Sterling's Snippets: Seusstastic Fun!

Good Afternoon 1st Grade Families,

We had a Seusstastic week in 1st grade this week! We took some time each day to celebrate reading and Dr. Seuss by sharing some favorite books and completing a few projects. We began by reading Green Eggs and Ham. The students loved the rhyme and repetition and were also excited to be told they could read many Dr. Seuss books independently due to his use of high frequency words! The students sampled some "Green Eggs and Ham" and then made their own eggs writing a sentence them. I've made several versions of green eggs and ham over the years, but this year I thought I would go for a version I thought most students would like!

Here Tinah makes her own green egg.

We then read the story, One Foot, Two Foot, Red Foot Blue Foot. Students put their sorting and graphing skills to work with a fun Goldfish Cracker math activity. We also practiced estimating a bag full of gummy fish. Lucky for us, the student that guessed closest and won the fish decided to share them with his classmates. How sweet!

Here Preston works on graphing with his Goldfish Crackers.

There were 38 gummy fish. David guessed closest with 34.

We wrapped up the week reading The Lorax. Students then made Truffula Tree Pencil toppers, though I neglected to take any photos! Oops! Perhaps the students will bring these home for you to see how cute they turned out!

Students also participated in the Washington All School Read-a-thon on Wednesday afternoon. I again, failed to take photos as I was enjoying reading with my students. It is always important to model reading for the students, so I brought a novel I am reading into the gym and enjoyed 20 minutes of silent reading with the students.

This week in math, we began learning about Equivalency. What a big word for 1st graders! Students learned that there are many different ways to represent a number. They worked collaboratively to create a poster and presentation to share with their class. I'll be honest, this was hard for the students! We will need to practice more with collaboration and teamwork. Some strong personalities took over whereas others sat back and didn't engage too much in the activity. In the end, I still felt successful about what they had completed because they seemed to grasp the concept well! Below are the three teams in action!

There are just over 7 weeks left to participate in the Reading Trophy Program. Has your child already earned his or her trophy? All reading logs are due on Wednesday, April 27. It seems far away, but the days will creep up on us quickly this spring. Please help your child achieve the goal of reading 50 books, independently! Have you marked your calendar? The trophy presentation and 1st grade music concert will take place at 1:15 on Friday, May 13.