Curious Parents: 2013

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Welcome April!

We have had a busy March in First Grade! We spent a lot of time this month working on our animal research projects. And did our firsties work hard on them!!! Here are a few pictures.

Our next reading and writing unit will be Fancy Nancy and Henry and Mudge! We are looking forward to using "fancy" words and vocabulary. Here are some of the books we will be reading.

If you can read any Fancy Nancy or Henry and Mudge books at home, that would be great!

Happy April!

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

This upcoming week is a celebration of reading and Dr. Seuss. Right to Read Week always occurs the week of Dr. Seuss' birthday. Sharpsburg Primary thought we would dress up for the occasion.

The only problem with this is that it says "February 29," which does not exist this year. My apologies. Friday is March 1st.

Each room is going to be decorated for the Dr. Seuss week. The theme will be based around one book. First grade classes will be decorated as "The Lorax," "The Sleep Book," and "Please Try to Remember the First of Octember."

We are very excited and look forward to sharing lots of pictures with you!

Mrs. Hutchison

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Our last week in January

Our firsties enjoyed 4 different Pigeon books this week. Here they are:

We worked with the students on looking at all different text features that help the author/illustrator tell the story more effectively. Here are some of the examples that we looked at:


underlined text for emphasis

the use of all capital letters for emphasis

We also discussed other ways that authors give us information through diagrams, descriptive illustrations, maps, and many other ways. Here are some examples that we showed:

The use of many panels on a page. The expressions of the pigeon.

We learned how to read a life cycle diagram.

Check out some other activities we did with the Pigeon this week.

We will be continuing our study of the author/illustrator Mo Willems in the upcoming week.

Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Hutchison

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Author Study

Hello everyone!

Hope you enjoyed your three day weekend! To celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday, we placed the events of his life into a timeline. Here are some book ideas you might enjoy about this topic.

We are very excited to announce that we will begin an author study of Mo Willems in our writing class! If you haven't seen his books, you will just fall in love with all the great characters. Here are some examples of his books:

We can't wait to share all the great activities with you! Please be on the look out for them.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Preposition Snomen

Hello everyone! Hope you are staying warm during this cold time of year!

This week we used snowmen to help learn about prepositions.

Mrs. Eshman came up with a great activity that helped our students understand what prepositions mean. They created a snowman scene using her directions (including prepositions). It looked like this:

Then I received a "Highlights" magazine in the mail. And inside of it was a great poem that included lots of prepositions.

After listening to the poem, our firsties made the tracks using the prepositions to help them know where to go. It looked like this:

This week we will be working on a "how to" melt a snowman! We look forward to sharing all this great new learning with you!

Mrs. Hutchison

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

A look back...A look forward

I hope everyone enjoyed their winter break! I know it went very quickly in our house this year.

Our last week of school before break was filled with lots of blue. Pete the Cat blue, that is! The whole building seemed to have a great time reading and writing about one of our favorite characters. Here are just a few pictures from that fun week...

This week we will move on to explore snowman! We will read books, use shapes to create snowman, and begin to understand the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Here are couple of books that your firstie might enjoy!