Hope For Better Days Ahead

I know a lot of you have been concerned about my health so this should bring everyone up to date. This past Friday, I had an appointment with the chief neurologist for Kelsey-Seybold regarding my chronic neck pain.  This has been going on for a while but has peaked in the last 4 weeks. We have had multiple tests done with no findings (..which is frustrating) and know that I am in good hands but regret having to miss days with your children.  I want to apologize for cancelling conferences, this past Friday, but it was due to the unplanned additional testing that the doctor wanted to do.  I will plan for rescheduling conferences for the coming weeks.  Thank you for your continued support, consideration and understanding.  If you have any concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to email me.

Field Trip Excursion

WOW! What a wonderful adventure! We all had sooo much fun! Not only was day filled with activity but we also had beautiful weather to enjoy.  Our first stop was playtime at 'The Hill' by the Miller Outdoor Theater.  The kids had a blast running up and down the hill.  Just watching them makes you want to find out where to get a dose of that youthfullness.  The kids had a blast! We had lunch 'picnic-style', had a quick restroom break, posed for photos, loaded back up onto the buses and headed to the Children's Museum.  Our guides did an excellent job touring us around the museum.  We learned about ecosystems, water concepts, problem solving, bloodsuckers, pulleys and more! We had so much fun that many of the kiddos fell asleep on the bus ride back.  THANK YOU VERY MUCH to my chaperone moms of Elizabeth, John, Angel, Meagan, Antonia and Ella!

What Do You Think?

This week we have been focusing on shadows and how they are made along with learning about natural light and artificial light...today we worked on sorting sources of light into these 2 groups after a long discussion. They got to use magazine cuts out to demonstrate what they had learned.
I few of the pictures we found we some of the following:
 sun, stars, fire, light bulbs, flashlights, and glow sticks.
Tonight sit down with your family and discuss all the different natural and artificial lights you have around the house. This is really interesting and really fun to listen to their thinking.

Getting All Caught Up

I just wanted to get everyone filled in on a few weeks of wonderful and exciting things that we have all been doing in our active classroom.

After investigating at a variety of different maps and where they can find them, they were able to take the information they collected then use it to create their own island.This was so much fun because we took this lesson and pretended they were in the game of survivor. They were able to take paper and play-doh  and include  a variety of different land forms and building structures that they believe would be important if they were to be on this island all alone. They brought these creations home and I hope you really enjoyed listening to how they created them and why they chose the things they placed onto their island.

With maps, they were also able to work with a friend and create a birds eye view of the classroom and then create a map key to add to this.

Now we have moved to learning about the United States map and practicing the ten states that are important for first graders to learn. They got to play a game with one another yesterday and really got lots of practice with learning the ten states.

There are just a few pictures of what we have done with maps.