendar Time!

Every day we start math with Calendar Time.  The Calendar Helper guides us through these routines. 
If you click on the video, you can hear the"Days of the Week" song we sing in October.

We add a straw for every day of school and "bundle" them together when we have 10.  This helps the kids learn about place value.

We will count how many days we've been in school until we get to 120 days! Phew!!
This gives us many opportunities to count by 1's, 5's, and 10's and to discuss odd and even numbers.

The Calendar Helper, Madison, checks the weather.

We record our weather data for each month and the whole year on graphs.

Eric Carle Field Trip

Last Friday, we had a wonderful field trip to The Merrill Auditorium to see "Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Other Treasured Stories."

We had read all three books that were part of this performance, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me before the performance, so the children were entranced by the puppet show renditions of these classic stories.

Senator Susan Collins introduced the show, and the children were thrilled to hear that thanks to generous corporate donations, each audience member received their own copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.

The kids were very excited to read this familiar story to themselves once we got back to school.

At the end of the day our first graders made and played a graphing game based on "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" with their fourth grade book buddies.  A fun way to end to our day full of Eric Carle!!