Red Ribbon Week

Monday's theme:  We have the power to be drug free!

Cardboard Creations!

Here are some proud 1st graders and the things they created out of cardboard.   Lots of creativity and effort went into this project.  Thanks to all the families that helped make this day a big hit!

Student bloggers

We are learning about blogging in 1st grade!  We have a class blog (see link on the right or here) and each student has their own page on the blog.  We will be using these blog entries to share what we are learning about in school and to show projects students have made.  The kids love to get feedback from their families so please check often and share the link with other family members who would like to leave comments!  When you leave a comment, you only need to leave your name (what your child calls you) and the comment.  There is a space for email addresses, but just leave it blank.  This is the same process the kids use to comment on a classmate's post:  just their first name and their comments.  We have talked a lot about digital citizenship and our THINK! rule.  Before leaving comments or posting online, students need to think about whether what they want to post is Truthful, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and Kind.  If it doesn't meet the THINK! test, then it should not be posted online.  I hope you will enjoy reading your child's posts, looking at their work, and watching as their writing skills develop throughout 1st grade!

Brand New Year!

Our class has been busy this week getting settled into 1st grade!  We have worked on being a team and how to work with partners.  We have talked about our school theme this year:  superheroes!  We will keep coming back to this topic this year:  What are our own superpowers (things we are good at)? What can we do to help make the world a better place?  what can we teach others and what can we learn from others?  And, of course, since we are a STEM campus, we have done several engineering/building challenges.   Students have enjoyed getting their hands into things right away.

Since Superman can leap tall buildings, 1st graders worked together to build the tallest structure they could with 25 Keva blocks:

 

 

Since some superheroes have incredible strength, 1st graders used 25 blocks to build strong towers and tested them with a heavy bucket of blocks:

We also had some free exploration time in the library to see what they could create with the different materials there:

 

 

The students worked together to complete a cup challenge.  They could not touch the cups with their hands, but had to use the rubber band and yarn tool to stack the cups and then line them up by alternating colors!

We are looking forward to a lot more learning fun!

Summer Fun

Dear students,

I hope you are all having a great vacation!  Remember to write some blog posts and tell the rest of us the fun things that you have been doing.  And go check out the posts on Edmodo, too.

Coding in 1st Grade

Now that our nest building project is finished, we have been working on computer coding in class in several different ways.  Students are learning to think through a task logically and put the steps in the correct sequence.  They have to test their program and fix errors, then test again.  With so many electronic devices in the world, from our computers, iPads, and smartphones to microwaves, thermostats, and cars, coding is a skill that will be required in many future careers!  We have several great iPad apps that teach coding in a fun gamified way.  Kids love to play Kodable especially.  We also recently used a website called learn.code.org and another app called Hopscotch to write some more complex code.  

This week the kids designed roads and then programmed the robot roamers to follow the path and stay on their road.  Here are some robot programmers in action.  Notice the code they were writing down on their iPads in many of the pictures - the arrows that tell the robot which way to go.  Isaiah even invented his own shortcut way of writing the code.  Instead of writing 4 forward arrows, he just wrote one arrow and put a 4 under it to show how many times to repeat that command!

DFW Earth Day 2014

Today the 1st graders celebrated Earth Day at the airport.  There were live animals, fossils, handouts with tips about protecting the environment and a concert by a band called Vocal Trash featuring instruments made from recycled materials.  Students learned about the life cycle of a butterfly and got to go inside a tent with live butterflies.  They got to see and touch some live animals that we share the earth with like a snake, turtle, skink, tarantula, opossum, chinchilla, and more!  We heard lots of ways to protect our world.  Here are some of our adventures:

We saw all the stages of a butterfly's life cycle: eggs, caterpillars, chyrsalis, and adult butterflies.

The biggest skull below is a sea turtle.

Above are some dragonfly nymphs and other young insects that can be found in water.  Below are some of the live animals we saw.

We also saw a giant model that showed how water can erode the soil.  That does not look like a safe place to build that cabin!

The kids had a great time and should be able to tell their parents lots of ideas about how to protect our world!  And all our chaperones deserve a big thanks for their hard work!