Butterfly Symmetry

Students have been learning about and observing butterflies.  We decided it would be fun to integrate some math into our butterfly study.  We learned about symmetry.  The students each decorated one side of a butterfly, then they traded with a friend.  Each student matched the other side of their friend's butterfly to create a symmetrical butterfly.  Here are the partners and their beautiful creations!

 


 

 

 

 

Life Cycles

We have been studying the life cycle of frogs, plants, sea monkeys (brine shrimp) and butterflies.
The students have been able to integrate reading, art and technology into their study of the life cycles.  Check out what we've been up to....

Frogs:
We read about, watched some youtube videos and create artwork about the frog's life cycle.

We read about the life cycle of plants and trees.  First graders searched pictures of the stages of plants and trees and created a pic-collage of their learning.

 


We have been observing sea monkeys for a couple of weeks.  We saw them as eggs, watched them hatch with magnified glasses and are now able to watch them swim with our own eyes.

Finally, we have had the most fun watching our catepillars (larve stage) eat until they fattened up, create cocoons around themselves (pupa stage.. which I forgot to photograph) and hatch from their cocoons into beautiful butterflies (adult stage)!

We took our butterfly cage outside today and released all 5 of our butterflies.  A few of them decided they liked our first graders (and their shoes) enough to stick around for a while!  Tomorrow, each student will be creating a pic-collage of our butterflies' lifecycle from our photos we took along the way.  Stay tuned for those soon!

Self Motivated Learners

We were learning about different types of landforms.  The students asked a lot of questions and told many stories about the landforms.  When we were completing our study of the landforms, a few students started creating a book about the landforms during their choice time.  As they talked with the other classmates it became obvious that my first graders were interested in creating their own landform books about what they learned.  We used some of our social studies time to create these books and share them with our friends.  The students were very proud of their work and I am very proud of their motivation to create their own learning!  Way to go First Graders!

Happy Friday

Winter in April...

The Week of Visualizing

This week we practiced using our visualization skills as we listened to books and poems.  To help us remember what visualizing is we learned a song from the book Reading Power by Adrienne Gear.  Take a peek below...

Non-Fiction vs. Fiction

After exploring non-fiction books, we decided to compare fiction and non-fiction books to see what was they same and what was different about these types of books.
Take a peek at us comparing the books and at our Venn Diagram that explains our findings.

Exploring Non-Fiction

Over the last two weeks we have explored non-fiction texts.  We talked about the text features that non-fiction books have and what the purpose is for having the text features.
After exploring the books each child chose a non-fiction animal book to read and read it jotting down questions they had as they were reading.  After jotting down their questions, they decided what was their "burning question" they wanted to find the answer to.  They used their IPad to create a Pic Collage of their animal and their "burning question".  When they had that completed, they used the book  or other resources to find the answer to their question.  They recorded their answer and sited their source.  Take a peek at our non-fiction journey.

Then they shared their findings with their friends.

Then I hung them in the hall for our other OLE friends and teachers to see.