Lilly's Leapsters

The following is our class story about our field trip to the Pioneer Art Settlement:

Then we went to the farm.  We saw chickens and peacocks and fed the goats and donkeys.  Next we visited Santa and Mrs. Claus.  We told Santa what we want for Christmas and he gave us candy canes.  After that we visited "Mexico" and made poinsettia bracelets.  Next we strung popcorn.  Then we learned about the first Christmas cards in "England" and we laced our own cards. The last place we visited was the "Artic Circle" to make reindeer puppets.  When we finished we went outside to eat lunch.  It was an awesome trip!

As Thanksgiving Day draws near, our class has discussed things we are thankful for.  I know in my life I have so much to be thankful for including each one of my wonderful students and their parents.
We made this class book of what each of us is thankful for.  Hope you enjoy and have a Fabulous Thanksgiving.

Here are this year's disguised turkeys.  I am amazed at how creative our familes are.  I hope you enjoy the parade of turkeys.

This week we wrote and illustrated riddles. I compiled the riddles in a class book for our classroom library.  Here is the digital version of our book.  The students did a super job creating their riddle.Hope you enjoy them.

Friday our class participated in the O.R.E.O. project. That stands for Our Really Exciting Online project. Hundreds of classrooms across the U.S. participate in the project. Our class used science, math and language skills while working on the project.
So, you are probably wondering, "Well, What did you do?" I am glad you asked. The students predicted how many oreos they could stack. They stacked the cookies one at a time and kept track of their data using tally marks. When the tower of cookies fell, they recorded their data and compared it to the prediction. Each student was given two attempts, with the better number counting for the class average. When we finished, we averaged the results and posted them to the project website. We then compared our results with other classes across the nation. Our kids are great cookie stackers. They beat the first grade average by 2 cookies. Our class average was 18 cookies. We had 2 students, Jeremiah and Mia, who stacked the most cookies with 23 each.
After using all the science and math skills, we moved on to the arts. Each student was given cookies to use the filling and the cookies to make a sculpture. When the sculture was finished, I photographed the results and each child wrote about his/her creation. Stay tuned for our video showing off our creations. Of course, we finished the project by using our sense of taste to enjoy some of the cookies.

I am so excited to begin a new school year. I can't wait to meet everyone. One of my goal's this year is to make this Blog more interactive. I have found a site where I can post a question and you and your child can post the answers on "sticky notes".
Here is the link to the first question.

http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/lillysclass

In our reading books, we read a selection called Cool Jobs. After reading the story, we wrote our own stories of our cool jobs. We hope you enjoy them. The students did a fabulous job.

Last week we went to the zoo. We had such a great time. Thank you to Mrs. Gracia, Mrs. Schomer, Mrs. Yeomans, Mrs. O'Brien, and Mr. St. Jean for helping. We have created a movie of the animals we saw at the zoo. I am so proud of the students' work on this. I am sure you will enjoy it, too.

The rainbow pictures and leprechaun traps are amazing. We will be setting the traps to see if we can catch a leprechaun. Here is a video of the students explaining their projects.

The students did such an outstanding job on their 100 day projects that I wanted to share them with all of you. Click on the video below to see and hear about the projects.

This week we read a story called "Save Paper, Save Trees". The story tells how we can save paper. One part of the story shows how paper is recycled. Our class used pretty much the same steps to recycle paper into new paper. This video shows what we did. I hope you enjoy it!

Wow, I can't believe how quickly the year is flying by. It seems we just started and now we are at the end of January. I'm so proud of how much our class has learned. We have started learning our long vowel sounds and are reading more difficult books. Some students have started Reading Counts. Reading Counts is an incentive program where students read a book then take a quiz on the computer about the book. They earn points based on the difficulty and length of the book. Each quarter prizes are given to students with 10 or more points.
The 100th day of school is coming up quickly. I can't wait to see the 100 day projects this coming week. Stay tuned to the blog for a slide show of all of our projects.