First Grade News: Week of November 13th

This week we learned five new sight words: but, not, all, what, and were.

First grade writers continued to work on their opinion writing. To learn more about opinion writing, we read the book Earrings by Judith Viorst. Earrings is about a young girl who is trying to convince her parents she should get her ears pierced. She uses many of the opinion writing strategies we learned about: using many reasons, adding details, and anticipating disagreement by talking back.

We also read The King of Little Things by Bil Lepp to learn about sparkly words. Sparkly words are a way to add some excitement to our writing. For example, first graders came up with different words we could use instead of the word good, such as great, magnificent, awesome, and Fantastic.

In Social Studies we started interviewing members of our community. Last week we practiced our interview skills by interviewing each other. This week the red stars interviewed Jorge and the blue stars interviewed Shelley. It was so interesting to learn more about these important members of our community!

This week first grade mathematicians reviewed everything we’ve learned in the last two math units. They used many strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems, practiced number bonds, and challenged themselves in our challenge packets.

First grade scientists practiced reading thermometers by measuring hot and cold water. They made predictions about the temperature of the water when mixed together and then tried it out. They took home their own thermometers to practice reading them!

In Hebrew, we learned the letters pey, fey and fey sofit. We also learned the verb Kanah (buy, masculine) and kantah (buy, feminine) and we practiced using those verbs in writing and speaking. We added lots of new words to our word wall and our vocabulary just keeps growing. We continued to practice our reading with all of the letters and vowels that we have learned so far.

In Yahadut, we learned a new prayer from the amidah called chonen hadaat.  We spoke about the word “knowledge” and how we can be thankful to God for our knowledge. Our siddurim are coming together beautifully!

This week Parasha is Toldot, which is about Jacob receiving Isaac’s blessing. We talked about how these two brothers were very different from each other, but that they also had a few similarities. We had the opportunity to interview someone in our class and learn about our similarities and differences.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rebecca, Ilana, and Jeanette