We finished our project work!

Dear families,

We did good project work, and Clara is happy with our work. We worked really hard on this social studies and writing project and we hope that you like it!

We finished our project work books. We wrote nonfiction books about our community buildings and the people who work there. Please read our books. We hope you like them! We worked as hard as we could to finish our projects for today, when we had a lot of visitors for Family Friday. Next week we will make copies and everyone can read our books at home, and keep them.

Here is what the whole block area neighborhood looks like:

If you visit the block area neighborhood, try to be careful because we worked so hard on it. Just to remind you, if you knock something over, you have to fix it. Another reminder, our block area is like a real neighborhood!

We love the block area!

Anyone else who wants to come visit to see our block neighborhood and read our books can come before school or after school on Monday.

Bye families!

From,
The First Graders

p.s. Next time we'll show a close up of EVERY building. Stay tuned!

Cooking, Interviews, Buliding and more!

Dear Families,

Today we start Cook Shop! Cook Shop is a progam where we learn to cook and learn about food. Next week we start to be chefs! We'll have Cook Shop one time every week.

Yesterday Auden's mom came because she was showing us how to be nurse. We interviewed her about her job. Bev is putting the blood pressure sleeve on Julia's arm. Auden's mom let us pass her hospital tools around. She showed a stethescope and a pen light.

Julia's not here anymore. Yesterday we gave her cards. It was her last day working at this school. She's working with bigger kids now. Julia, if you're reading this we love you! Have a good time in your new school.

This is how our block are neighborhood looks like today! We have been working on building and writing our nonfiction books this week.

Bye!

From,

the First Graders

Beginning Our Building Project

Dear Families,

The whole class is working on a project to build a neighborhood community in the block area. We thought of buildings that are important to put in our community, and then we chose six. We signed up for which buliding we wanted to build. The groups are restaurant / bakery, library, hospital, school, park and police station. We all have jobs to do in our group, like group monitor, recorder, materials manager and reporter.

We made our blue prints today for our block area nieghborhood. Blue prints are plans on paper you look at so you know what to build. Each person made a blue print, but each group will build one building.

We made rules for the block area: 1) Work together. 2) Take care of the blocks. 3) Clean up the rubble and 4) Be safe. Rubble is left over blocks from your building but that are extra, on the floor.

We just started building our buildings. Here's what it looks like now:

Check our blog next Friday to see what it looks like then!

From,
the First Graders

Harvest Festival Week

Dear families,

Our school was collecting food for the soup kitchen in our neighborhood. Homeless people and other people who don't have enough food use the soup kitchen. If someone needs food, they can get food from the soup kitchen. Our school is very generous. Just our class collected 56 cans. Here is a picture. We organized the cans into groups of 10. Then we counted 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, then 6 more.

Everybody needs food to eat. That's why we help collect food every year. We call it the Harvest Festival. There was a club to help organize the Harvest Festival and the Penny Harvest. On the day of the Harvest Festival our whole school went outside to sing songs and bring food to the soup kitchen. When our whole school was outside, someone took a photo of all of us from the school's roof! Then, every person carried one can to the church. The soup kitchen smelled like chili, or maybe chicken soup.

Our school is thankful that we have the Harvest Festival every year.

We hope that everyone has a good Thanksgiving!

love,

The First Graders

Our First Family Friday

Dear families,

We had the first family Friday today. We liked it a lot! Thank you for coming to Family Friday, families! We had fun on Family Friday.

Here's a picture of Malcom and James and Jack, Malcom's dad. They are doing the survey for our morning message. 

This is Chento and his mom. They are reading a book about fire fighters. All of our friends like to work with their families.

Here's Michael. He was playing Ladybug Ladybug with Psyence and his dad. It's a rhyming bingo game.

We and our families played games. Here is Juliana playing memory. 

Diego had fun with his mom. She thought Family Friday was the best. They were playing memory games with our word wall words.

This is Yuna and Azul. Yuna's dad and Azul's mom were there helping them play a word sort game, sorting rhyming words.

This is Chloe's dad with Amalia. Amalia is new to the school this year. Chloe's daddy likes our materials and our class. Chloe wishes her mom was there to see how wonderful the class is.

Only some of us are in the pictures, but everyone did great today for Family Friday!

love,
The First Graders

Geometry and more!

Dear families,

We started something in our class to help remind people to do the right thing. We have class goals for the week and if we fill up our goal chart, we get a reward that we decided on that week on Friday. If you do what you're supposed to be doing all day, you get snack that day and if it's for the whole week the whole class gets something special, like a longer choice time or a short PBS Kids movie during snack. We're about to have snack right now.

Some people did math at quiet time today. They made posters about shapes. We're studying about shapes in math. We're working on how to put shapes together in different ways. When mathematician study shapes it's called GEOMETRY.

We are now starting sing alongs in class. We sing "Taxi," "John the Rabbit," and "Wishy Washy Washer Woman."

We love you, families!

From,
The First Graders

Here's what we're up to this week!

Hi families!

Writing Workshop this week was fun because we are writing new books. We made a map of our hearts, or our brains, to write down memories of stories that happened to us in our lives. Then, we picked one story and split it into four parts. We recorded the four parts on paper. It was fun!

We made parachutes this week for science, and took them home. We learned new kinds of words, like AIR RESISTANCE. That means that the air pushes the parachute up and the parachute tries to push the air down. It floated slowly down because of the air resistance. We used paper napkins, string, stickers and a paper clip to make the parachutes. Science is fun!

Goodbye, families!

love, 

The First Graders

Dear families,

Science is really fun! At science we had big jars full of water. We had experiments with cups and paper towels inside. First we put the paper towel in the cup. Then we put the cup upside down, and put it straight in the water. Do you think the paper towels got wet? No, they didn't! Because the air in the cup kept the water away. The air pushed the water out of the way. We like these experiments!

We published our books from Writing Workshop. At the back of our books there was a page for "comments for the author" so we read each other's books and wrote comments. Then at the end of the party that we deserved we had a glass of orange juice. We said "cheers!" to celebrate our books.

This is the end of Chloe's book, and this is the end of our blog post for today!

See you later!

From, the First Graders



Today's Letter

Hola familias!

"Hola" means "hi" in Spanish and "familias" means famlilies.

Two weeks ago we started homework. Speaking of homework, today we have math homework.

We started science last week. We're studying about air. We learned we could blow a feather with air, left or right. And the feather goes down and up. We learned that everything around us is matter. The rug, even us! Air is matter too. You can't see it but you can feel it.

Today on Tuesday we got new sensory tools. They are for helping you in the meeting area when you feel like running around, you're tired or fidgety.

We have also been liking reading Halloween books for read alouds.

Adios, familias!

Love,
The First Graders

p.s. Sorry we didn't write on Friday. The SMART board wasn't working.

October 15th: Here's what we did this week!

Dear families, 

This week we signed up for clubs! Clubs are groups with grown ups teaching certain things and kids from all the classes in the school. This year Clara's club is going to be the cooking club. Everyone in our class signs up for a club that they want, and go to the club every Friday afternoon. Clubs start next Friday!

There were a lot of fun math games this week that were really exciting. We like story problems, like figuring out how many cupcakes two people have if you add them together. We also liked learning about tally marks from Melissa. Math is really fun. First grade is really fun!

We went on a neighborhood walk for social studies because we're studying the neighborhood community. We saw lots of things. We did a scavenger hunt. When we saw something that was on our list on a clip board, we made a check mark. We saw some people's houses.

Bye, kids who are reading this with grown ups!

Bye, grown ups!

From,

The First Graders

Read About Our Week!

Dear families,

We learned a new math game this week called 5 in a Row. It's like bingo. You have to add numbers from a pair of dice and cover that number on your game board.

We're doing really good in Reading Workshop. When we start to read we sit back to back in chairs so we read quietly for independent reading.

On Friday, today, we had reading buddies with Stefanie's fourth grade class. We read together.

The meeting area looks like this now. We have a new rainbow carpet and some cubbies are in the closet now. We made these changes so we don't have trouble paying attention in the meeting area and keeping our bodies calm.

We also started classroom jobs, so you can learn how to be nice and take care of the classroom.

See you later, people!

From,
Clara's class

What we did in school

Dear families,

Today we had a visitor named Cecilia. She taught us some sign language, she showed us some dolls, and she taught us how a hearing aid works. She talked to us about people who walk differently, hear differently, talk differently and are blind. She let us feel a McDonald's menu written in brail. That's writing for people who are blind.

We also learned a couple of new sign language signs with our music teacher. Our music teacher, Hubert, taught us the signs for "stand," "sit," and "circle."

Today we had math books.

We're going to have a special snack in a few minutes. We are eating popcorn.

See you later, grownups!

The first graders

Our First Blog Post

Dear families,

Clara and Julia and Melissa and Katy are the best teachers that we ever met. We celebrate birthdays in all kinds of months. In September there were birthdays for Clara, Diego, Adiana, Julia and Eli.

We are having fun. It was hard work to do our self portraits.  We worked hard. They're finally finished!

First grade is super fun, and we learn. And we really like it.

We love the first grade!

Now our letter is done.

From,
The First Graders

The last day of school!

Dear Families,

Today is the full last day of first grade! We're having a class party today. On Monday is the last day of school, and we have a half day.

This morning we made memory books about first grade. All of the kids did a wonderful job on their books. Some of our favoirte memories from first grade were . . .

• Driving the combine during drama with Kelli
• Going on a class trip to Queens County Farm and going on the hay ride
• The school picnic
• The first morning meeting greeting, when Clara came back to work, which was the pinky shake
• We wrote nonfiction magazines for Writing Workshop 
• Meeting Clara's baby, Vera
• Learning to be strong readers
• Measuring fish in math class

We hope we all have fun in second grade!
 
We'll see you next year, we hope!

From,

Clara, Heather, Nellie and Nile's first grade class

p.s. Now we're second graders!

Salutations!

Greetings, families! Salutations!

We didn't write last Friday because we had the school picnic. We went in the sprinklers and had so much fun at the picnic. We all did some activities at the picnic.

Today we finished Charlotte's Web as a read aloud! It was sad when Charlotte died.
Now we can watch the movie.

We finished our garden model in the block area. We made lots of things for the garden like in a real garden. We named our garden "El Jardin de los Ninos Brillantes." It means "The Garden of the Bright Children." We got the idea for the garden's name from gardens we saw in the neighborhood, like "Children's Garden" and "El Sol Brillante."

From,
The First Graders

Today we had a project share. We shared our poems, our writing projects from earlier in the year, our model in the block area, and math.

Oh my! What a lot of activities!

Good morning, families!

Today we are going to start to make a project in the block area. We're making a model of a community garden.

Today we are also going to watch a movie. We are going to watch Charlotte's Web.

Today is the last day of clubs.

Now that it's June so there's no more homework!

From, the First Graders
(and Clara and Heather and Nellie and Nile!)

Let's see what fun we'll have in June!

Good morning!

This week we went to a few community gardens. We saw six community gardens on a neighborhood walk in only two blocks!  We had so much fun going to walk to see community gardens.

Yesterday we got checked for lice. We got to wear our hats inside if we wanted.

It's close to the picnic! It's on June 11th. At the picnic we have a snack in Tompkins Square Park in front of the sprinklers. We get to go in the sprinklers. Last year it rained so we didn't have a picnic outside. Some of the clubs, like the clowning club, will perform that day.

Wait, don't go! We have something else to say.

There will also be activities at the picnic!  It's not only for kids, it's for parents too!

Adios! Goodbye, we love you!

The First Graders

Family Friday and Writing Workshop

Dear families,

We have almost finished all the chapters in Charlotte's Web. We read it for read aloud every day.

We had Family Friday today, all about poems. Parents helped us write comparisons, like "my baby niece is as cute as a button" or "a cup of water is like a baby bird's bath." We're writing poetry for Writing Workshop. Today is the last Family Friday.

We only have five weeks of school left!

Bye for now!

The First Graders

About gardens

Dear parents,

Remember the lettuce we planted in our classroom? Last week, we harvested and ate the lettuce! The lettuce was weak after spring vacation, but they grew back to life!

We hope you enjoyed our publishing party this week. We're finished with our farm study for social studies and now we're studying community gardens.

This week, we went to a community garden. It's called Campos, and it's right next door to our school. It was fun! The gardeners told us a lot and it was fun using the shovels and garden tools. There were a lot of statues, like a fairy, a monkey and cats. The gardeners' names were Alex and Felix. We had fun watering plants. Aden watered a rose!

Next month is the last month of school!

love,
The First Graders

See what we're up to this week!

Dear families,

In math we're working on a new unit, measuring. We measured fish! Not real fish, but cards of different sized fish. Three different kinds. We measured the fish in inches, using inch tiles.

Today we went to Sauer Park. Today we had clubs.

We made parachutes for science. And some of them had little holes and they could still float slowly. Some of them had big holes and they fell fast. Air is all around us. The parachute falls slowly because the parachute presses down on air AND the air pushes up on the paracute. We learned a new word, air resistance!

From,
The first graders

Lily, Sam and Justice are here!

Good afternoon, parents!

Lily , Sam and Justice are here for the whole day. And Nellie and Heather!

In Writing Workshop, we are writing our farm animal magazines. We are writing about chickens, bees, cows, pigs, horses, sheep and goats. We've been researching these animals and this week we started to write the magazine articles.

This week has been a very fun week.

Have a good weekend!

From,
Clara, Heather & Nellie's Class

We have some new students!

Hi parents!

We have some news! We will soon have more students, and an extra teacher. Heather is coming to help teach our class every day, and Sam, Lily and Justice are going to be in our class all day from now on. We will find cubbies for them. And we will help them any time they are having a hard time.

This week we had a field trip to the Queens County Farm. We saw goats, a cow, pigs, chickens, roosters, guinea hens, sheep, peacocks, and bees. The farm has a new cow because their very old cow, Daisy, died this year. We learned that a one year old cow is called a heifer. That's before she has a baby. We had fun at the Queens County Farm.

We started clubs today! We had fun in our clubs.

Any time you want, you can write us a note on our blog.
I hope you enjoy our letter! Bye, parents!

love, The First Graders and Clara too

We did lots of things this week. Read all about it!

Hi parents!

This week was an exciting week. We had some celebrations, a farmer's market in our classroom and a dance party. It was also spirit week. Today was dress as your favorite, or make up a character day.

This morning our classroom was transformed into a farmer's market.  It was a lot of hard work to make our classroom into a farmer's market. We pretended to sell wheat, milk, vegetables, fruit and honey that we grew on our farm. The farm stands had samples of real food, and the parents who visited tried things like real honey. It was fun. We also watched a video that our drama teacher, Kelli, made. It showed all of the hard work we did over the last month. Thank you to all the visitors who came today. And thank you, Kelli! We love you so much!

Have a nice day. See you next month, after spring vacation!


From, the First Grade Farmers

Photos from our classroom farmer's market. We had stalls selling bread & wheat, orchard fruits, garden veggies, eggs & honey, and dairy products. We had so many customers visit that we ran out of shopping bags at the information booth!

See what we're doing in class!

Dear parents,

This week we reached a goal our class had. We had a chart. We earned a sticker every day we did a great job for independent reading.

We performed with Kelli at Town Meeting this week. We taught the school our morning wake up song. We taught you how to be farmers. We showed how to collect eggs, plant crops, drive a combine, make flour out of wheat for bread, and harvest honey.

Starting on Monday, it's spirit week. Monday is pajama day!

This week we were busy as bees!

Dear families,

We started a new science study. We're studying air and weather.

Last week we planted real lettuce seeds in flower boxes. This week the lettuce plants are starting to grow! We saw a really long sprout!

In drama this week, we've been pretending we were at the farm.This week we turned into bees! We were talking about bees, and then suddenly we just turned into bees! We had to do work to make honey and get the nectar from the flowers. We turned back into farmers, and learned how to use a smoker to smoke the bee hive! The bees think their house is on fire so they eat all the honey that they can, and they get so sleepy that they fall asleep and don't sting you. You have to put suits on too so they don't sting you.

We also went to the Union Square farmer's market. We saw farmers selling honey. We saw a real smoker, real honey comb and we bought some honey. Check out some photos from our trip!

Parents, we love you!
from,
The First Graders

See what we've been up to in our reading and writing!

Dear parents,

We've been working hard on our reading, to be stronger readers. Some things we've been doing in reading workshop are:

Read slowly, or medium, don't rush.
Make sure to look at the end of words.
After we read a book, retell the story.

We have a goal to read more quietly during independent reading, and to follow our meeting rules all day.

We finally finished our folktales and fairytales one or two weeks ago and this week we had a publishing party. We were supposed to have a publishing party last week, but we had a snow day on Friday. That's also why we didn't write a blog post for you. Thanks for coming to the publishing party this week!

This week we're starting a new writing study. We will be writing nonfiction magazines.

Bye!
From,
The First Graders

Wonder what we're up to? Going to farm!

Dear families,

We're studying farms and country life in our drama class. This week we met two kids named Max and Katie. Their farm has lots of fresh vegetables and fruits that they sold at the Union Square Farmer's Market. But, they were going to close their farm because just two kids couldn't do al l the work by themselves. Their parents got divorced, and their mom had to take a job in town. Max and Katie were so sad they were going to have to close the farm! Good thing we were here because Natalie thought up a plan--we could come to the farm and help them work! Ethan had the idea that if we use team work, we could do all the farm chores.

We could plant for them, feed the animals, and ride the tractor.

We took a photo of our class riding a bus to the farm (but not everyone could fit in the picture). We looked out the bus window and saw the city, a bridge, the highway, the small town of Chittenango, and finally their farm, with one farm house. And, it was raining along the way!

Don't worry, this is all pretend. We're not REALLY moving away from you to go to the farm.

From,

Clara's students (the first grade farmers)

See what we're up to this week!

Hello parents,

We want to share what we're learning about in Social Studies. We made Venn diagrams to show what is different and the same about small towns and big cities. This is part of our study of life in the country.

On Tuesday we had our first drama class with Kelli. We played games and it was fun! We made human statues.

This week, the school store was on Friday. Usually it is on Wednesdays. Some kids brought a little bit of money and bought something from the store.

This week SO many students were home sick, and Clara too! We made Clara really nice get well cards. We hope everyone feels better soon!

love,
the first graders

See what we're up to this week, the last week of January!

Dear parents,

Happy ending of January!

Did you like the books from the publishing party three weeks ago? Write a comment to us on our blog and tell us what you thought! Now we're writing folktales and fairytales. We chose classic stories like The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Cinderella, etc. and we are changing the characters to write the story in our own way.

In math class today we practiced writing numbers from 1 to 100. Some students got past 100!

Next week we start drama class with Kelli. We are SO excited!

From,

The First Graders

What have we been doing for TWO weeks?

Good morning, readers!

In Writing Workshop we are studying folktales and fairytales. Today, Friday, we read folktales and fairytales with parents visiting for Family Friday and we put post-it notes on the parts that sounded the most like a fairytale or folktale. Parents, we want to tell you that we've been doing things that we haven't done before. This is the first time we studied fairtales and folktales.

We got something new for the class, a Rekenrek. It has beads on it, ten white beads and ten red beads. We use it for math.

We hope you like it when the school store opens. It's a place you can buy something for a dollar or less. Some of the kids from our school run the school store.

We had no school on Martin Luther King day. We hope you had a good day celebrating Martin Luther King day.

Good bye.

Clara's first grade class

See what we're up to this week!

Dear families,

Happy new year! Feliz ano nuevo!

Today we had a publishing party. We wrote nonfiction reports about these community places: Pet Store, Hospital, Police Station, Fire Station, Music School, Museum of Natural History, and Supermarket. This morning our parents, some teachers and brothers and sisters visited to read our books. Today we had Audrey's pre-K class to visit, and they checked out our reports too. We made collage covers for our books.

We are reading Stuart Goes to School by Sara Pennypacker for a read aloud. Stuart is a third grader who worries a lot. He has a magic cape. Whenever he wishes something, it comes true. But not in the way he wants! We really like the book.

We are doing subtracting now in math. We are having a good time with our math workbooks and subtraction games.

From,
The First Graders