Happy Halloween

1st graders have had one fun filled Halloween Day!  Thank you to those who donated to our classroom with delicious food or crafts.  A special thanks to our room mothers for organizing our event.  Costumes are on and we're ready for some Trick-or-Treating. 
 

Below is our Halloween Spook poem for you to watch.  Happy Halloween!

 

 

Plump Published Pumpkins

Our first published piece on the iPads are finished!  Students created, wrote and then published an alliteration.  Alliterations are sentences where the same sound is repeated at the beginning of words. 

First we used pictionaries to help brainstorm words the start with the beginning sound in our names.  We unscrambled funny alliterations on the Smartboard to help us understand that our alliterations must make sense!  Students then wrote a sentence using their words to make their own alliterations.  After our sentences were complete, students wrote them on sentences strips and made an adorable pumpkin to go along with it. 

 

Wait, we weren't done yet.  Next, we used the iPads and illustrated our pictures using one of our favorite apps educreations.  Students even typed their sentences choosing their color, size and placement.  As a class we recorded ourselves reading our sentences.  Make sure to check out our final published piece above.

Going Batty

We've gone batty over bats in 1st grade.  We started by asking I wonder questions about bats.  There were typical questions such as, "Do they bite?", "What do they eat?" or "What do bats do during the day/night?".  There were also some cute I wonder questions such as, "I wonder how bats get in our house" or "I wonder how bats don't fall".  National Geographics for kids was our resource for learning about these interesting creatures.  Here's your fun fact for the day: One bat can eat almost 600 mosquitoes in 1 hour!

We used our love for learning about bats to help us practice our math facts.  Students were amazed to learn that 3+2=2+3.  Oh the wonders of learning in 1st grade.  Each student was given a number which was called their whole. Then we split our whole into two parts to write an addition sentence.  This addition setence went on one side of their bat.  We then flipped our parts and our bat to write another addition sentence.

We are officially experts on bats.  Although we still don't know how bats get in our house.  I guess that will remain a mystery.