Day 11- It's finished!! Well, the words are....

Our major accomplishment today was finishing our ABC informational text titled General Delk's Guide to Clifton Hills. My soldiers thought of 26 different tips and rules for CHES. Tomorrow we start taking pictures to match the words. When our book is done we will discuss differences between fiction and nonfiction books; and how we can tell the difference between the two.
Here are our tips and rules:

Poetry was up next. We read a new poem titled I Saw It, about different animals. It also had color words, which of course we picked out and created a chart for. The kids pointed our that there were two things listed in the poem: animals and colors. I praised them for being so smart to realize that. :)

  

We did add some color words that were not in the poem, and we did leave off the color 'white'. I'll make sure we add it tomorrow.

We had our first math  test today, and I think it went pretty well. In fact, they were EXCITED about it! They cheered when I told them it was time for math! I could tell that their hard work at school and at home really paid off. My goal is to have the tests graded and going home with them by Friday. After the test, the kids got to play the math game that was included in their math workbooks. I let them take it home today.

Now, my favorite part of the day...science! We stared the year classifying animals, now we are talking about living and nonliving things.

You might be wondering why we didn't start with classifying living and nonliving at the beginning of the year, and my answer is this... the first grade teachers got together and realized that most of the ABC books we were using in reading revolved around animals. It was the best way we could figure to combine both subjects, and it was interesting to the students. Now that the students are in the groove of school, and ready to make more connections, we can build on some basic science foundations; animals are living things. Check out the chart we made today:

We found that living things are basically separated into 2 groups: plants and animals. We already know how animals are classified, so we should be able to move on to plants fairly easily. Tomorrow we are going to take what we know about living and nonliving things and turn it into a writing prompt. I'm excited to see what my students will write about!

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