Tri-Town 1st Grade Gingerbread Exchange

1st grade classrooms from Middleton, Boxford and Topsfield partnered up for the 2nd Annual 1st Grade Tri-Town Gingerbread Person Exchange. Each classroom was responsible for creating and decorating a gingerbread person and writing a letter to send to all the other classrooms. Klipfel and Kids got creative by drawing and decorating our very own gingerbread people. I love how different they all came out!

After our gingerbread people were ready, as a class we wrote a letter telling the other 1st graders about us. Top news to share included our LOVE for monkeys and our real winter fireplace in the classroom. Oh and we of course had to send along a joke. What do monkeys sing at the holidays? Jungle Bells, Jungle Bells!

Finally we packaged our gingerbread people and letters up and off in the mail they went. Now we wait for our twelve packages from the other 1st grade classrooms to arrive. We can't wait to learn about all the other 1st grade classes.

Check out more pictures of the project on Twitter with #TTUGingerbreadExchange. You can also see what the Tri-Town 1st Graders are up to be looking at #TTUGR1.

1st Grade Fairy Tale

Princes and princesses of 1st grade have been royally enjoying exploring the elements of fairy tales. We discussed how fairy tales are made up stories that usually have magical elements and often contain the number 3 or 7. Klipfel & Kids along with the rest of the Fuller Meadow 1st Graders were inspired to write our very own group fairy tale. We began with a collective brainstorming session to discuss possible story elements.

After coming up with some magical ideas, possible settings and even potential characters, each class had to determine which part of the fairy tale they would write. This year 1st graders across classrooms are writing two fairy tales with the same beginning. Meaning our tales will have common characters and settings but the events will be different. We will have so much comparing and contrasting to do! Here is how we broke each story into parts:

Klipfel & Kids rolled the dice and landed on the end, meaning we are responsible for writing the solution to our first grade fairy tale.

We are anxiously waiting for Mrs. Scharffenberg's class to write the beginning and Ms. Teixeira's class to write the middle so then we can get started. Once each class writes one part of the story we will then digitally illustrate the story and create a digital book. This really is one collaborative project! Stay tuned for our first grade fairy tales coming to an iPad near you soon.

First Grade Common Core Standard for Writing - W.1.6. With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

Shapes

1st graders have been busy exploring 2D plane shapes and 3D solid shapes. Students worked on distinguishing shapes by defining and non defining attributes. As part of our Math in Focus program we explored, identified and described plane and solid shapes. Students took plane and solid shapes to compose pictures. Partners worked on using good math vocabulary to discuss how many sides, vertices, edges and faces these shapes have.

Students then took cut outs of plane shapes to compose pictures in their math journals. Students counted the different number of triangles, circle, squares and rectangles in their creative pictures.

You can even make a monkey out of shapes! 

Our shape creating fun led us into a great discussion about the 2D and 3D shapes we see at school, at home and all over the world. Our emoji pillow is really a cylinder but has a face of a circle and our keyboards are rectangles. We even discovered that our tissue box is a rectangle prism with 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices!

What shapes do you see around you?