Another great week in first grade! We are having a lot of fun reading many books by Eric Carle as we continue our author study. "A House for Hermit Crab" inspired our ocean pictures done in a similar format to his beautiful illustrations using finger paint and collage techniques. He also inspired us to make pancakes after reading Pancakes, Pancakes!
     We continue to laugh out loud as we enjoy the very funny chapter book written by Roald Dahl, "The BFG".

     Our Literacy focus continues with Informational Text. Students are becoming quite good and identifying non-fiction features such as "heading", "caption", "index" and the "table of contents". We have sorted our dinosaur book collection into fiction and non-fiction and are working on a nonfiction feature book using a variety of examples from our non-fiction dinosaur collection.  Daily 5 continues to be a valuable time of our day as children read and listen to a variety of stories. Students also work in small groups with a focus on specific literacy strategies.

     We have begun our new mathematics unit called "Number Games and Crayon Puzzles". This unit develops ideas about counting and quantity, the comparison of numbers, and the operations of addition and subtraction. Most of our work is focused on the 2-addend combinations of 10 as well as finding relationships among different combinations of number up to 20. During this unit, students have many opportunities to engage with ideas that lay the foundation for algebra!

     We are very excited for our performance! Students have been working very hard rehearsing and we are very proud to perform for you next Thursday!