Native American Study

What an amazing Friday we had in our classroom! We were so lucky to have a special visitor come in and talk to us about the instruments and music Native Americans made and played. We have been studying Native American culture this week from what they ate to how they communicated between tribes to  the art that they created. This was truly a wonderful gift from Mr. David Dicks. Thank you so much- this was such a wonderful learning experience for the kids. Take a look!

Reminders:
**No DEARABBY or Murphy Math Log this week
**Reader's Theatre Presentations will be held on Tuesday, November 22 from 8:30-10:00 in our classroom. We are so excited to have you come in to see how much progress we have made with or reading fluency. Yay!

Reader's Theatre/Native American Culture Study

Reader's Theatre: We will be having our first performance of the year coming up a week from today. It is very important for students to build reading fluency as this is directly coordinated with comprehension! We have been working on our fluency through reader's theatres this week. All of our plays will be themed around Thanksgiving and we are working so hard to make this a special day for everyone. Please note the flyer that I sent out earlier this week for specific times!

Native American Culture: This week we have studied the different aspects of culture, specifically some of the cultures of different Native American tribes. We have discussed the different languages of the tribes and how tribes used picture symbols to communicate with one another. Check out some of the other aspects of Native American culture that we studied this week!

Veteran's Day

Today was a very special day here at Stonewall. Not only did we get to enjoy an in-school performance of Old Jake's Skirts, we also got to eat lunch with some special visitors. Take a look at some of the highlights of our day:


Veteran's Day Lunch: Today Stonewall provided lunch to all of the Veteran's in our community. Our class had SO many Veteran's come to eat lunch with us. We had visitors that ranged from dads, grandmothers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers...it was truly a remarkable event. Thanks to Mr. Gatliff for creating such a memorable moment for the families and veterans of Stonewall.

Old Jake's Skirts: Wow, what an amazing time we had today watching the play, Old Jake's Skirts. The play was exciting, funny, and a little bit sad. We handled ourselves very nicely and were very respectful to the actors. Overall, we loved the play along with the costumes, characters, and props.

Wednesday, November 9th

Well, this has been a fascinating week thus far. The kids can't seem to figure out what day it is because of Election Day yesterday...if I had a nickel for every time they asked if it was Monday...Anyways, I hope every one enjoyed their day off and found the time to exercise your right to vote!


Reading: This week we are focusing our comprehension skill on Main Idea/Topic and Key Details. Students have been working on this skill since the beginning of the year and are getting better and better as we practice more. This is still a complicated, higher-level thinking skill.


Our stories this week and next will focus on Native American folktales and legends. This week we have discussed what it means to be a folktale or a legend. To demonstrate the concept we played the game, telephone where a message starts at one end of the line and is transferred from student to student until it reaches the other end of the line. It was interesting to see what details were left out or changed by the end of the game. Do you have any legends or stories that have been passed down to you by your mothers or grandfathers? This would be something neat to share with your little one!


Math: Well, we have finally moved on from place value and are now comparing numbers to 20. While this sounds like a simple task it truly is not! We are not only comparing using phrases "greatest" and "least" but we are also finding out how many more and how many less between two sets of numbers. Right now everything is very concrete and we are using many manipulatives; however, by the Thanksgiving Break students will be expected to do this through word problem only without the use of manipulatives.


On another note, I would like to share some of the equations students have been sharing during our "Incredible Equations" portion of Calendar Math. Just to get you up to speed, in Calendar Math we focus our studies around the number of days we have been in school. For example, today we made Incredible Equations for the number 60. Some of those equations included 5 x 12, 10 x 6, 25 + 25 + 10...I mean, WOW! We are really raising the bar here, folks! On Monday we got a gasp from an observer when one of the students gave the following equation for the number 59 -  (5 x 10) + 9. Ha! I was so impressed and this just goes to show how much our students really do pick up on everything that we say and teach.


Veteran's Day: This week in Social Studies we are learning about soldiers and what our soldiers and veterans do to help us keep our rights and freedoms as American citizens. Today we made a word web to describe all of the things that soldiers do for our country. Tomorrow we will be working on some patriotic activities (which I very much appreciate all of your help in getting together) and I look forward to sharing this activity with you all.


Please consider coming to the Veteran's Day lunch at Stonewall. This will be a wonderful treat for all of our Veterans and families of the community! Let me know by tomorrow if you plan on attending this lunch.


Reminder:
**Please send in 1 dollar for an in-school performance on Friday

Celebrations of Success

We had a great Celebrations of Success Ceremony today. The students were so genuinely happy about receiving their awards and went home feeling very happy and proud of themselves. We put together a quick podcast this morning to share with everyone what we have accomplished and are proud of this year. Take some time to listen to what we have to say...

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. Remember we do not have school on Tuesday for Election Day!

We are Super Stars!

Wow, what a special day we have had here in first grade. Probably the most exciting part of our day was our "special visitor" who came to videotape our class. Apparently the folks down at central office found out about our students and decided that they would come videotape us to showcase students doing the right thing. Way to go Mrs. Murphy's class. Our class will be in the Teacher Spotlight segment on channel 13 beginning in January. Keep your eyes and ears open... :)

Today we go a LOT done and I want to share some of the photos with you as well as send out a souple of reminders for tomorrow...

Today we played a math game online and we also played a place value game with partners. Check out the following link to play some cool place value games:

http://www.learningbox.com/Base10/BaseTen.html

Here we are playing a place value math game:

Aren't they cute?!

Reminders

**Tomorrow is Celebrations of Success...12:00 in room 12...look forward to seeing you there!

**DEARABBY and Math log dur tomorrow

**Health Fair tonight- look in your student's folder for more information!

Wednesday, November 2nd

I hope everyone is having a great week. I know are in the midst of an exciting week here, as always! Take a look at what we've been up to the past couple of days:

Reading: We are currently working on retelling important events in a story IN ORDER. This year we have really worked on finding the important details so now we are taking the next step and putting those details in order from beginning to end. Today we read the book, The Ugly Pumpkin, and talked about four very important events. Tomorrow we will be making flip book...stay tuned!

Math: We are really hitting place value hard. We continue to work with base ten blocks to show how many tens and ones make up a number. We are learning lots of cool new games in class and tomorrow I am introducing the students to some online manipulatives using the following website: http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/frames_asid_152_g_2_t_1.html?from=grade_g_2.html

Check out the math game we played today...

Powerpoints: Can you see how hard we are working on our nocturnal animal powerpoints?

Reminders:
**Celebrations of Success- THIS FRIDAY at 12:00 in room 12