Weekly Wrap-up

What a brief two-week spell we have had here on planet First Grade. We had a mini-vacation last week, which threw a bit of a wrench into our NWEA plans. However, the class did a great job when they returned on Monday. Wednesday saw us take the math portion of the NWEA exam and there were quite a few issues on the server side of the equation. We had a lot of long… load times for kids’ questions and Ms. Heyward and myself were playing an interesting game of “whack-a-mole” in trying to triage and fix the problems as the kids took the test. Needless to say, the kids did a great job with this confusion. I will say that the results from this math portion may be a bit skewed though because of these technical difficulties. I can speak to this more when the results are posted. On Friday we had our fantastic MLK celebration with Mrs. Krohn’s direction. The classes that participated did a great, great job. A very special shout out to Mrs. Krohn for everything she did to put that assembly together. Now that the housekeeping issues are off the table, onto the highlights!!!




Math:

We have been able to get to a lot in math these past few weeks. A big focus of our time has been greater than and less than stories. We have practiced this concept in several different ways and the kids particularly enjoyed more than/less than stories that involved animals’ weights. We also spent a lot of time with compliments of ten. The reason for this is it really helps the kids in a number of different areas, specifically adding three number problems. We also practiced measuring crooked paths and adding sums of three numbers. Finally, on Friday we spent some time to explore several different concepts, which included base ten exchanges, measurement, and place value. Oh what fun!


Phonics:

In addition to our weekly practice with spelling words, which I recently cut down from eight words to six words, we have worked exclusively on long and short vowels. This is a concept that still gives the class trouble, so I have spent additional time with it.


Science:

In science we were able to compile and graph our December weather data. We also spent a lot of time with our motion unit. This included exploring the effect of collisions. We also designed different collisions and recorded the results. Finally, we spent time exploring the concept of friction.


Social Studies:

We spent a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at the concepts of maps. The class got to create their own map of a classroom in their student journals. They had a lot of fun with this concept.












While this was just a snapshot of what took place over the few weeks, there was also several other happenings and learning opportunities.