Meet O'Brien Lǎo Shī

O'Brien Lǎo Shī started his Chinese teaching at Washington Township by working on introductions. Ma Ma and Ting Ting helped the students learn introductions protocol. Each student had the opportunity to introduce themselves to O'Brien Lǎo Shī in Chinese.

Adaptations and a Special Guest

Adaptations...one would think a big word for first graders.

Not really when you break it down the way Mrs. Caskey did....Just another word for change. She talked about how animals adapt to winter and the colder weather. She talked about how animals adapt to weather---hibernating, migrating, growing a thicker coat, collecting food, and becoming more active to stay warm. Plants might go dormant, send out more roots or they might even die. People adapt to the colder weather by staying in, dressing warmer or in layers, turning the heat up, or building fires in their fireplaces or wood stoves. Adaptations.......another word for change.

Mrs. Caskey read us a folk tale about Turtle Flies South for Winter.

And lastly........she shared her pet salamander named Spot. Here student #4 is taking Spot around so the rest of the class can get a close up view of him. Mrs. Wilson learned that salamanders are not slimy!!! They are just covered with mucous.

Mrs. Caskey will be back next week to share some more about the outdoors.

Language Day

In Spanish to day we learned our color words. Senorita Beeler read a story about hot chili peppers to help us practice them.

Here we are singing our Adios song.

Today was Mr. Brown's last day as our Chinese teacher. We took a traditional Chinese school picture. Notice how serious we all look.

If I Live To Be 100

We drew pictures of what we look like in first grade and what we thought we would look like if we live to be 100 years old. We decided that was VERY old!!

February 4th Newsletter

There is not much news this week other than SNOW SNOW and more SNOW! I will not be sending home Friday Folders this week since it has been such a short week.

Our Star of the Week this week was Student #3. We learned that Student #3 has an older sister. He has 1 dog who name is Lacey. His favorite color is black. His favorite school subject is PE. When he is not in school he likes to play his DS game. His favorite animals are tiger. His favorite TV show is Phineas and Ferb . His favorite foods are Hot Dogs and Macaroni and Cheese. He has a bobble head collection and a rock collection at home. Student #3 also likes to play soccer and T-ball.

Our Star of the Week next week is Student #6. We will look forward to learning more about Student #6.

Day 100 was a success even though we had to spread it out over two days due to the weather. We counted and grouped our objects that were brought from home. We had a very wide collection of things: cranberries, rice, cereal, Lincoln Logs, pennies, beads, M&M’s, Legos, toothpicks, animal crackers, pop tops, trading cards, Rice Krispies, and craft sticks. We read several 100 Day books. We broke up into small groups to see how many words we could spell. We reached 100 words quite easily. We also made a list of 100 books we have read since the beginning of first grade. We reached this quite easily as well and could have kept going. We also got our exercise by doing 100 jumping jacks and also 100 toe touches. We did some writing about what we would buy if we had $100 and also drew what we would look like when we were 100 years old. The kids had a great time with all of the activities.

There is a class list attached to the email this week for Valentine’s Day. The first graders will be having their Valentine’s Party on Monday, February 14th.

If you ever have any concerns or questions, please let me know. You can call me at school or shoot me an email and I will respond as quickly as possible. I would rather answer questions and concerns when they are small rather than let them snowball into a huge problem.

When your child brings their math homework home, there is always a note to the parents about what we did in math class that day. Math homework is a great time to sit down with your child, listen to what they did in math, and complete the paper together. The answers are always on the first Home Link for the chapter. Thank you.

We are going to carry over the spelling words to next week. We will be taking the test next Wednesday.

1. boat
2. coat
3. slow
4. grow
5. show
6. toad

Challenge Words
7. coast
8. know

100 Hungry Ants

We all brought in a collection of 100 of something. We read the book 100 Hungry Ants and tried to group our objects in the same way that the ants marched to the picnic. We came up with these combinations:

2 groups of 50

4 groups of 25

5 groups of 20

10 groups of 10

Here we are with our collections:

cranberries

M & M's

trading cards

rice

pennies

peanut M & M's

Lincoln Logs

cereal

Legos

toothpicks

animal cookies

pop tops

pennies

Rice Krispies

pennies

craft sticks

Day 100 and SNOW!

February 1st was the 100th day of school We have been counting the days of school since the very first day back in August. We started the day by making Day 100 headbands.

Then we made a funny face!!

Because we had music, Chinese, and Spanish in the morning we did not have a lot of time for our activities. We did manage to get a few of them in before the snow started. We broke into groups to see if we could spell 100 words.

This was very easy because we are good spellers.

And then the snows came!!!!!