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!