Habitats and Helping Out

Aloha friends and family!

We have been learning a lot about character, setting and events in first grade lately. We even have a cool graphic organizer that we have been using to help us gather the information from the text! As as activity this week everyone read a story called "Thump Thump Helps Out". It is about a bunny who loves to thump his feet, but the other bunnies tell him to stop. They think it is annoying. Well, then one day their bus gets stuck, and no matter how much they yell for help no one comes. Then Thump Thump comes to rescue! He thumps his feet on the so that the grown up rabbits can hear, and they come and help pull the bus out! 

(Hmmm, I don't know about you, but this makes me have a connection! This story reminds me a lot about Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, who also was disliked for being different, but then saved the day!)

After the kids read the story they were each given four Post-it notes. On one Post-it they wrote a page number from a story. On the second they wrote the name of the character from that page. On the third the setting, and on the fourth the event.

The kids then brought their Post-its and book to the carpet. One at a time someone came to the board and placed their Post-it notes. As they did this the rest of the class went to that page number to help double check their peer's work. They all did a great job!

Just like "Thump Thump Helps Out" is a fictional story, we have begun to write fictional stories in class ourselves. The ones that we have been writing are realistic fiction - so no talking animals! Together as a class we created a realistic fiction story about someone who helps out in the community. We first chose our character's name, which was Elsa. (Yes, we love Frozen in this class, can you tell!?!) Then we chose how our character would help in the community. We chose picking up rubbish. Here is the story that we created together!

And just like "Thump Thump" and ALL other stories, we made sure that our story had a beginning, a middle, and an end!

For the last week we have been learning about habitats, and how animals live in a community - just like we do! This week we concluded learning about animal communities with a cool collage project. Each student chose one habitat and then had to find pictures of animals that live in that habitat.

We had the Jungle-

Lots of collages of the Woods -



And LOTS of collages of the Coral Reef-



As I mentioned last week we are now learning in science about animals that live in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. This week we focused our learning on the Polar Bear. Here is what we learned...



And of course we had to watch some cute baby polar bears! (I think this class loves baby animals just as much as they love Frozen!)



I am so excited for this up coming week as we gear up for Thanksgiving by learning about Squanto and the Wampanoags! Thank you everyone who brought in paper bags. (Hmmm, have you guessed yet what we are making!?!)

Hope you all day a fabulous weekend!

Sincerely,
Mrs. Kawai