Mrs Govostis's blog

We have completed our nursery rhyme unit with much eagerness to continue on our own. Ms. Max and I are impressed that some of our kids brought nursery rhyme books from home to share with the class.  What a great connection between home and school!  Thanks for sharing, Josh, Carol, Michael, and Ruby!

Our Nursery Rhyme unit led us into writing new endings to rhymes, designing our own rhyming book,  adding –ing to actions words, and completing sentences. These were  excellent association activities to our writing practice that we do daily.

In Math, we started working with rulers and dominoes. And…. Let’s not forget the calculators!  We know calculators are tools for helping us with different math functions and they are not to take the place of what our brains can do.

Nursery rhymes were a hot topic this week. Though this is a topic that might sound trivial for sophisticated first graders like us, they serve a definite purpose. They are loaded with lessons in phonics, story elements, and sequencing. Our core book, Each Peach, Pear, Plum, contains a variety of nursery rhymes that are based on the I Spy theme.

Miss Max also read us Goldie Locks has Chicken Pox, an enjoyable book that helped us with making connections, an effective strategy for comprehension.

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein was a highlight of the week. A thoughtful story about an unselfish tree deriving happiness by giving everything she could to make a boy happy was touching and prompted a wonderful discussion. How many of us can be that unselfish!

Apples, apples, apples!  Our study on this nourishing fruit took us to apple tasting, apple oxidation, apple poems, Ten Apples on Top, apples and yogurt as a snack, and the legend of Johnny Appleseed.  We culminated the unit with a self-reflection on what we learned for the week. 

We also talked about the size of the earth compared to the sun.  Did you know that it takes 108 Earths to cross the diameter of the sun. What a great activity to show us how big the sun really is..and it doesn't even move!

Our reading comprehension skills were challenged with When I Was Little and The Apple Pie Tree by forming connections orally and on paper.  When we are encouraged to form connections between what we hear in a story and what we know from our background, comprehension is made more easily.  We worked hard and did an excelent job at this strategy.

We are developing our vocabulary! How impressed Ms. Max and I were to see how well the children know the words, coincidence, loyal, bitter, murmured, recited, and sensitive. These words were taken from a book called Ruby the Copycat, a story about a girl who always mimicked a classmate she admired. Ask us at home to use these words in sentences, as we did here in school. Not bad for First Graders!

Our comprehension skills received practice by focusing on Quick as a Cricket which was great on learning analogies and using similes. We put a class book together that was related to this.

    Hello Everyone!  Even though we only had four days of school, we accomplished a lot this week.

    We talked about mixing colors, making  rainbows, and prisms.  Did you know that when light shines on a prism, the light bends into colors?  That's called refraction!  We loved looking through these prisms in the classroom.  The colors that come out of them are really fun!  We also read fun color poems. 

    Ms. Max and I are very proud of the color poems the children wrote. We are hoping they get published soon in the "Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans."

    We also read Mary Wore Her Red Dress which prompted us to write our own little version that was made into a class book.

Hello Everyone!

Hope you all had a wonderful and restful summer.

The first week of school focused primarily on learning the proper techniques toward being responsible, respectful, and safe at Todd Hall. You received a packet recently regarding our implementation of this program.

Our PBIS team carefully orchestrated  "stations" for us to visit. At each of these stations we reviewed the rules we needed to follow and proper behavior was modeled by teachers, as well as, students. As a result, we now know how to use proper behavior in the hallway, in the bathrooms, in the lunchroom, on the playground, during dismissal, during assemblies, and on the bus.  There was a lot to do and a lot of participation required but... we did it!

On Friday, we had our first kick-off assembly regarding positive behavior and we are looking forward to a great year ahead!