Today in first grade we are officially launching the MWJDS Read-A-Thon with a celebration of Dr. Seuss’ birthday tomorrow. All the lower school classes will be gathering in the kindergarten room later this morning. We will have guest readers reading Dr. Seuss books in English and in Hebrew and will be doing some fun Dr. Seuss related activities.
Zayit mathematicians are finishing up a unit on graphing today. We have learned to read and make three different kinds of graphs: pictographs, tally graphs and bar graphs. We also did a short study of weights using a balance scale. Next week, we will begin a new unit in our Math in Focus book focusing on the numbers 1-40. We will examine place value, ordering and patterns for these numbers and then will move on to doing addition and subtraction with these larger numbers.
The children learned the word onomatopoeia this week as part of our Writer’s Workshop. Zayit writers have been working on writing their small moment stories. These are personal narrative stories that take a small moment in time and stretch it out adding lots of details. The children worked yesterday to add “sound words” to their small moment stories.
In Fundations, we have continued to learn about “bossy r” words and blends. This week the children began to learn about closed syllables, a syllable containing one short vowel followed by a consonant or consonants. It is important for the children to recognize closed syllables to help them distinguish words with short vowels verses long vowels. We also have begun to study some vowel teams. The first vowel team we are learning is ay and ai in words such as play and bait. The children are learning the saying: When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. We will continue to learn more and more vowel teams over the coming weeks.
In science, we have begun a new unit on air and weather. Before vacation, the children watched a video about how the design of a plane’s wings reflects how air currents work. Then they made gliders and observed how they flew. In the next few weeks, we will be comparing the flight of the gliders and the flight of paper airplanes. Children will take turns being the “pilots” and the “control tower observers.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Joanne