We are so thankful for the wonderful week that we've had! Here's a rundown of lots of our great fun ...
Last week we made 10 with our fingers & turkey feathers. We practic d making number sentences with more than two numbers. Aren't they all great!
We wrote an original poem about thankfulness together as a class.
You can also see Thanksgiving poems by each student on their blog.
We even made turkey finger puppets!
We read lots of Thanksgiving books!
We made clay pots and inferred what the maker likes by their drawings.
We attended a virtual field trip about turkeys with the Texas Wildlife Association. We learned so much!
Then we used the thumbprint turkey cards we made last week to share turkey facts! Each student made a video using their picture and the app ChatterPix.
Here's the final product! I bet you didn't know that turkeys poop differently if they are boys or girls?! Well, now you do!
We've been solving a lot of story problems, and having fun writing our own this week. Check out these really fun story problems by both 1st grade classes. We used Pic Collage to add the turkeys, then told a matching story problem in Book Creator.
You can write problems like this at home too! We LOVE drawing pictures to go with the problems we solve!
We've read several bat books, and learned from videos and a virtual field trip too.
Here's a playlist of bat videos that we have either watched together or are using in stations to learn about bats.
Here are some of the things we learned already ...
Readers use mental images to help them make meaningful connections, visualize what's happening in a story, and remember information and stories to retell.
Here are some of our fantastic mental images about bats.
Some bats eat other animals. This bat is eating a small frog.
Mental images change as we read different things.
Scientists call bats Chiroptera - which means hand-wing in Greek. Here's a mental image of a scientist calling a bat by its scientific name.
Here's a mental image of what echolocation might look like.
Here's a bat in the night sky getting ready to eat insects!
Want to see more of our mental images and learning about bats? Visit our Kidblog where students post their own thinking! We'd love for you to leave us a comment with your thoughts!
Oh my have we been busy learning about and exploring pumpkins in the past few weeks!
We recorded new and old pumpkin schema.
Then we carved virtual pumpkins and made them talk telling a pumpkin fact we learned. Watch them all here -
We watched interesting pumpkin videos and learned from them too. Click on the ThingLink to watch them.
We used our mental images to illustrate a pumpkin poem called "Have You Ever Seen A Pumpkin" and made it into a video.
We also made an interactive poem on our bulletin board outside our room.
Look at our beautiful pumpkins too! We mixed orange, brown, yellow and green to paint them. Then cut the paper and put the collage pumpkin together.
We even cut apart a pumpkin and now we're watching it rot in a jar. This video will show you our entire process! It was so cool! We even counted 418 seeds!
Our pumpkin is rotting now. Here it is after 10 days in the sealed jar!
Look at all that white bread mold!
We've moved on to using our mental images to learn about bats now. Look for a post about our bat fun soon!
Mrs. Zigmond's Class is on the iBooks Store! Click here to visit our books.
One of our favorite apps to use is the Book Creator App. We can draw, write, add pictures and voice recordings and now even create comics! This is the tool we use to create our iBooks.
We usually save our books two ways - as a book and as a video. You can always see our videos on our YouTube channel.
Creating books with the Book Creator App
We have written several books already this year. We will write about many different topics this year, but so far we've written a few social stories. Social Stories are books about social situations, like being kind to friends and much more. We have a special playlist for our Social Stories on YouTube. These are also the stories that are published in book form in iBooks. If you have an iPad you can download them for free.
Here are two social stories we have written this year -
We are so excited to be a part of the Global Read Aloud this year!
We're reading a book by Amy Krouse Roaenthal each week for 6 weeks. We'll be tweeting our thoughts and answering questions with other classes on Twitter.
We started by reading Spoon, then tweeted our friends in Massachusets. Mrs. LaRocco's class read Spoon before the first GRA book, Chopsticks, too!
