Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in first grade by learning about his life and work. After listening to stories and video clips about Dr. King, we wrote about what we learned. We wrote a paragraph focusing on the main idea, supporting details and a closing sentence. We drew a picture of Dr. King. Then we scanned the picture and used Jing to record our voices as we read our paragraphs. We are posting some today. We will post more this upcoming week. Enjoy them!




Visit us next week for more about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.!

We would love to know how Dr. King has influenced your life. Please add comments below!

More from the week of January 13th

One of the highlights of our week was the graphing/store project mentioned in our previous post. Here are a few other things that we have been working on. We have been learning about verbs. Each student made a list of ten verbs that tell what they like to do. Then they made a wordle Here is one of the 'wordles'.

We learned a lot about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (In fact next week we will feature our Dr. King paragraphs!) We learned what it means to be a peacemaker. Here a couple of our peace doves.

In science we completed an experiment on chromatography. We learned what happened to black ink on a paper towel strip as water passed over it. We saw how the black ink was composed of many beautiful colors. You can see more of this at our upcoming science fair! Here are our before and after pictures. The students enjoyed this experiment.

Another project that the students enjoyed was making the paper plate fish. We learned about the first four apostles Jesus called. We learned that Jesus called them to "fish" for people. The fish we made remind us of our call to be followers of Jesus.

We would love to know what you think about our work!

Graphing and Stores

We were given a problem to solve in math. We had to create a store and find 3 items to sell in it. We worked with partners to create our store. Then we picked 5 possible items to sell. We polled 13 people to see which were the most popular. We graphed our results. Then we analyzed our graph to select the three most popular items. Some of us had ties so we had to choose the third item. You can see our graphs, which we made on Kidspiration. You can listen to us analyze our graphs.


We hope you enjoyed listening to us discuss our graphs!

What do you think about our graphing projects? We would love to know!

The Advent seasons ends and Christmas break begins

We had a wonderful December! We enjoyed our "Christmas Around the World" unit. We were able to look at the Christmas traditions from 5 countries. We visited: Mexico, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the Philippines. We learned how to say Merry Christmas in each language. We learned about the holiday foods and practices. We are able to locate the country on the map and identify its flag. You may have looked at our previous posts to see the ornament we made for each country. Each country had a "tree" outside our room. As we prepared to leave for the Christmas break, we each made our own tree and put the 5 ornaments on it. This way we could take them home. Here is what some of them looked like.

We also worked on nativity scenes this week. They turned out really well! Here are some:

The Nativity figures came from The Daughters of Saint Paul.

We would like to wish you all a very Merry and Blessed Christmas!
As our German friends would say: Frohe Weihnachten!
As our Swedish friends would say: God Jul!
As our Mexican friends would say: Feliz Navidad!
As our Italian friends would say: Buon Natale!
As our Philippine friends would say: Maligayang Pasko!

To all of our readers, we will see you in the New Year!

Christmas in Italy

We learned a lot about Christmas in Italy. We learned that the nativity scenes were started by St. Francis in Italy. We also learned that Shepherds come down from the mountains and play bagpipes around Christmas. Here are some more things that we learned:

Christmas Traditions Around the World and Our Lady of Guadalupe

The students wrote and recorded our news update.

We continue to learn about Christmas traditions around the world. We visited Germany to learn of German Christmas traditions. Here is what we learned:

After going to Germany we traveled (virtually) to Sweden. In Sweden this is what we learned: We also had a visitor come in and share with us her Swedish Christmas traditions. She showed us the following ornaments.

Then we went back to Mexico on December 12th to learn about Our Lady of Guadalupe. Stay tuned to learn about Christmas in Italy and the Philippines! (St. Lucia doll came from the Paper Dali.)

Weekly Highlights

This week we thought we would try something new. We worked in teams to create four news reports. The reports are about one thing that we learned this week. The week was exciting. We began our Christmas around the world unit. We learned a lot about Advent and St. Nicholas. Here are some items that we found interesting.

Questions for our readers: Have you ever been to Mexico around Christmas time? If so, what was it like? How do you celebrate advent? Have you ever read Imogene's Antlers? If so, did you like the book? What special things do you do to get ready for Jesus' birthday?