First Grade News

It’s hard to believe this is only our second week of school! First graders have already written multiple stories, worked in their new math workbooks, and learned many of our classroom routines.

We started handwriting this week. First graders have learned “magic c,” “o,” and “s.” We call the letter “c” magical because it can be turned into the letters o, d, a, g, and q.

First grade writers are writing small moment stories: stories that zoom in on a particular moment in their lives. We’ve learned the first four steps of our writing process: think of an idea, plan, write, and revise! This week we talked about making sketches before we write to help plan, and using question words to revise and add detail to our writing.

First graders have been sharing all they know about letters and the sounds they make. To review short vowel sounds, we learned a new song “Who Let the Vowels Out,” sung to the tune of “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

In Math, we’ve reviewed numbers 0 – 10 and how to compare them using vocabulary such as more, greater, fewer, and less.

We had such a wonderful day on our apple picking field trip. The first graders picked more than enough apples for the whole school for Rosh Hashanah!

In Hebrew, we learned the letters mem and mem sofit and we were able to learn a lot of new words which we added to our word wall.

In Yahadut, we learned about Rosh Hashanah. We discussed how Rosh Hashanah is the world’s birthday and learned some of the important symbols of this special holiday, which are apples, honey, the shofar, a pomegranate, and a round challah. We learned about the importance of giving tzedakah, and how it is particularly important that we start off the New Year on the right note. We made a beautiful class tzedakah box that we will use every week to collect tzedakah during kabbalat shabbat. Another highlight of the week was that every student had the chance to practice blowing the shofar, which was very exciting.

In Tefilah, we learned the prayer mah tovu. We discussed what has to happen in our classroom/home so it will be a good place. We also added another page to our siddurim.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rebecca, Ilana, and Jeanette