Buon Natale!

This week our first graders traveled around the world to learn about Christmas traditions in other countries. They traveled to Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, China, Germany and Italy. Each one of our first grade teachers chose a country to dig into!  My classroom studied Italy. We had a special visit from La Befana herself!

 

Our class continued to learn about Christmas traditions from Italy today. We learned about The Feast of St. Lucia, St. Nicholas, the Feast of 7 Fish and that the most important holiday symbol in Italy is the Nativity scene. Then we had a taste of Itlay! We had our own "Feast of St. Lucia" (which in Italy will actually occur December 13th) with fettucine alfredo, spaghetti, garlic bread, canollis and biscottis! It was delicious!

Here is Wyatt digging into his feast!

Genevieve, Lily, Peyton, Connor and Evie feasting it up!

Wyatt, Jade, Braelyn, Caleb, Drue, and Logan digging in!

 Grace, Madeline, Dante and Logan stuffing themselves!

Jade loved the pasta!

 

Emma, Senali, Trey, and Kyla say "Buon Natale!"

 Mrs. Davidson brough in our bread and desserts! She also served the food!

 

Blog Brag

Welcome to Gingerville!

My sweet teacher friend Mrs. Kelly has just finished up an awesome Gingerbread Unit with her darling firsties! I just HAVE to brag on her brilliance a little bit. She started out by reading as many of the Gingerbread Man versions she could find to her students. While reading students were making text to text connections and predicting if the stories would end the same.

Since Mrs. Kelly's class theme is pirates students got to pick a Gingerbread story to retell on a pirate ship they designed! Students recorded The beginning, middle, and ending of a Gingerbread story of their choice. Then she put them outside her classroom in the ocean!

She made gingerbread play dough so that her students could smell the gingerbread and make their own creations from the dough. Her students tasted ginger snaps and charted descriptive words from their five senses. Then they thought about how they eat a gingerbread cookie...what part do you bite off first? They charted their class data and it turns out the majority of her students bit off the

Mrs. Kelly asked her students to think about why in all the gingerbread man stories the gingerbread avoids water. Then her class did a science experiment: "What will happen when we put the gingerbread cookie in a tub of water?" Her class documented their predictions in their science data notebooks. Then the class observed the gingerbread cookie in the water and figured out that gingerbread cookies dissolve in water!

Mrs. Kelly and her class then brainstormed what would be in a Gingerbread community! They were inspired by this poem:

If I Could Build a Town

If I could build a town , well then

I know just what I'd make:

An icecream store, a toy store

And a store with bread and cake.

I guess I'd make a park,

And build a nifty fire station.

Say, would you like to help me?

It just take imagination!

 

Then they got to build their own Gingerbread community! They used small milk cartons as the base and covered them with colored paper. They included buildings like a hospital, vet office, mall, movie theatre, JEA, porta potties, and so much more! They decided to name their community "Gingerville" and even named the streets. They each built their own house out of graham crackers and added a neighborhood! Mrs. Kelly and her class had a blast!

 

 



Mrs. Kelly and her first grade class!

 The kids raided the treasure box to find occupants for their homes!

Number chatting it up

Here is a picture of today's number chat! It was a pretty tricky one but I was super impressed with the strategies that were being used to figure out the answer! Senali came up with a great strategy all on her own to make 5 circles. Each circle represents a day inside each circle she drew 5 circles to represent the buckets of oats! Then she counted them all and came up with 25.

Goodbye November

So since I didn't start this blog until the end of November I thought I would share some of the fun activities our class did this month!

Presidential Election Week
We read "Grace for President" and charted all the fancy vocabulary! Then we discussed the leadership qualities Grace demonstrated!

 

Then we read "Duck for President" and did a character analysis on Duck! The kids loved that he only spoke "duck" and that he was a funny farm animal!

We compared our two presidential candidates and students had to choose one to campaign for...since we learned what campaign posters are in "Grace for President" students made their own! Then we voted!

 Then of course we had to throw some math in there! These are the number chats we did after we counted the votes! Grace was our winner!

 

 

 

 

 



Number Chat

Our class loves number chats! A number chat is a word problem that the students solve using their own strategy in their math journal. When students are finished solving their word problem they check in with me and play a math game until everyone is finished. Then we pick a student from our name sticks and they explain their strategy to the rest of the class! Here are some pictures of what we did today!