Women's Tea, Publishing Party, and Shapes!

A ton has been going on in the pre-first classroom.  Before break, Frida Kahlo dropped by to say hi.

We ended our unit on famous women in history by having a tea party.  The girls were able to sample small sandwiches, fruit, special desserts and--of course--tea.  As the girls we eating their lunches, we got the chance to discuss all of the famous women we learned about and how they paved the way for our young girls today. Many thanks to Emily Prevas, Alison Pritchard, and Mohamed Gheis for their help in making our tea a success!

The girls got into the St. Patrick's groove by creating their own pots of gold!

To celebrate our latest Writer's Workshop book, we had a Publishing Party with Mr. Lancaster's 7th grade history class.

Today in math, we continued studying shapes and challenged the girls to use the shapes we have already learned to create new shapes.

Parallel Lines and Famous Visitors

Many thanks to our famous females who have visited our pre-first classroom.  

The "Notorious" RBG stopped by yesterday.

Amelia Earhart flew through today!

We had a special Mystery Reader yesterday; Bryn Mawr alum, current Assistant AD and head lacrosse coach Jordy Kirr read the girls a book about Sonia Sotomayor.

In math the girls learned about parallel lines.  After looking at different shapes and identifying the parallel lines on the shapes, the girls broke up into partners and groups to create human parallel lines. Finally, using the Educreations app, the girls took pictures of items in our classroom that have parallel lines.  They then recorded themselves "teaching" their friends why these objects had parallel lines.

Chunking, Shapes, and Transition Words

On Friday, the girls learned about breaking words into chunks (aka syllables). We taught them three different ways to break apart a word: clap it out, robot speak and holding their hand under their chin.  Ask your daughter which way was her favorite.  As we broke apart all of our names into syllables, most of the girls chose robot speak.  

We finished our syllable activity by getting into partners and sorting St. Patrick's Day words by chunks.

Queen Elizabeth came to visit the girls today.

In math today, we continued studying and identifying different shapes.

Next we created a class graph of the shapes we have learned.

After that, the girls returned to their seats to create bar graphs of the various shapes' vertices and sides.

We have begun planning our next Writer's Workshop book.  The girls will be writing a How-To non-fiction book using the transition words that they were introduced to today.  We sorted the different transition words (first, after that, etc) according to where we would use them in a story.  Then we used these words to help us arrange the steps of how the girls get ready for lunch. Next, the girls listened to Harriet Tubman and sequenced the events of her life story using transition words. Finally, the girls used the Popplet Lite app to plan out the steps of how to build a snowman.

Squares

We began our geometry unit yesterday by reading Perfect Square  by Michael Hall and the girls brainstormed the attributes of a square.  They also learned some new vocabulary words that we will be using quite a bit during our unit. (Make sure to ask them what a vertex is?)  They then returned to their seats and had to create squares out of yarn.   This was a difficult task for some, as the girls had to be creative in order to make a square with equal sides. As they completed this task, the girls made different sized squares on geoboards.

We loved our Mystery Reader on Tuesday!

Wilma Rudolph

Determined. Brave.  Amazing.  These are just three of the words that your daughters used to describe Wilma Rudolph, our second famous female we studied in our latest social studies unit on Women in History.  We read the book Wilma Unlimited and discussed everything that Wilma had to overcome in order to be labeled the fastest woman on earth.  After we read the story, we brainstormed our favorite facts about her and made our own gold medals. 

Jane Goodall and Magic e

Our Mystery Reader this week was a special granddad.

We finished up our Hibernation unit with our last three presenters.  We are proud of the girls for doing an outstanding job of informing their friends about their animals.  

We also had our first famous female visit our classroom today--Jane Goodall!  

She taught the girls all about her passion of animals and her work in Africa.

The girls were introduced to the magic e today during language arts.  We watched a short video from The Electric Company (brings back some memories, doesn't it?) that highlighted how the magic e changes a vowel's sound.  Afterwards we brainstormed some short vowel words then used the silent e to change the word.  The girls also played a fun game of Pictionary with magic e words.