The above two pictures are of Pol and Lorena for the French department's celebration of Epiphanie today, during French class. They were eating the “galette des rois.” Lorena found the bean (la fève) in her “galette", and she chose Pol as her king! We have had a fantastic week of getting back in 'school mode'. There has been a lot of review and a great deal of new learning with the introduction of our new unit of inquiry. It was lovely to see so many students move up reading levels over the break. Thank you so much to the families that made reading a priority over those busy three weeks. We now have 5 students reading level H. This is what grade level reading looks like. We are so proud. Remember that students don't improve over night, but with hard work, and nightly practice, all of our students are capable of reaching age appropriate reading levels. In Math we have been busy measuring height using inches. We know where to start and end. Today we graphed out heights to try and decide what heights were the most common in first grade. We also used the graph to figure out how tall the shortest students in the class were, and how tall the tallest student was (Anish). In Language Arts, we continued to work on our 'word choice' trait. Students learned some different words for scared (afraid, terrified, petrified, shaken, etc.) and wrote a personal narrative about a time they were scared, using their new 'wow words'. We also learned how to use a thesaurus to find more synonyms. Today we became fiction detectives looking for 'wow words' in books. When students found great words, they wrote them on the white board. As a class, we looked at the 'wow words' and had to think of a synonym for each one. The students really enjoyed this. We hope to see more exciting words in their writing as the year progresses. There are many ways to say one thing. During our UOI period, students learned about the sun. We had an ice melting race, where students build different contraptions that they thought would melt the ice best. They also build boxes where they were trying to keep their ice cube cool, and stop it from melting in the hot sun. Today, we built a solar oven to make s'mores, but because it was such a cloudy day, we were less successful than we had hoped. That said, it was a lesson that not all science experiments go as planned, and that cloudy days aren't as hot. So we were still learning, and the students still enjoyed their treat.
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ASA First GradersWe are caring, balanced , reflective, openminded, risk-taking, knowledgeable, principled, thinkers, communicators, inquirers, explorers and learners. Mr. Mason McCormickI am: a husband, teacher, friend, researcher, grad student, mulitliteracies specialist, designer, social media fanatic, lover of all things tech, creative, and progressive. I am an energetic, life-loving, no-nonsense person; passionate about respectful, rigorous, and relevant teaching and learning in the 21st century.
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