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!!