First Grade!

Students develop an understanding of life cycles this spring by studying the life cycle of the Butterfly. It is an exciting time! The students observe the caterpillars in their containers and watch the miracle of metamorphosis over a period of two weeks. They are engaged recording the butterflies’ progress each day in their Butterfly Journal. In late spring the students continue this theme by planting their own seeds and observing the life cycle of a plant.

The school has participated in the school wide “Ice-Cream for Reading Program”. First graders have been busy reading extra books at home and in school. In our own reading program we have been busy retelling our stories on our “Summary Sheet”. We know all about characters, settings, story plots, and now we are pulling all these features together to summarize our stories! It is amazing to see the unity of thought amongst our students concerning characters and plot, even though each will identify a different detail!

First graders have been busy in the writing process all year long. We have learned to think of ideas, draft a rough copy, revise, edit, and finally fix up our work and publish! In our study of grammar we have learned all about nouns, verbs, and adjectives and how to apply them to our stories! It is a work in progressJ

What fun first graders have had in math! We have enjoyed counting, making patterns, graphing, telling time, measuring, weighing, solving problems, and so much more! On the 100^th Day of School we had so much fun graphing our 100 jelly beans, recording the results, and analyzing the data! We discovered that hardly anyone liked the black jelly beans! Math is all around us and we have learned that we use it every dayJ