Surveys and 100 Days

Dear families,

We are working on a social studies unit studying life in the country and on farms. Next month our drama teacher, Kelli, is going to come work with our class to do a drama and social studies project with us about this study!

This week on Monday was the 100th day of school. We counted 100 objects, drew pictures of 100, and made more counting strips starting at 1 and writing up to 100 or above!

We're also studying nonfiction, reading books and writing down nonfiction facts on post-it notes. Yesterday we finished our collection of 100 nonfiction facts! We learned these facts about topics like animal life, water life, mammals, plant life and other science topics. This morning parents who visited for Family Friday helped us write even more facts. Maybe we'll get to 200!

In math we're doing surveys. We wrote our own survey questions and asked everyone in the class. Some surveys were: Which do you like better, numbers or letters? and Would you rather explore deep sea or outer space? We're already pretty much experts on surveys because we do one almost every morning for part of Morning Meeting. We're going to ask YOU a survey now. Look to the right on this blog and please take our survey. We'll be checking back to see how many people answered it!

Next week is February vacation. See you on February 28th!

The First Graders

Growing Plants and Reading Nonfiction

Dear families,

The plants are getting REALLY big! They're so beautiful. We think the plants will flower soon. The seeds will be inside the flowers. The plants are so tall they're almost falling down. They have big leaves now too.

We did a read aloud called Plantzilla about a plant that gets REALLY REALLY big. It even eats hamburgers and drinks milk. When the flowers bloomed a chiuaua popped out! (It had eaten the family's pet dog.) In this story the plant eats human food. This week when we studied nonfiction topics, Chloe learned that real plants make their own food from the sun.

We are reading nonfiction books and learning how to take nonfiction notes. This week we all signed up for something that we wanted to study. The topics were bats, sharks, plants, mammals and fish & crayfish. We made posters for each topic, and stuck post-it notes on the posters with real facts that we learned from studying nonfiction books. We learned that nonfiction notes are short, true facts that you write down. Some of our nonfiction notes are:

• Sharks sometimes eat birds that float on the water.
• Seeds grow inside a plant's flowers.
• Bats can swim, jump and climb.
• Mice can have up to fifteen babies in one litter.
• When baby fish hatch they are called fry.

Here are our posters that we made over the last two days:

Keep writing comments, families! We love to read them every Friday!

Adios!
The First Graders

Our Bean Plants

Dear families,

Sorry that we didn't have time to write on our blog on Friday. Our class wanted to make a quick post today to show that the bean seeds we planted almost 3 weeks ago are growing really well! They were supposed to grow in our "grow lab" but it turned out that the light bulb was broken the first day we got it. So, we put the plants by the window and it looks like they're getting plenty of real light because they're growing so quickly!

Here are some photos to show you how much they have grown in just ONE WEEK. The first photo is from last Monday, the second is from last Friday, and the last one is from today. Stay tuned for more news from our class at the end of this week.