First Grade Dance Recital

Jesse Owens Timelines

We watched a short video and read about the athlete Jesse Owens.  As a class, we made a timeline of important events in his life.  The children each drew their own timelines.

Washington/Lincoln Culminating Activity

The children sorted facts about Presidents Washington and Lincoln.  Some facts related to George Washington, some related to Abraham Lincoln and some were true for both presidents.  After the children sorted the facts, they drew Venn Diagrams and completed them with facts.

Venn Diagrams below:

Rosa Parks

Each of the children wrote about Rosa Parks.  This is the web of important ideas from the books we read.  The children were excited to read about Rosa Parks and tied information from the book we read on her to the book we read about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mrs. Plank's 6th Grade English Class

Mrs. Shannon Plank brought her 6th grade English class to read stories they had written to our first grade class.  The first grade children were excited to have some older students explain how they had written their stories.  At the end, you can see an example of how each student finished their stories with a piece called "About the Author".  The sixth graders were great role models for the first graders!

Dinosaur Research Papers

The children each chose a book about a dinosaur that we hadn't learned about in class.  They wrote important facts on post it notes, then arranged their sticky notes into groups according to themes such as habitat or physical description.  Each group of ideas became a paragraph.  We hope you enjoy reading about these sixteen dinosaurs!

President Abraham Lincoln

We read several books about Abraham Lincoln and each child wrote true facts about this president.  The children were happy to learn that Abraham Lincoln helped to end slavery.

Fossil Math

On Wednesday, we counted how many "fossils" were in each piece of "dirt".  Today, we added the total number of "fossils" found by all of the children.  First the children estimated how many they thought had been found in all and then children counted using base ten blocks and ones cubes.

Then the children helped to work out the average number of "fossils" in each piece of "dirt".

Estimating the total number of "fossils".

Below you can see that each student used tens and ones to add the number of fossils he or she found.

They traded ones for tens.

Then they traded tens for hundreds.

Ty's estimate was the closest.  He guessed 301 and there were actually 312!

We shared the cubes equally between the children and discovered that each child had 19.5 cubes.