Welcome to First Grade in Queen Anne Elementary's Tree house! Ms. Meck and her 26 amazing students are now settling into their classroom ready to begin the incredible journey that is first grade! We hope you check in often!
Field Day 2012! We had so much fun at our annual Field Day Celebration! My dragonflies competed in water balloon tosses, hula-hoop marathon and a marble grab before the first every Tug-O-War between the first grade classes. We fought hard but Ms. Leland's class took us 2-1. ( No sour grapes but my boys said it had to be because our "strongest boys' were on vacation already and Ms. Leland had her own kids on their team) Anyway - we will get them next year!
The stage is set for our first Reader's Theater today. We will be performing four classic Fairy Tales: The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Three Little Pigs, Rumplestiltskin, and Little Red Riding Hood. Break A Leg First Graders!
We started our non fiction book clubs today. There are 6 groups - we are learning about snakes, dolphins, penguins, horses, space and the Titanic.
March 1st - Our One Hundredth Day of School
Another Unity Point Party and today we are celebrating with our favorite stuffed animals!
We have three rules at QAE - Be Kind, Be Fair and Be Safe. In room 204 we've added one more: Don't Litter.
Hot off the Presses!
Our first Writer's Celebration is tomorrow morning. The kids have picked their favorite small moment story to share with friends and family. Hope to see you there!
Our first Writer's Celebration is tomorrow morning. The kids have picked their favorite small moment story to share with friends and family. Hope to see you there!
We read Oliver Button is not a Sissy together this week. Here are some of the connections and mental images that we made.
Our Neighborhoood - Families moving in soon
Roots of Empathy -
Today was just our second visit with Baby Mary but we welcomed her with much fanfare! Television news camera's accompanied the founder of Roots of Empathy, Mary Gordon, as she visited our classroom. It was so much fun to see the kids connect with Baby Mary and her mom.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
Thank you's from the HEART......
Seattle Firefighters from Ladder 6 visit QAE first graders today......
My joggers did an amazing job at last week's Jog-A-Thon! We all participated and we all turned in pledges to raise money for our school! Way to go Dragonflies!
Tomorrow is the Jog-a-Thon. Time for a Sundance!
Scientists use tools to measure their work.We are now working as meteorologists as we study the weather and how it impacts our lives. We are using tools like thermometers and wind flags to measure temperature and wind speed.
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Queen Anne Explorers
Today we took the first steps towards learning more about the community where we live and go to school. Here we are on the steps of QAE before going on our first neighborhood walk. It was a great beginning. Thank you to all my parent volunteers who led the way!
It's Feeding Day Today!
Evan is working while Markus keeps the tally.
How many Oreo cookies can you stack without making it tumble? Today the first graders at QAE participated in the Oreo Online Project. We will find out how we stack up against other first graders all around the country. Each of us got two attempts at stacking oreo cookies. Our partner kept track of our stack using tally marks and numbers. Our goal was to find the average length stacked in our classroom. Our smallest stacks were 12 cookies high and our longest were 32 cookies high. And when we looked at the data we found the average stack in Room 204 was fifteen cookies high!
Pictures inspried by James and the Giant Peach.
For the last 19 days we have been coming in after lunch and reading Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. We have laughed and talked as a class about each chapter and I think we were all a bit sad to see the book end today. In fact someone asked, "Ms. Meck is there a part two?" Like all good readers we all make different pictures in our minds as the story unfolds - today we got to put our favorite parts of the story on paper. And I'm so impressed with the results.
Look at these incredible faces!
"Snake Day" was an amazing success. After three days the snake finally was taken out of the terrarium for his first meal. Gray was our "snake charmer" and the job will rotate from week-to-week, but the kids couldn't be happier to have a new friend in the room. All day we learned about snakes. We read new books, we documented our learning and we wrote a book filled with fun facts. We learned to slither and we talked and talked and talked about snakes. In Math, we measured our snake (he's aproximately 11 inches long) and because we learned in our reading that the longest documented snake in the United States was 9 feet long - we got out rulers and unifix cubes to figure out what 9 feet looks like.
He's been sleeping all week but when I got to school this morning our snake was finally moving! And not a moment to soon....Today is Snake day. We are finally going to get him out of the terrarium so that we can learn to care for him. We are all super excited!
If you look closely you will see the corn snake that is now making it's home in our classroom. One of my students really wanted us to have a pet so he came up with a couple of ideas. As a class we decided our pet had to be friendly and require little care. We knew it would be spending weekends alone and would have to go for a couple of days without food. After a lot of disussion we decided as a class that a corn snake was perfect. So Gray and his mom delivered our snake this morning. He slept most of the day and we are letting him get used to his new environment before taking him out on Thursday. More to come......
During our math exploration, Kohana made a dragonfly on her geoboard using what she knows about shapes.
First day of school and already we look like readers!
This is our Cafe Board. CAFE is an acronym for Comprehension, Fluency and Expand vocabulary. During the year we will fill this board with all the strategies we need to become voracious readers!