Friday, October 14, 2011

Week 8

This seemed as though it was a short week in the classroom. Monday was data retreat day for all of the first grade teachers at our school. We each had substitutes in the classroom while we all met in the conference room to discuss many things about our classroom. There is a lot to talk about concerning curriculum and all of the new programs which need to be implemented from year to year. From what I've seen, things change for teachers every single fall-there's always something new to learn! It was a long and tiring day, but necessary considering all of the changes. I will be so grateful for each of the experiences that I've had once I'm finished with the residency program. I will have a lot of things that I can say I've seen and done! That means this week I was only in the classroom with the kiddos for two days. We packed a lot into those two day though!

In math we worked on partners of numbers up to 9. The students are getting pretty good at number 1-10 by now! It's exciting.
Science was filled this week with landforms-hills, mountains, valleys, plains, rivers, and lakes. We had the students make each of these with their play-doh and they LOVED it. They don't get to play enough in first grade, so they love it whenever they get to do something like this. They are so used to kindergarten, where they get to have playtime throughout the day-being a first grader is rough!

Sadly, that is all I have to write about this week. It was short and sweet. One of my little boys told me "Hey, Mrs. Aman? You're like the same level nice as my mom. You're like the same as my mom. Except, you've never yelled at me before!" hahahaha, It was pretty much the cutest thing ever.

Have a great weekend! God Bless,
Mrs. Aman

Friday, October 7, 2011

Week 7

This was another jam-packed week in the classroom! I think it was the fastest week so far. They just keep rolling by and there never seems to be enough time! This week the theme was pets-which of course was a very fun topic for the students to share about! We read many books about pets, wrote about our pets, and many other activities :)

Math this week consisted of a variety of activities and concepts. We worked on knowing triangles and rectangles, pairs of 6, and odds and evens. The students love to play math games, like garbage-where the students have to make the numbers from 1-10 with a deck of cards; and treasure hunt-in which they count by 5's and 10's. We learned about odds and evens, demonstrating that evens are happy because they have a partner, and odds are sad because they have no partner. We looked at this using the students as props, and also looking at dice patterns to see which numbers do and do not have partners. They grasped this concepts pretty well.

In reading we worked a lot on characters and setting (yet again :)) We charted the settings and then had the students match up what the characters were doing while they were in that setting. This helps the students with comprehension as well because it makes the story easier for them to retell. We also worked more on rhyming and word families/chunks. It seems as though reading is usually the same from week to week :)

In spelling this week we worked with the 'r' blends. The words were: crib, crab, grass, grab, trip, trab, hit, win, that, and good. We have the students work very hard on their spelling throughout the week with lots of practice. This week we had them draw out every word in order for them to better learn the meanings.

We did a lot more with science this week than we have been doing (at least while I'm in the classroom). We talked about thermometers and what they measure. We talked extensively about the sky and what we can see during the day and during the night, including (of course) the stars, clouds, moon (and it's four phases), and the sun! We talked a lot about how important the sun is and why it is so imperative to our lives. My mentor teacher said, "without the sun, we wouldn't be able to live." To which one of our girl students replied, "ya, and we wouldn't be able to go swimming either!" hahaha, it was really funny! We talked about shadows and how the night is the sun's shadow (of which they were amazed). Then for an activity we had the students draw the night sky on half of their paper, and draw the sky in the daytime on the other half of their paper, just so they can distinguish between the two.

We also had a birthday boy in our class this week! His birthday was actually on Sunday and he was sick...and he was also sick on Monday. Tuesday his dad brought him in with cookies, Kool-Aid jammers, and a sheet cake in tow, along with napkins and chinet plates! We had quite the day trying to keep the kids at bay, as we wanted to give them the cake at the very end of the day. So we did cake as the last thing and it was quite entertaining to watch. The boys got an IMMEDIATE sugar rush. They began gallivanting around the room, screaming and dancing. The girls just sat quietly and took their time eating their cake, as slowly as they possibly could. It was an interesting observation!

That was my week in a nutshell! Full of lots of fun times, and oh so much learning :)
Have a great weekend! God Bless,
Mrs. Aman