The End of the Year!!

What a year we've had!! I've attempted to blog some of it here over the year, but I have definitely not given the year of first grade justice with this little blog. I have learned so very much from these kiddos and I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to help them along their educational journey. My teaching career will be forever changed because of these sweet students:

Javier, Elisa, Nate, Paige, Christopher, Andrea, Keven, Gustavo, Kaela, Sammy, Erik, Maya, Kincaid, Phillip, Perla, Robert, Brook, Elysse, Michael, Rich, Dylan, Kian, and Leticia.

Here's a little goodbye song to end the year:

Thanks again for all your support! I'm already looking forward to alumni lunches starting in the fall so I can keep up to date with all their experiences in second grade! Have a very happy summer!

Best,

Jessica

Our last field trip!

On the last full day of school, we went to Sky River Park for an afternoon of four square, soccer, birthday singing, cupcake eating, and playground playing. Maya took my camera and got some great shots!

It was a nice way to end our year! Thanks to Kris, Kian's mom, and Dan, Kaela's dad, for helping out, and playing four square and soccer!!

A trip to the farm!

To celebrate our farm study, we headed to Kelsey Creek Farm for a relaxed adventure and a chance to see rabbits, chickens, goats, a horse, a pig, and more!

More pictures and video to come thanks to Tiffany Stringer!

Apple Selling!

We are busy selling apples at recess for our fundraiser! Our goal is $900. We are hoping to donate $300 to our O Ambassador Club's organization: Feed the Children. The remaining money we'll go to purchasing animals from the Heifer Organization as this nicely aligns with our Farm Unit.

Look at these world savers hard at work:

We'll definitely post our total at the end of the month!

Happy Earth Day!

Today we researched some challenges our Earth is facing and ways to be more friendly to our environment. We made posters out of recycled products and wanted to share it with you.

Here's a message from some earth-lovin' first graders.

My favorite part of our talk was sparked by Gustavo and Kaela, who discussed taking care of the world so it's around for all the animals, especially those in Antarctica and the Arctic Sea. It relates right back to what we've been talking about. Gustavo also said he'd like to know that the Earth will be around when he's old and has kids.

We'll be doing some more research (with a potential related field trip!) regarding ways to help our Earth and we've already committed to a few changes in our classroom.

MP3 Players

We started using our MP3 players this week. It was definitely a highlight. Each student has an individual MP3 player to listen to reading. Research shows that children who listen to good models of reading increase their fluency, learn more vocabulary, improve their comprehension skills, and not to mention have a great time.

Each child picked three theme books, two books on his/her reading level, our selection story from our reading program, and their current high frequency practice words to add to their MP3 player. Students follow along as the stories are read to them and many are ready to read along. We will change the books each week.

I captured some pictures of the kids hard at work.

There's nothing a teacher loves more than books thrown about and kids actively reading!

Easter Egg Math

Today we had an Easter egg math hunt. All students were assigned a number and had to find all the eggs that equaled their number. It was fabulously fun chaos!