Finishing Santa!

Today we finished crafting our Santa faces! We enjoyed gluing the cotton balls and listening to Christmas music! HO HO HO! We did a great job-take a look!

Bryson, Lillian, and Grant working hard!

Jack and Griffin making Santa's beard :)

Kacie and Josh making great progress :)

Miss Meghan and Zayah!

Mrs. Randall and Owen are almost done!

Charity and Storm!

Toby and Cedar finishing up Santa :)

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

There was a lot of snow on our playground! We had fun playing at recess. We made snow forts and snowmen. We learned about doubles facts during math today. Today during library we read a book about a baby gingerbread and his band. We got to color a picture of a gingerbread man. Today we made Santa Claus with paint, paper plates, and paint brushes. Tomorrow we will finish them by adding Santa's beard with cotton balls. There is only 12 more days until Christmas! We have been in school 70 days already! As a class we figured out that we only hae 30 more days until the hundredth day! We had a great day today! We did a winter scholastic news.

Take a look at our Santa faces. This was the first step!

Friday, December 9, 2016

We had a great day together!! We had P.E. today and if we followed directions we got to play what time is it Mr./Mrs. Fox? We worked on dribbling basketballs while playing the fox game! During writer's workshop we worked on letters to someone in the class. We picked a name, wrote them a kind letter, then read it to them. We had some very nice things to say about each other! We had a long choice time today! We played all kinds of games including play dough. There is snow on our playground! We have enjoyed making HUGE snowballs and snow forts and snow men! We played ice dragons.

Monday, December 5, 2016

We were very excited that it was snowing today! We go to play in the snow at recess! We were excited that we got to go off the blacktop even if we didn't have snow pants! Let's all try to remember our snow pants from now on! A lot of people went sledding down the hill on their bellies! Today during music we got to use the orff instruments. Tomorrow is the holiday concert. It starts at 6:00 pm and goes until 7:00 pm.

Today we had our writing celebration! We were celebrating finishing our first writing unit: Small Moment Stories. Three teachers came to see our writing! Thanks for coming! We had chocolate chip cookies and apple juice! Yum yum! We thought the treats were really tasty! Here are some photos of us enjoying each other's writing and the cookies!

Philip enjoying Bentley's story

Visiting with Mrs. O'Hearn while we enjoy our cookies!

Cedar and Kacie reading Kacie's small moment story

Payshence and Josh enjoying stories and treats

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

We watched a video about feelings we might feel on the first day of school with Mrs. O'Hearn. Next Monday we are going to have a writing celebration. We will be inviting some other teachers from the building. There will be another chance for parents to come to a writing celebration later in the year. During reader's workshop we learned how to picture what is happening in our books in our own heads. We make a mental image or movie. Miss Lloyd read us the book Owl Moon without showing us the pictures and we made our own pictures! During P.E. we played a fun basketball game. We worked on dribbling. During choice time we played so many games! We get to choose any game we want to play.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Every other Monday we have community meeting. Today we got our gem jar for Westshire ROCKS! We got the color rose petals. When we do something kind of nice Miss Lloyd will put a gem in teh jar. When the jar is full we will get to have a special celebration! Tomorrow is the Harvest Dinner! We will wait to go into the gym until lunch time. We will be good friends and be on our best behavior. We will visit with our guests. We are so excited!

Wednesday, November 9. 2016

 We had P.E. today and we played battleship and stuck in the mud. For battleship we have four mats and four pins at each "ship." We try to knock the pins down with balls that we throw. At the end, the team with pins left standing on their ship is the winner! There are also scooters which are the submarines. They collect the balls to hand to their teammates. Some of us played soccer at recess! It was fun working as a team. We had fun playing other games as well. During math we played a game with dice. We had to add the two dice together and then show that time on a clock and then write the digital time. We also got to do iPads during math with Mrs. Martino. On Wednesdays we have guidance but Mrs. O'Hearn was out today. We missed her! During writing, we studied author's craft. We learned that "..." means to take a pause when reading! We can't wait to try some special crafts in our writing!

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Today some of us finished our ABC books that we do for morning work. Today is election day. We talked a little bit about how adults vote and who the two main candidates are. Tomorrow we will find out who the new president of the United States is! We really enjoyed Spanish today! We got to look at books written in Spanish! Today was Grant's Birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRANT!! We had blue and red cupcakes for Grant's Birthday and they were really good! Thanks Grant!

Monday, November 7, 2016

During morning meeting we learned the "Brown Bear Brown Bear" greeting. We learned how to make connections to the books we are reading during reader's workshop. We are finishing up our books about our families.We had music and REP today. We did a listening dance in a circle. We had to freeze when the music stopped. We had fun at recess. At choice time we had two new choices: play dough and stamps. We had a lot of fun! We earned a lot of gems today in our jar because we did a great job!

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

We were excited to start our day today! Today was the first day of November! We had carrots and cucumbers for our healthy snack today! During math we learned how to use pennies and dimes to count ones and tens. We played a game: penny-dime exchange. If you get ten pennies, you trade them in for one dime. The goal is to collect as many dimes as you can! We had Spanish today. We learned numbers and colors. We remembered that gray is said "gris" and red is "rojo" and blue is "azul." Some of us counted 1-20 and some of us worked more on 1-10. We had fun at Library. We made a list of how to be good friends. Today during writing we talked about our family trees. We will work on filling in our family trees tomorrow. We had a group conversation about how to be good friends at recess again today. Ms. T came in to talk with us helped us apologize for being unkind to our friends.

Monday, October 31, 2016

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! BOO! We are excited to dress up in our costumes tonight! During math we worked on a rainbow for the friends of ten. We are working on a story all about our families. We have been working on this during social studies and writing. Today we got a new buddy bench at our school. If you need a friend to play with at recess you can sit on the bench and friends will come over to play with you or cheer you up. We had the chance to go outside and see the bench before school ended. Nine people can fit on the bench at one time! This bench is in memory of Dylan O'Hearn. We talked about how we want to try to be good friends to one another just like Dylan was to everyone at Westshire.

Happy Halloween! This is one of our favorite greetings: the spider web!

Westshire's Beautiful Buddy Bench

Thursday, October 27, 2016

 This morning we had a lot of fun visiting with friends and doing our work. We learned two new trick words today during Fundations: to, into. During math Mrs. MacQueen came to watch our lesson. Tomorrow is Friday and we will be building Frankenstein in P.E. Tomorrow is also the Halloween dance at Samuel Morey Elementary. Some of us are going-yay!  Today during Art before we drew pictures, we helped unpack all the new art supplies! We read a book and drew a mistake on our paper on purpose. Then, we turned our mistake into a masterpiece! We got to draw anything we wanted! We did okay today, but tomorrow we will work on our listening and being quieter. We had a fun day together!

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

During P.E. we played pin guard. The goal is to knock over five bowling pins with a ball. We are practicing throwing a ball. We had a lot of fun during P.E.! Some of us threw the ball really high! Ms. Otis told us on Friday we will do a special Halloween obstacle course and try to build Frankenstein. During guidance we learned a new song about feelings. We had math today and we worked on tens and ones. We worked in our math journals and our new problem solving notebooks. We got to practice our friends of ten on the iPads with Mrs. Martino. Before choice time we had to practice how to be quiet on the rug. We came up with some good ideas to help us be quiet on the rug in the future.  At the end of the day we cleaned up to a Kidz Bob song. During choice time Miss Lloyd took pictures of us playing!

Grant, Philip, and Bentley being silly playing with Mr. Potato Head!

Payshence, Cedar, and Kacie working hard on a 100 piece puzzle!

Josh was building with pattern blocks!

Bryson and Owen sharing Toby's Coloring Book!

Miss Meghan helping facilitate a game of Candy Land with Charity, Storm, and Zayah!

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Mrs. Lacasse from Samuel Morey spent the morning with us! We worked hard during math on tens and ones. Mrs. Lacasse taught us how to play tens pyramid. We had fun at recess playing hunting. We had Spanish for the first time with Cedar's mom, Comfort and students from the Mountain School. We learned how to count to 10 in Spanish. It SNOWED today which we found very exciting!!!!

Monday, October 24, 2016

Today we did word work and we got a new center. It was homemade play-dough that Miss Lloyd made! We had music today. Today we learned a new song in music about peace. We also learned "frosty the snowman." It was an awesome song! We had REP today. During choice time we made some awesome designs with pattern blocks. We read a book about feelings, which we will finish tomorrow. Thanks Mrs. O'Hearn for letting us borrow the book. We noticed that Miss Lloyd moved some things in our classroom. Now we do calendar on the back rug. She hung up a numbers chart that goes all the way to 110!

Thursday, October 20, 2016

During morning recess a hot air balloon landed on the hill right in front of Westshire! Only some of us got to see it because we were at breakfast. Today we did not follow our schedule! Our day was all mixed up. We didn't get to do our read aloud or write during writer's workshop! Tomorrow will be a normal day! During fundations we had a practice quiz because we are taking the real quiz tomorrow. During math, we had two centers. We had partners to make friends of 10, but some of us worked alone. We also worked in our journals. In our journals we were working on groups of tens and ones. Some of us didn't get to do our journals because we ran out of time. We will do them tomorrow! Today Ms. Tolbert came in to talk about playing together at recess and being good friends. During recess we worked together to solve problems and to compromise. We had a whole bunch of fun playing soccer with kindergartners and second graders. During art we finished up our superhero self portraits. If we finished them, we could start a school villain portrait. The villains were something that wouldn't help us in school. This was just for fun! Our superheros depicted things that can help us in school. Miss Lloyd was given a pumpkin plant by a student-how nice! We had a great day together!

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Mrs. McGowan was our teacher for the morning. We had so much fun with Mrs. McGowan! During morning meeting we played four corners. We read a math book with her as well. She also brought us down to P.E. During P.E. we enjoyed throwing and catching the ball. We also played sharks and minnows. We had a whole bunch of fun!!! During math, we did some all about tens work in our journals. We played tens go fish. We colored a picture with an owl on it after we connected the dots. This afternoon, we got to play outside. Miss Lloyd spent the morning with Samuel Morey first graders and she came back during lunch. During read aloud we read a book called What Does It Mean To Be Kind? We had guidance this afternoon with Mrs. O'Hearn.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

During math, we counted by fives and played tens go fish. We also played count and sit using 22-32.Today during reader's workshop we learned how to make predictions. We had fun at recess. Some of us played a game called wolves and some of us played basketball. We enjoyed quiet time. Quiet time is after recess and we read and color. Today we had fun at library. We read fun books and colored. We read this nonfiction book about a hotel and the woods around the hotel burned down! All the people had to go into the lake to stay safe-the animals, too! Closing circle is one of our favorite parts of the day because we get to post on our blog. We noticed that we have been getting a lot of views on our blog, but we want to get even more!

Monday, October 17, 2016

Today was Cedar's Birthday! Cedar turned seven. We sang happy birthday to her! We had brownies with little flags in them for Cedar's Birthday. Thanks, Cedar! We gave Cedar some special things like a crown and a pencil. We hosted Community Meeting today. That means we got to sit up front and use the microphone. We played outside and we had fun being creative with our games. We also saw a big oil truck come during recess. We have a job chart and we get new jobs on Monday for the week. Today, we did a nice job during music. The dental truck was here today. We have squeaky clean teeth!

Thursday, October 13, 2016

We did a great job during writing today. We did quality, small moment story writing. We worked on adding detail to our writing and unfreezing our characters. We have writing partners and we make good teams! We also have reading partners. During reading and writing we talk about our special rules that help us stay safe, kind, and help us to build stamina. Today we earned a few gems for good behavior. We get gems in a jar so that we can have a special celebration in our classroom when the jar is full. We had our first bus evacuation drill today. We learned to be safe on the bus in case of an emergency. We had fun playing together at recess! During math time we solved some equations to practice our friends of 10. We played games with our math partners. We had art today and we did a nice job. During art we started self portraits that are meant to capture a special super power that we could use during school. We worked on adding backgrounds to our portraits. Mrs. Bando hung up some of our portraits. We had a great day together! Tomorrow, Mr. Stever will be in for Miss Lloyd while she goes to a teacher conference.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Hello First Grade Families! Today, first graders practiced how to be safe and kind. We also learned new trick words: a, and, the.  We started word work today. We made words with poms poms, stamps, letter tiles, and rainbow colors.Today was picture day! Students want to remind you that picture day retakes will be November 16th.  We had fun at recess. At the end of the day we had a closing circle all together. Before our closing circle we had choice time. During choice time we do puzzles, coloring, a variety of toys and games, and pattern blocks. We had a great day!

Welcome to our blog!

Welcome families and friends!

I will no longer be sending home the paper newsletters! We will be working as a class to keep our blog updated and current. All of our first grade news will be posted and written by the students to keep you informed. At the close of each day we will come together as a class and decide what we want to share about our day. This blog is by the students (and Miss Lloyd) for the students and all of you. Thanks for joining us on our first grade journey!!