3D Shape Museum

Take a look at our collection of everyday 3D Shapes.  Students collected the shapes and then sorted them into the correct category.  We then used the items to play a game of 3D Shape Bingo.  They filled in their game board with the labels "sphere, cylinder, cube, rectangular prism, and triangular prism".  Mrs. Heath randomly chose real items to call out.  The students then marked off the shape of that item.  It was a FANTASTIC way to practice identifying 3D shapes by name. We discovered that cylinders are the easiest 3D shape to find examples of ...BY FAR!!!!

Fly Butterflies, Fly!

Our butterfly project came to a (mostly) successful end.  We began our journey with 6 caterpillars.  All six formed chrysalis, and 5 hatched from their chrysalis.  Unfortunately, after hatching one of our butterflies perished in the cage.  In the end we were able to release 4 Painted Lady butterflies into the wild to continue the life cycle.  What an interesting, hands on activity this was for the students! 

After releasing our butterflies, the students created a model of the butterfly lifecycle with pipe cleaner caterpillars, masking tape chrysalis, and student create butterflies.  They are truly works of art!

A Trip to the Zoo

I have to admit, I was VERY worried about how our zoo field trip would work out.  The weather forecasts for the day were ominous to say the least!  But thank goodness Mother Nature was on our side and it worked out to be a simply GORGEOUS day!  We are grateful for all of our parents and grandparents that joined us and helped out.  The students were able to apply their science learning as they viewed the animals in a variety of habitats.  The baby giraffe seemed to be a favorite of all, as did the newly remodeled aquarium.  A special thank you to our PTO for making our field trip possible! 

Homophones

Homophones are tricky, tricky words for our first grade friends!  When students are learning to write  they often times write the sounds they hear and then look at the words to see if they "look right".   As students' reading and writing vocabularies have been expanding we have noticed something interesting ... they can spell words different ways and they both look right.  How can that be?  Aaahhhh... it is those tricky homophones!  We can write the word plane or plain, both are spelled right but they don't mean the same thing!  Students worked on creating homophone books to help them remember what each spelling means.  One resource we used was a fabulous book called "Dear Deer" 

The book has many examples of homophones and uses them in context to help with understanding.  Take a look at the examples of our homophone writing.