Week 7

We have some exciting highlights from this week!

In science, we are learning about living vs. nonliving things. The beginning of our chapter reminded us about our 5 senses and that we use them to learn about the world around us! On Thursday, I decided to give everyone's taste buds a test! 
I'm sure you've heard by now that I tricked them pretty well (or tricked them pretty bad, I guess it's open to interpretation!) 

We started by turning off our sense of sight so that our other senses were heightened. We really tried to focus on the areas of our tongue that have the specific taste buds for salty, sweet, sour and bitter. We started with salty potato chips!

Followed those up with sour candy!

And then came the mean taste test :/ It's true it was chocolate... but unsweetened baker's chocolate! I guarantee they'll never forget what bitter tastes like! (Slash, I'm sorry).

And of course, we immediately followed up with a sweet :) 

See!? They didn't stay mad for long!

The next day, we had so many visitors!!! Our prayer partners came to interview them about their favorite book. Everyone had such great answers and used so much of what we have learned about stories to answer their prayer partners' questions! Mrs. Molloy and I were very proud :)

You can look for these 2 on the afternoon announcements Friday, September 26th!!! They will be sharing their interview with all of you and the school!

After Mass, 8th grade came down to share a project about climate zones and habitats they had completed with Ms. Moore and Mrs. Pasko! Each group presented their short video about an animal that had gotten lost and was trying to find their way back to the correct climate zone they lived in. They met some silly friends along the way :) We really enjoyed learning from them and spending time with them, too!

Week 6

Well folks, we pretty much mastered writing simple sentences this week! What a breeze for these smarties!

We learned/reviewed that sentences begin with a capital letter and end with punctuation in our grammar lessons. We also reviewed that names, days of the week, and months of the year are capitalized. 

We use special paper (which you have likely seen go home in the Wednesday Folder) to practice writing out sentences. 

This is an Orton-Gillingham approach. We pound each syllable (right now we are only writing sentences with one-syllable words) and use the visual cues to help write the sentence! Each word fits on a line. If the word is double underlined, it means it is a "red word," or "sight word," or "word to know" (we use all of those terms) and can not be sounded out. The mountain is the clue for capitalizing the first letter, and the box reminds us to put punctuation!

COPS is what they do after they have written their sentence to check for; capitalization, organization, punctuation and spelling. Each time they rewrite the given sentence, they have fewer cues and clues! Their work is pretty impressive :)

We also worked on writing sentences during Work on Writing! We following the process of gathering ideas/getting started, prewriting, editing, then publishing! Check out an example below!

This week, we also published our book of possessive nouns! You will see that coming home soon. We started in alphabet order by last name and each student will get it for a night at home!

This week, we also did some more work with counting ON. We were having a little trouble distinguishing that from just counting the numbers, so we did an activity to help clarify! I would tell the students their starting number and ending number, and the rest of the class would count how many jumps they made :) See our video below! (And picture in case the video doesn't work for you). 

You may have, at this point, heard about "Test Friday!" These guys are such troopers!!! They have to concentrate and stay focused to do their best on our weekly assessments - and it's not simple task! Luckily, we get time for a brain break after each assessment, and after each section of our story test.
At this point in the year, I am reading them the directions and answer choices out loud. The only thing I don't read to them is the phonics portion of the story test. Luckily, we do so much fun "work" with phonics, they are successful! 
Check out this video of us taking a brain break! This is one of our favorites: it's called "Field Trip!" You have to dodge and duck and jump over obstacles and you end at a place or thing. The program then walks you through some facts about it and sometimes has a short, educational video to go along with your trip!

Week 5

Aaaaaand they've got another Daily 5 rotation down, folks! Word Work was introduced this week! This is another independent task that helps us become better readers, writers and spellers! 

We will have different assignments and projects for word work throughout the year, but our first task was sorting words by their short vowel sounds! 

In Religion this week, we continued to discuss God's gifts to us, and, of course, our families are a huge gift! In keeping with the target theme for our reading series this week, we made a comparison of our families and The Holy Family! Check it out below!

We noted that God is in both columns because He is our Heavenly Father! We also talked about how Joseph was the father, Mary was the mother, and Jesus was the son :) We discussed the differences as well!

This week, we also spent some time building our Word Wall! We have 2 sections: Word Wall Words (which are "green words" or words that you can sound out/phonetic words) and Jail (which is for "red words" or non-phonetic words and rule breakers). Some words are living in jail until we learn the actual rule they break :)

Week 4

We have mastered 2 more parts of our Daily 5 - Work on Writing and Read With Someone!
What professionals!
During work on writing, the students practice writing and spelling through a variety of assignments :) See what we do, why we do it, and how we look doing it below!

Students are responsible for keeping track of their work. They file their writing in a file folder titled either "Still working on" or "Finished." We also have a folder for ideas :)

I was so so impressed at how well the class picked up "Read With Someone!" There are so many rules to follow :) but they figured it out the first day AND had fun doing so!

This week, we also did a science experiment to get us "thinking like a scientist." We gathered together to go through the process!
First we observed and gathered information. Then, we made predictions. After we performed the experiment and recorded what happened, we discussed our findings and did some research to see if we got the same results as other people "out there." The final step of our scientific process is sharing with you! See our experiment below!

Observations:
- They are all drinks
- 4 types; sprite, coke, coke zero, diet coke
- They are all bubbly
- 3 bottles are clear and one is green
- All of the tops are different colors
- The sprite is clear; the others are all dark brown
- All are coke products
- All are sodas
- They are all the same size
- They all have the same amount of liquid in them

Predictions:
- Regular coke won't explode, others will
- Since they are all different, they will react differently
- They might shoot up
- The sprite won't explode because it's a different color
- It will shoot sideways
- It will shoot down
- The mentos will disappear/dissolve
- It will catch on fire
- It will make a mess
- The reaction will be hot

Experiment:
We dropped a roll of mentos into each bottle of soda and recorded with chalk on the wall how high each one went!

Findings:
- The diet coke and coke zero went the highest
- The diet coke and coke zero went the same height
- The mentos kind of disappeared
- It did make a mess :)
- It did explode!
- The sprite didn't really explode too much 
- It didn't go as high as we thought it would
- The leftover soda in the bottles smelled like mentos

Conclusions:
- The sugar causes the reactions
- The diet coke and coke zero (ones that went the highest) have fake sugar so maybe that is why they went the highest
- We used 1 liter bottles and the other experiments we saw, people used 2 liter bottles, so that may have made ours different

Week 3

Another exciting week in first grade down!

While learning about God, what He gives us, and why He is good, we read The Our Father and talked about what all of those fancy, old words meant :)

We also did another fun math project together! The day before the project, we started to learn the concept of "getting rid of extra information" in a math word problem. The book had us circling in red, crossing out in blue, underlining in orange... Ahhhh it was too much! So we decided to try again the next day and work together to figure it out! Students were each given a sentence of a word problem. They had to find their group (by color) and put their sentences in order. They then had to read the problem together and take away the extra information! Once they did, they reread the problem and solved it! We traded sentences and were able to do 3 problems in small groups before discussing all together! It made so much more sense today!

Another day this week, we reviewed "number order"! The students were each given a number card that showed 3 representations of the number. They had to walk around, talk to one another, and find their sequence of numbers! After they found their correct bunch, they had to put themselves in order with the rest of the numbers, lowest to highest! Great work and great teamwork!!!

Week 2

What another great week it's been! 
We have been super busy in math lately - here are some things we have been reviewing!

We completed a project together that took so many steps! We wanted to know how we could make the longest, 2 color pattern possible with all of the unifix cubes we have. We decided that the first thing we should do is divide them up into different groups by color!

Then, we decided we better count them to see which groups had the most!

Then, we reported our findings!

We narrowed it down to the 2 biggest numbers so we could make the longest pattern possible! We then worked all together to build it, and counted 124 blocks in our red/black pattern! (Go Dawgs!?! Totally not on purpose even!)

We've added a new activity to our phonics instruction as well: the sand trays!!! This activity is a great way to hit the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles to help different learners AND to reinforce what we learn to our brain in so many different ways!

Week 1

These first 8 days flew by!!! We got started learning the "ways" of Miss Napoli ;) our classroom and school. While I was busy giving the students 1,000,000 assessments, they worked hard all week!

We did a lot to get ready for our phonics instruction! Check out our vowel tents! We use these to practice identifying vowel sounds in real and made-up words just about every day!

We also made up a set of classroom rules based on respect! We brainstormed people and things we should respect at our school in a main idea web (also the target strategy for our reading that week). This is what we came up with:

Pretty awesome, huh!? They had some great ideas!
Next we narrowed it down to the most important ones, and made them fit with R-E-S-P-E-C-T in an acrostic set of rules :) These are posted at the front of our room so we are reminded throughout the day!

We started working on building our stamina for our Daily 5 Rotations this week also! They worked so hard to improve their concentration time every day! (See chart below)! We mastered the first D5 - Read to Self with ease! Check out what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and what we should look like reading to ourselves below: