Special Hearts

 Look what my fantastic class made for me on my birthday.  They were all so yummy.  We got to have a treat in the morning and after lunch.  Thank you Eli and Julia.

  Here are some beautiful valentine hearts our class made.  They look like lace along on the edges.  Our class had fun making these special valentines.

 

 

Claire

day 2

New Goal 7 Posts In 7 Days

Lets see if I can do it.  7 Posts in 7 Days?  Do I have that much to say?  Ha, I talk a lot, lets see if I can transfer my talking into posts.  I'm on winter break so this should be easy right?
  This morning I taught myself how to resize batches of pictures all at once.  I spend hours doing this one at a time in Paint.  Today, I resized and rotated  308 pictures in about 1 minute.  Yippeee!  I had the tools all along on my Windows 7 Computer.  I just didn't know it.
    Here's how you can do it too:
   Check your programs for Windows Live Photo Gallery.  Open up your batch of pictures that you want to resize or rotate.  Highlight (or select) your whole batch and click file, then resize.  Let the computer do it's magic.  Next click only the pictures that you need rotated.  (I had a lot.)  Remember to use the control key to select only those pictures.  Next at the bottom of the page are rotate to the right or left arrows.  Click and watch the magic happen.  Good Luck with your resizing.

Here are a few pics from February.  Working on and wearing our 100 Day Hats.

See you all tomorrow!

Remember 7 Posts in 7 Days....I can do it!

Claire

Our 100th Day

Celebrating 100!  It was a great day in first grade!  Here's a bit of fashion we were sporting on Monday!  We all had lots of fun.

Claire

Author Visit

We were lucky lucky lucky yesterday when we had a terrific author/illustrator visit from Jason Chin.  His fabulous books Redwoods and Coral Reefs are fascinating reads.  They combine both fiction with non-fiction information.  Mr. Chin explained his process of writing a book and showed pictures of his trip to California to see the redwood trees.   We learned many facts about the Redwoods.  Redwoods start out as a seed the size of a tomato seed.  The tallest tree in the world in found in the redwood forest and it's taller than the Statue of Liberty.

 It was fun to watch Mr. Chin sketch an idea he elicited from the audience of first and second graders. 

During our writing time we all took out at paper and pencil and sketched just like Mr. Chin.  We thought about a place that a book could take us.  Check out how we did.

 We loved the visit with this Vermont Author.  Check out his books today.

Claire

Dominos Game

 

On Friday we played a fun game that combined adding and sequencing of numbers using Dominoes.  I just made it up on the spot.  We had been using the dominoes to for an activity of placing the dominoes into a parking lot and adding up our cars.  It was fun but I was looking to do some more adding and mental math  if we could.  We have been concentrating on counting backwards so I worked that in as well.
   The game:   
1. Spread lots of dominoes on the floor upside down.
2. Ask each child to choose 2 dominoes
3. Add your dominoes together first using mental math, then checking by counting the dots.
4. Our goal was to try to be the highest number or the lowest number.
5.  I started counting off to sequence the numbers (kids made a line and helped count)
6.  We gave a round of applause for the lowest and the highest.
7.  We counted up and we counted back from the highest to the lowest.
8.  Our last round I had them pick 3 dominoes and Asked what we might see happen to the numbers.  They of course thought that the largest number would be higher with more dots available.
9.  They got very excited as we were counting.  Next time I might have them write the numbers as we sequence.

It was fun and we will try this game again, soon.
Check out these other domino games!

Claire