First grade has been hard at work. First grade works in stations most days in language arts and math. One of my favorite activities in language arts is to have students say a word, tap out it’s individual sounds, and then write it out in sound boxes or sound lines. This is a very helpful activity to get students to notice the sounds in words and it develops their spelling skills and handwriting.

In math, the stations focus on practicing skills we are working on as well as building number sense. A strong number sense is crucial for understanding and manipulating math. One activity that builds number sense and help the students we skip counting and grouping is counting collections. The child chooses an item and counts it. Sometimes the parameters are to count by ones until you reach 100; other times it group the items in twos and skip count. It reinforces the one to one correspondence and ordering numbers. Other math station activities include pulling a number and building that number, matching the word to the number, pick a card (or roll a die) and make a number sentence and solve it, and many more.

This last week and this week we discussed expression that equal and what equal means. One station was to match the expression cards that equal. Working with a partner helps them with social skills and furthers their learning. Making math fun allows students to learn in multiple ways with several options of manipulatives. They are way more likely to retain the knowledge if they enjoy the process and practice.

In science the class has been learning about physical properties of matter, states of matter, and how matter can be changed. The experiments that align with these topics are always so much fun for the class. One week they completed Cracker Science, using the physical properties like color, size, texture, and shape to describe the different types of crackers. The students loved it and enjoyed eating the crackers afterwards.

To demonstrate how states of matter can change the class explored root beer floats! I put ice cream in all of their cups and then poured root beer over it and we watched the solid ice cream become a liquid and the root beer release gas. It was a fun and tasty experiment!

Mrs. Claire

First grade is back in action and off to an excellent start. The first week of school is full of review, learning the rules and procedures of a new class and building, and seeing old friends while making new ones.

To make the review fun, the class practiced letter formation with shaving cream.

One tradition I started a couple years ago was reading Freckle Juice by Judy Blume the first week of school. It’s a short book about a boy who wants freckles and is tricked into concocting and drinking a juice. The story touches on the fact that we are all different and being different from one another is a good thing. On the first Friday of school, the book is finished and the class has a little activity and get freckles! Some choose not to have the freckles and that’s okay too. It’s a fun way to end the first week back.

It is going to be a fantastic year in first grade with this crew!

Mrs. Claire

Testing week is typically a week everyone involved in hates, but not at St. James. At St. James we use the Stanford 10 and the OLSAT for measuring our students knowledge and abilities. It also is used to keep us accountable for what and how we are teaching. Yes, the mornings are full of testing, but the students have frequent breaks and special snacks all week. Our afternoons are filled with extra recess and fun science experiments. Every afternoon a parent volunteer had the option of visiting first grade and leading an experiment with the class or to send the materials. The class got to see how cold and warm water changed skittles, they made elephant toothpaste, constructed a marshmallow catapult, mixed and played with fluffy slime, and even made colors explode in milk. It was such a fun week!! Being able to ease the tension of standardized testing by balancing fun educational activities and utilizing beautiful weather is amazing. It’s the perfect way to wrap up another fantastic year at St. James Day School.

To celebrate Earth Day this year all of lower school planted 5 milkweed plants. We were able to do this thanks to a very generous donation of the plants by Ellis Home and Garden, in Texarkana. Each grade level planted one plant, with the exception of third grade who planted two because it was there connection to the local store and because they have the most students in their class. We’re so excited to have these plants on our campus to help encourage the monarch butterflies to make a pitstop during their migration and also encourage other beneficial insects to the surrounding habitat. Students helped clean up weeds, dig the hole, put the plant in its proper place, and then cover up the roots. It was such a gorgeous day to do something that benefited the Earth.