Updates, Constitution Day, Storytelling, Living & Nonliving Collage

I have completely updated the blog pages.  If you look at the sidebar of the blog, there are various pages:  About the Teacher, Academic Updates, Homework, Schedule, Policies, Field Trip, Links and Resources for Parents and Teachers, and Student Links.  If you click on any of these pages it will take you to another page in our blog.  I update the Academic Updates page on a weekly basis.  Up until this point, I haven't done that.   It is now updated for news for the upcoming week, including important dates for you to remember.  The Homework page is updated every Monday.  If you ever forget the homework for the night or misplace your homework schedule you can find information pertaining to the homework for the current week on this page.  The Schedule page has been updated with our most current class schedule.  The Policies and Field Trip pages have also been updated with the most current information.  Please check these pages out and remember to check back weekly for homework and academic updates.

Pete the Cat has made it to our class.  I introduced the kids to this awesome literary character this week.  Well...let's face it....99% of my kids had already heard of Pete!!  We worked on color recognition this week with Pete the Cat:  I love my White Shoes.  The kids had fun listening to Pete the Cat Rockin in my School Shoes.  Pete taught us about subtraction this week also with Pete the Cat's Four Groovy Buttons.  Please check out Pete here.  You can see all the Pete the Cat books on this website, plus download music, videos, activities and more.

We also learned about The Constitution of the United States of America, The Pledge of Allegiance, and the United States Flag.  Constitution/Citizenship Day was observed on Tuesday, September 17th.  We used the book The Pledge of Allegiance to learn about the pledge. The students learned what each line of the pledge means.  They then created their own book about the pledge.  We also read a poem called The Flag that taught us about The United States Flag.

We read We the Kids by David Catrow to teach us about the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States and listened to The Preamble Song by School House Rock.  You can check it below.  I LOVE School House Rock and use it to help teach many concepts in my classroom.

This week in writing the students learned how all writer's have a partner to help make their writing better.  Grown-up writers call these helpers editors.  The first thing I teach the students to do with their partners is storytelling.  Simply put, writers share their plan for their writing with their partners.  Their partners then ask them questions about their plan and the writers then retell their plan adding more information.  This is the first step in adding more details to our narrative pieces.  I have been so impressed with the students stamina for writing.  They really think of themselves of authors.  I love teaching students to be the authors of their life stories.  Who knows....maybe one day one of my firsties will become a published author.  Anything is possible!!!!  Hopefully they will dedicate their first book to their first grade teacher.  ;)

This week we also finished our first science unit on Living and Nonliving.  We culminated our learning by creating living and non-living collages.  Students browsed through magazines to find pictures of living and nonliving things for their collages.