A Busy Week!

On Thursday, the students of Wellman Elementary had McGruff the Crime Dog pay them a visit. Students were reminded about staying safe and how to respond to strangers.

We also enjoyed getting together in our Friendship groups today on a beautiful day! Students enjoyed tye-dying their t-shirts which will be worn on special days throughout the school year. Many giggles and smiles were also shared during our time as we had time for games in our Friendship groups!

Fun In Science!

In Science we have been studying trees. Earlier this week, Pam Holz, the Washington County Naturalist, visited us to introduce the first graders to five different trees found in Iowa. After reviewing the leaves of these trees, students had a lot of fun with a leaf relay as they were challenged to find a 'particular' leaf!

Dear Parents...

We worked on a shared writing activity this past week in First Grade writing a letter to our parents about our year so far. During this special writing time we looked at high frequency words that we are working on as sight words in reading and also paid close attention to capital letters and ending punctuation. We hope you enjoy these fun letters!

Dear Parents,

1st grade has been awesome! In 1st grade we have fun! We are learning to read good books by ourselves. Our class works hard every day. We do homework now every weekend. We do lots of activities. Math is fun too! We are making friends and helping each other.

From,

1A Friends

Dear Parents,

In 1B we work hard! If something is hard we say, "I think I can!" We are going to try to get 4 pumpkins to find out the surprise. We are reading Clifford books.

Love,

1B

Clifford

One of our beloved storybook characters, Clifford, brought a lot of laughter to our classroom this past week as we read many Clifford books. We discussed the model character that Clifford exemplifies and how each of us can be a great friend just like Clifford. We also wrote about what each of us would like to give Clifford for his birthday and what we would predict Clifford would do with our gift. We ended our Clifford study by making Clifford ears and rolling out sugar cookies cut with our special Clifford cookie cutters!

Back to School Fun!

We have enjoyed getting to know one another more in first grade and building our community of friends within the classroom! We have now been in school one month and it has flown quickly by. To say goodbye to summer we enjoyed reading the story, The Enormous Watermelon. We then sponge painted our own watermelons and enjoyed a slice of this yummy vegetable! Yes...we learned that watermelon is actually a vegetable!!

We also discussed how sometimes we may encounter work that will seem difficult, but we shouldn't be discouraged or give up. We then read the story, The Little Engine That Could and shared ideas of what each of us can do this year in first grade. To complete this short unit, we then made Little Engine Twinkie Trains!