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!

Dogs, dogs, dogs!

Last week we practiced metacognition (thinking about your thinking) with stories about dogs.

We read stories ...

and told our own, as well as wrote and drew our thinking.

Then we used our thinking to write a dog poem, and painted fabulous dogs. 

Watch this video to hear us read our poem and see everyone's amazing art. 

You can also see them in our hall!

A Great Start to 1st Grade

Where has the time gone? We've already had two very busy weeks in First Grade, and are so excited for what's to come this year!

Here are a just few things that have been going on the past two weeks ...

We drew self portraits to be our Kidblog avatars.
Be sure to check out our Kidblogs here!

We set up some expectations for working with iPads, and many other
parts of our room. We're doing great at choosing kindness and respect. 

Our Writer's Workshop is in full swing and we are 
excitedly writing and sharing many stories. 

Speaking of writing - we've written a lot around our room too! Here's our schedule. Each block represents about how long each activity lasts.  

We also used iMovie to record our schedule.

We read, wrote and thought a lot about dogs this week.
They were a perfect way to practice Metacognition (thinking about our thinking). 

We even painted wonderful dogs and wrote a poem!

We sure hope you'll join us Tuesday, September 8th from 5:30 - 6:30 for Open House. Come learn more about how Olsen works, discover what we've been up to and where we're heading!

We'd also love for you to check our blog often! It's a great way to keep up with what's going on in our classroom. You'll see examples of how we're working, fantastic projects and also get resources to use with your 1st grader at home.

Mrs. Zig