Hopes and Dreams

We have been thinking about and sharing our hopes and dreams for the school year! We read Rose's Garden written by Peter Reynolds. The book was about Rose who wanted to plant seeds and make the the earth beautiful. She ran into a bump, but had help from some friends. Ask your child for details!

Our hopes ranged from being readers to making choices in math stations. They were about making new friends and working with different materials. This is a class of determined dreamers! Do you know what your child's hope was for the year?

From our hopes and dreams we decided we needed to make some rules so we could make sure we could all reach our goals.

At first, the list of rules was a little long...

So we started categorizing our rules by rules that were about us, rules about safety, and rules about our materials.

After we sorted all of our rules, we talked about how we might want to phrase each rule. The class ended up writing and agreeing on five rules. We signed the bottom to show that we agreed to follow the rules in order to make sure our dreams could come true.

We worked in small groups to show what each of our rules would look like, sound like, and feel like in the classroom. Check out our posters! (Click to make them bigger!)

Beautiful Oops

We explored with scrap paper and discussed how we don't always need a clean, new piece of paper! We learned that we can make mistakes beautiful! 

 

We read Beautiful Oops, written by Barney Saltzberg. Then we let our creativity soar! These artists took left over pieces from our morning message and made long bridges. They took torn paper and colored in the holes to make pigs! They even took crumpled and cut paper to make treasure maps!

Are you curious about this Beautiful Oops book that inspired us all? Well get excited, because it was on YouTube with a song! Check it out below. :)

Handwriting Without Tears

We began handwriting last week with a review of capital letters! Students are practicing proper letter formation (always starting from the top), having good writing posture (head up, helping hand down, feet flat on the ground), and a good pencil grip (two or three finger pinch)!

Check out these images taken from the Handwriting Without Tears website! They are great images to use as resources when thinking about a good pencil grip and how to get it!

 

Remember to watch for and remind your child about good grip, posture, and form! :)

Second Week!

We had a successful second week of school! We have been slowly introducing new materials and academics. Here are some of the things we did this week...

First graders shared what type of class they wanted.

We read Rose's Garden By: Peter Reynolds and used it to inspire our hopes for the school year. We shared our hopes and dreams, illustrated them, and began to create our classroom Hopes and Dreams display!

 We opened up the colored pencils!

We revealed the scissors! We practiced holding, carrying, and using the safely. Then we practiced our cutting skills on flowers for our Hopes and Dreams display!

 We used pastels to decorate our Hopes and Dreams flowers. 

We revealed the glue so we could glue our hopes and dreams onto our flowers!

We visited the library and Mrs. Daigle taught us about the METIS organization of the library. 

 We opened the ENTIRE math shelf! We talked about the materials and how to take care of them. Ask your child about his/her favorite material!

We read Chrysanthemum and Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon to inspire our thinking around other people's feelings. We illustrated a time when our feelings were hurt and sorted them together between two categories: "Heart was Hurt" and "Body was Hurt." Then we talked about what we could do if we were about to have our feelings hurt.

 We did a lot this week and have more in store for next week! Remember to keep asking your first grader about their experiences and favorite moments of the day! :)

Social Thinking

We began learning about "Social Thinking." We read You are a Social Detective! to introduce the ideas of "social smarts" and our language of "expected" and "unexpected." We learned that "social smarts" means that we know that people think about us and that we think about them too! We think about what people need, what they want, what they say, and what they do!

We learned that we can make choices that are expected and unexpected. An unexpected choice is something that makes others say "huh?" It might sound like: when the class is talking about a book, someone is thinking about lunch or a video game and interrupts the group to share something off topic. We say that when people do things that are unexpected, others might have "yellow" thoughts. This means they start to feel confused or uncomfortable. "Red" thoughts happen when something unexpected keeps happening or if something is dangerous. "Red" thoughts make us feel really uncomfortable, unsafe, and confused.

An expected choice is something that makes sense. It might sound like: when the class is talking about a book, everyone is talking about the book and thinking about the book. It might look like: when everyone's on the rug and someone is speaking, everyone is facing the speaker and is close to each other, but not touching.

We decided to show our knowledge of expected and unexpected choices by making posters in our desk groups. We worked together to show expected and unexpected choices in different situations.

Here are a few groups presenting their posters!

Here are the completed posters! Click on the photos to enlarge them or come by our classroom to check them out. :)

Ask your child about expected and unexpected choices at school as well as what expected and unexpected choices might be in other situations (at bed time, at dinner, at a soccer game, at dance, etc)!