Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings, everyone! Happy Thanksgiving! First grade is quite excited for the holiday. At times, it was hard to contain our excitement in class this week. 

In Religion, we talked about the season of Advent. We learned that it is a time of waiting and preparing for Jesus' birth. We discussed the importance of the Advent wreath and which color candle we light each week. To help us celebrate the season of Advent at home, we made our own Advent wreath. We used our handprints for the greenery and added the candles. Students are encouraged to glue a candle flame each week during the season. Here is one Advent wreath: 

On Wednesday we gathered for our school's Thanksgiving Mass. This was also the last Mass Fr. Brian will celebrate with us before he moves to his new parish. We enjoyed his classroom visits and stories. We will continue to pray for him as he promised to continue to pray for us. 

During Language Arts class this week, we wrapped up our story Life in the Forest. Not only did we review long u, long e, and inflected words but we also reviewed long o words and contractions. We partner read our story to help us build fluency and wrote facts we learned from the story to help us build our comprehension skills. In addition, we identified more than one noun in a sentence. Finally, we finished writing about the steps in brushing our teeth. 

In Math class this week we learned new subtraction facts: subtracting a number from itself and subtracting 0 from a number. We discovered that these a easy facts for us to remember. We also talked about volume of a container. We filled four containers with water, talked about its capacity, and then ordered the containers from smallest to largest. 

In between all that work, we took time this week to talk about Thanksgiving and completed several activities. We created a story booklet about the First Thanksgiving. After reading This is the Feast we compared and contrasted the First Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving today. We then wrote and illustrated our very own I'm Thankful booklet where we listed various things and people we are thankful for. We ended our week by reading Turkey Trouble and discussing all of the disguises Turkey tries to avoid being Thanksgiving dinner. 

I want to take this time to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the time with your family and friends. Enjoy your turkey and all the good food that comes with it. God Bless!

~Miss Chalich