Sterling's Snippets: We Welcome Guests

Over the past two weeks, we have welcomed several new guests to our school and classroom. The students are always excited to meet new people and learn new things from them. We enjoy working with Miss Mullen from NDSU as our practicum student. She listens to readers, practices sight words, and helps with day to day tasks in the classroom.

Recently, three Veteran's visited our school for the Flags for 1st Graders Program. This program teaches 1st grade students about the progression of the United States Flag as well as respect for members of our armed forces, past and present.

We also received a special visit from author, Ame Dyckman. Ame wrote picture books such as Horrible Bear!, Boy + Bot and Wolfe the Bunny. Ame was exciting, engaging and inspiring for these 1st grade writers! We enjoyed meeting her during our own private author signing!

We celebrated three birthdays recently in 1st grade. Happy 1/2 Birthday to Piper who celebrates in the summer! Happy Birthday to Nora and Blaise who both turned 7!

Meet Gracie

If you are looking for an all-around great kiddo, Gracie is your gal! She has a big family and this lends itself to her ability to be patient and help other students in our classroom. I'd imagine she is a great help at home too! Gracie is a super addition to our classroom.

Meet Daphne

Daphne is a fabulous seven year old in our classroom. I had the pleasure of having her brother Jack in class too and I feel lucky to have been able to teach them both. Daphne is quiet and mature and sets a great example for her peers. Daphne is a writer extrordinare, recently allowing us to examine her dialogue in her personal narrative story!

Meet Blaise

Blaise was able to celebrate his birthday and Star Student week at the same time! Blaise is a super Bison fan and an all around athlete. We enjoy his humor and wit in 1st grade as he is always trying to make his classmates smile. He has great jokes that he enjoys sharing at snack break!

A Peek at Our Week

Reading: We have been busy in reading determining the author's purpose. We practiced by reading books that made us laugh, feel a bit sad, and taught us new information. We are busy practicing vowel teams in phonics including ai, ay, ee, and ea. This week we will learn about synonyms with some scrumptious cinnamon roll fun!

Writing: We continue to write personal narrative stories. Our focus for the last week has been incorporating dialogue into our writing by using speech bubbles and quotation marks. This week writers will work to describe the characters and setting along with practice staying on one topic.

Math: In math it is all about place value in 1st grade! Students are working with base ten blocks, double ten frames and place value mats to explore numbers to 20. Students practiced the add 10 strategy to add 10 to any number such as 7+10 or even 37+10. This week we will work on number comparisons using the greater than and less than symbols.

Science: We have been having rocktastic fun in science exploring and acting as geologists. We conducted "Rock Research" to explore rock similarities and differences. We explored our rocks to determine if they were magnetic, soft or hard, or contained calcium chloride. We wrapped up our study with our STEM challenge. Students were faced with the challenge of working for a bossy jeweler. This jeweler challenged teams to separate different sized rocks/jewels without touching them with their hands. Through the STEM engineering process, communication, and planning, students eventually learned to sift the jewels using paper plates with different sized holes. This was a more difficult challenge but the students did a great job working together.