First Grade News: Week of January 8th

First grade writers have been diving into our new unit on nonfiction teaching books. This week we studied the book “Sharks” by Anne Schreiber and noticed how she uses pictures to add more information. She zooms in on important parts, and uses arrows and words to point out details.

In math we learned new strategies for addition with double digit numbers. We learned the “make 10” strategy and “doubles plus one.”

First grade scientists began a new unit on organisms. The discussed the differences and similarities between plants and animals.

Our Martin Luther King Tekes concluding our unit on Martin Luther King; however, we will still be learning about how to be good citizens in Social Studies. This week, first graders learned ten ways to be good citizens, such as being a good neighbor and taking care of the environment. First graders made posters sharing what they leaned. Our posters are hanging in our classroom.

In Hebrew, we learned the letters tet, tzadik and tzadik sofit as well as a new vowel, which makes the “Oo” sound and we kept practicing our reading. We also learned the verb ohev (love, masculine) /ohevet (love, feminine) and we practiced using those verbs in writing and speaking. First graders wrote sentences using all the vocabulary that we have learned so far and they did such an impressive job! (Feel free to check out our bulletin board to see their beautiful work!).

In Yahadut, we continued working on our siddurim and learned two more prayers from the amida. The first prayer ismikabetz nidchei amo yisrael, which is about community. We spoke about why is it so important to be part of a community. The second prayer is ohev tzedakah umishpat. We spoke about the rules that we have in our classroom and in America and how they help us stay safe and be better people. We have learned so many of the prayers from the amidahand we are looking forward to learn the rest!

In Parasha, we learned about Parashat Vaera, which is when Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh to ask him to free the Israelites, which results in God sending plagues to the Egyptians. We spoke about why we think that God choose Moses and how Moses felt when God told him to go to Pharaoh. We also discussed that at times we feel that we can’t do something but we should try. The first graders also loved watching parts from the movie “The Prince of Egypt”.

Shabbat Shalom!