Thankfulness & Turkey Fact Fun

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! 

Happy Thanksgiving from Mrs. Zig's class!

Turkey Problems

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!

Bats! Bats! Bats!

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!

Pumpkin Exploration

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. Zig's Class on the iBooks Store

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 -

Watch -  Keeping Your Hands To Yourself


Download the iBook here.

Watch - Kindness Is ...

Download the iBook here.

Look for more great books from 1st grade as the year goes on!

Global Read Aloud

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! 

Here are our thoughts after reading the book. 

Then, we read Chopsticks. 

We loved both Amy Krouse Rosenthal books!

This last week we read Duck! Rabbit! and Tweeted our thoughts with our friends.

We even took two surveys (one before and after our reading) about our thoughts on if it was a duck or a rabbit. Our opinions changed!

You can explore more about Amy Krouse Rosenthal and her books on this ThingLink. 

 

This coming week we'll read It's Not Fair!

Pumpkin Verbs

We've been studying verbs this week. A verb is the word that tells you what to do. It's the action word.

Here are a bunch of verbs that we came up with for pumpkins. So many actions for a pumpkin.

Each first grader drew a picture of a pumpkin verb on one of our favorite iPad drawing tools - Paper by 53.

They typed a sentence and posted their picture to their Kidblog. Be sure to check them out here! Remember we love comments!

Here's a pic collage of our pumpkin verbs - 

Composing & Decomposing Number

We've been working really hard to compose and decompose numbers within 10 in the last few weeks. 

Decomposing is subtraction - taking away some to leave just part.

Composing is addition - combining 2 parts to make a whole.

We've also been working to find all the different ways to make a number. Here's our chart of ways to 6 where we combine two numbers to make 6.

We've also been working hard to tell and solve story problems (both composing and decomposing). Mathematicians draw quick pictures (not like artists do) to solve. Then they write a number sentence.

We've been using our strategies like Doubles Facts (5+5=10) to quickly solve problems like:
10 pumpkins were on the porch.
5 pumpkins rotted.
How many pumpkins are left?

Mathematicians would quickly know the answer it 5 because 5+5=10!

Here are some examples.  

Have your amazing mathematician tell you a story problem to solve, or tell them one and have them draw and write the answer!

This week we're working on telling time to the hour & learning the parts of a clock. We'll be solving some story problems about time too! Look for a post on Time soon. 

Sharing Our O.R.E.O. Fun! Finally!!!

Thank you for patiently waiting for this OREO fun post! We've worked hard to get our projects published to share with you!

Stacking Oreos and sculpting with the cream was a bundle of fun and educational at the same time! We collected data, compared numbers, averaged our stacks and looked at data from other classes around the world! 

Click here to see the official results page for the O.R.E.O. Project. 

We also want to sincerely thank the community members and families that donated Oreos and other items for the project! We couldn't have done it without you!

Check out this Oreo Highlights video we made with Shadow Puppet EDU, an iPad app that lets you turn pictures into a neat video.



To find out more about our data and discover how high each stack was, watch this video. You'll even find out each class' average!

We made the video with Book Creator. If you have an iPad at home, you can download the file here. You'll be able to read our eBook on your iPad in iBooks just like we do!

Welcome Blogging Friends!

We are so excited to meet our blogging buddies! Thanks for blogging and commenting with us!

We go to H. G. Olsen Elementary school in Port Aransas, Texas. We live on an island next to the beach and the water. See us on Google Maps here.

It is hot here a lot! It doesn't get very cold in the winter. We have a lot of wind though.

Outside of school we like to ...

Play football, soccer, baseball, and go swimming.

We love playing with our pets.

Go to the beach to play and dig in the sand.

We love running.

Go camping.

Climb trees.

At school ...

We LOVE to read books.

We have station time.

We love all our animals. We have toad tadpoles, a tiger salamander and Texas Land Snails. 

We love writer's workshop! We write small moment stories.

We have P. E., music and art. 

We also love to make things on our iPads. 

We wrote this poem, and made it into a video with our art!

We're wondering if our blogging buddies have class pets too? Do you have stations too? Are your stations the same or different than ours? We would love to know your favorite books! 

Dear Families -

  We are participating in The Primary Blogging Community. We are excited to blog with 3 other first grade classes this Fall. We'll be learning how to write comments on each class and student's blogs. It's a great way to be connected with others and learn about how they learn. 

Mrs. Zig and Class

Text To Text Connections: All About Ponds

Last week we read several books about ponds, and all the critters that live there. We wanted to take special note of how making connections between texts helps us better understand what we read. 

We looked really closely at two books - In The Small, Small Pond & Pond Circle.

We wrote down our thinking on T charts ...

We also recorded our thinking on a Venn Diagram. Look at all the things we found that were the same and different. We were EXCELLENT book detectives! 

Then, Friday, we read another book about ponds. This one was a book of poems, and we loved noticing things that were the same as the other books we read this week.  Here's a Pic Collage (one of our favorite apps to create with) of our thinking. 

We  even got to watch our tree frog tadpole change into a frog! It was so neat to watch his tail shrink! We'll enjoy them one more day, Monday, before we set him free to enjoy the fall weather. We still have several toad tadpoles to finish watching!

This coming week we'll begin thinking about Fall. We'll be reading about the season, creating with fall scented playdough, and much more!

We will also be finishing up our O.R.E.O. project with a Skype call to a 1st grade class in Wisconsin! We're really excited to share how our project went and learn about theirs. We'll average our data and get put on the O.R.E.O. project map. Look for lots of pictures and projects very soon!

Thank you for all your support!

Mrs. Zig 

Be Brave & Give It A Try

We spent last week focusing on making connections to books where the characters had to be brave and give something a try.

We read:

The Dot



Everyone Can Learn To Ride A Bicycle

It's Tough To Lose Your Balloon



After reading all our books we wrote and drew some of our thinking about being brave. Here it is on our board.

We also recorded out work into a Book Creator Book. Watch it here ... 

We're looking forward to another great week! We hope to be sharing lots of what we're thinking and learning!

Dot Day!

Yesterday we had a wonderful day celebrating being brave, giving it a try and making our mark!

Our water color dots turned out beautifully!

Here's our class dot - 

See the book here:

Sing the song here:

Be sure to visit our Kidblog, so you can see your student's dot! You can even comment on it!  You don't have to sign in or anything! Just click on your child's post, and type in a comment. I approve all comments from anyone not in our class, so there's no worries about safety! We'd LOVE for our families to be our first commentators!