A first grade tradition is to visit Fosterfields Living Historical Farm in Morristown, N.J. The central purpose of this trip is to give the children a perspective about life on the farm in the late 19th century, compared with their lives today. Churning butter, washing and drying laundry on a wooden washboard, and cracking corn for animal feed are chores that our students experience firsthand during the visit. Of course, these activities are novel and fun for our students, but when they learn that children were expected to participate in these difficult daily farm-life tasks, they are astonished. The lack of an electric refrigerator and use of ice blocks to keep food from spoiling, not having a store to drive to just around the corner, caring for the farm animals, and collecting drinking water from a backyard well, are all eye-opening for our first graders and begin to develop historical empathy for youngest students.
This week the students in 1S performed their version of Spookley the Square Pumpkin, written by Joe Troiano. This is a story about acceptance and tolerance. The message comes across when all the round and oval pumpkins in the patch discover a square pumpkin amongst them. After the pumpkins try to convince Spookley that he doesn't belong in their patch, the farmer appears, as he does every Halloween, to choose one pumpkin to sit on his porch. When the farmer chooses Spookley, the other pumpkins begin to realize that differences are a good thing. The children performed a song celebrating their discovery. The chorus states, "Everyone is different, it's really no big thing. It's the differences between us that make life interesting."
If you walked into one of the first grade classrooms toward the end of reading workshop, you would see children sitting in pairs, side-by-side, with one book placed in between them. You would hear a productive buzz of children reading and sharing ideas about a book, or discussing which strategy would help solve a tricky word. First-grade students have been practicing good reading habits since the beginning of the school year and now are fully entrenched with partnership reading. The work involved in partnerships varies, but involves trying different word solving strategies, discussing the problem of a story, or sharing a favorite part. Reading together taps into the power of the social aspect of a story and helps children become even more strategic as readers. Partners are taught to remind one another, and cheer for each other to get stronger.
First graders are studying all about ten in math. They have expanded their math vocabulary with words like “sum” and “tens frame.” They began their study playing games like Mystery Penny Plate to explore all the variations that can make ten. In Penny Plate, the players begin with ten pennies. One partner covers his/her eyes while the other hides an unknown number of pennies under a plate- the other play must guess how many pennies are missing! After becoming experts at making ten, they began exploring how to decompose ten using manipulatives to represent red and green apples. Mathematicians had to find all the combinations of red and green apples to make ten. In this exercise, students combined their knowledge of turn around facts to find every combination. Ask your child about other games like Tens Frame Top It!
First graders continue to strengthen their writing muscles with each day. They are learning how to “unfreeze" their characters in their small moment stories. They learned that sometimes authors forget to let their characters move and talk- they are frozen in the story! When characters are frozen, the stories end up flat or boring. To bring life to the stories, first graders worked hard to add exciting movement words and dialogue on each page. One class wrote a story about our first fire drill. They decided to bring life to the stories by changing boring parts like “We had a fire drill” to “We ended P.E. and we were headed quietly back to the classroom. Everyone was walking in line when suddenly, we heard a loud noise!"