We have already had a busy start to the month of February.

We have been preparing for our Grandparents' Day program at school. Our class has worked on learning all 50 states in the United States of America. Not only do we know them all, but we can say them in alphabetical order! We will preform the song "Fifty Nifty United Sates" for all of the grandparents and special friends who attend  our program. Also for our Grandparents' Day, our class made outdoor decorative tree stumps as an item to be auctioned off to help raise money for our school. Each child in the class signed the bottom of a stump and we all worked together to place mosaic tiles on the top. We  were able to discuss the different shapes we used on each stump. 

February is National Children's Dental Health Month, so the tooth fairy, Twinkle paid our class a visit to share the importance of taking care of our teeth. She was so much fun and the children LOVED asking her questions and giving her hugs! She also had a goodie bag with a new tooth brush and other items for each child.

Finally, in chapel this week, my first graders were able to have chapel papers for the first time. Their reading has progressed so much already this year, so they were ready to read along during our chapel service. It was a proud moment for me to look over and see each of them reading along! 

We have wrapped up our unit on "Around Our Town" and finished it off with a fun project. Each child chose a place in the community to build with their parents' help. This project really tied in all of our subjects and I think the parents enjoyed building as much as the kids did. Their projects turned out SO awesome and I can't wait to display them for others to see all of our hard work! 

We have already had a busy start to the new year! We were able to wrap up our Christmas Around the World studies before we left for our Christmas break and now we will wrap up our unit by building our community. We are right in the middle of a big project that the kids are working on, each child is building their version of a place in our community. They will be working with their parents to build 3-D models of places around our town and once they are finished, we will design streets through the town and display our community. I will update you when we finish our projects soon, in the mean time, stay warm (and well)!

This month, we began our study of "Around our World". As we learned about how different each country is, we discovered that each country also celebrates the Christmas holiday differently. Then, each child chose a country to research and present to the class about their Holiday traditions. This has been such a neat way for the children to practice researching and putting a project together with their parents, while also learning from their peers! The students have also gotten the opportunity to see pictures, trinkets and taste foods from these various countries!

Oh what fun!

We have really enjoyed getting to see our trees' leaves change colors and fall to the ground. We decided to go and collect these leaves and see what kind of creations we could make from them. We searched all over our campus to find all different shapes and sizes of leaves to collect and use for our leaf art. I loved seeing how creative the children got in their creations! We have also been enjoying the falling leaves during our recesses. The children have made leaf piles to jump in and also enjoyed tossing leaves in the air to watch them flutter back to the ground.