Greetings

I am changing from kindergarten to first grade!

Zoo 1



I am finally caught up with my blogs!  Where have the weeks gone?  After the zoo trip, we began a study of zoo animals.  Research tells us that students need to have the real experience before learning about it, if at all possible, so that they can link what they have seen to new learning.  The first picture shows what coverings the zoo animals we saw had.  The next picture was linking our learning to the first sounds of the animals.  What a good way to review all of the letters we have learned.  We did have to look up an animal for N and U.  Some of the animals we did not see, but most we did see.  We are still learning about zoo animals next week, too.   

Plants

We had some interesting hands-on activities with plants.  Our garden is the perfect spot for learning about plants.  I should have taken more pictures!  One fun activity that we did was list vegetables that grow above the ground and those that grow under the ground.  The chart was labeled tops and bottoms after a book we read with that title, Tops and Bottoms.

Earth Day

Have you noticed your child being more Earth Friendly?  They may be telling you how to reuse, recycle, or reduce.  Picture one showed uses for trees.  Picture two showed how to conserve and protect our water.  Picture three was our pledge to the earth. 

Baby animals

The week before Easter was our unit on Baby Animals.  I must have forgotten to grab my camera because I just had one picture!!!  I am so glad I did take this picture because it shows how students transfer what they are learning in their free time.  During free centers, this student chose to play with some animal counters in our math center.  She put all of the animal babies with their mothers.  I ask her to name the baby animals after she had sorted it in this way.   This is one proud moment for a teacher when a students shows their learning on their own.

Butterflies

Our butterfly unit was as exciting as our frog unit.  Pictured are some of our activities.  The first picture shows our double bubble map comparing and contrasting a moth to a butterfly.  We looked at their similarities and differences.  I always seem to learn new facts each time we do research.  The next picture was a math connection to the unit where we made a glyph.  The boys made caterpillars and the girls made butterflies.  The last picture shows a counting activity.  One math tub for that week was to use The Very Hungry Caterpillar book to count what the caterpillar ate through each day of the week.

Frogs

Our research project this week was on Frogs.  We did our research from non-fiction books, the internet, and magazines.  (I forgot to get a picture of our KWL-know, want to know and learned-chart.)  The first two pictures show our research paper and the graphic organizer we used to organize our writing.  We extended our frogs unit to math and did addition and subtraction using the song, Five Green and Speckled Frogs.  Our fiction book for this study was Jump, Frog, Jump.  The last two pictures show our main characters chart and the chart we used for main idea.  Coming up-Butterflies!

April Fool's Day

Is Mrs. Carter tricky or what?  I told students that a finger paint company had contacted me to test their finger paint.  The only color they had left was brown.  I told them I did not have any finger paint paper, so paper plates would work just as good.  When I started giving each student their spoonful of "finger paint", they commented that it smelled good and that it looked like chocolate pudding.  I told them I would tell the finger paint company those things.  It wasn't long before one student snuck a lick, and the other students screamed out that he had tasted finger paint.  I said, "What!!!!!  Put finger paint in your mouth........April Fools."  Then I handed out spoons and more chocolate pudding to eat!  The rest of the day, students were trying to play tricks on me!

Who Took The Cookies From the Cookie Jar

HANDS ON Subtraction!!!  We acted out Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar with real Cookies (cereal).  Then each student wrote down the story problem on their individual white boards.  What a fun way to learn subtraction.

Spring

What authors and illustrators these students are becoming.  After making a circle map of some of the signs of spring, they put their favorite four signs on an accordion book.