Holy Week!

Greetings! I hope everyone had a nice week. It was a short week in first grade, but it was a week for of learning and celebrations. 

Our Religion classes this week focused on Holy Week. We talked about the events of Palm Sunday, how Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the people waving palm branches and shouting Hosanna. After reading this story, we made our own mosaic palm branches. Next, we talked about the Three Days and the events we remember. We made a poster with symbols of the Three Days. Then, we looked at Holy Thursday. We read about how Jesus washed his disciples' feet and how he shared a meal of bread and wine with his disciples the night before he died. To help us remember Jesus' call to serve others, we took turns washing each others' hands. Finally, we talked about the events of Good Friday. We made a watercolor scene. Here are pictures from the week. 

We began our next story in Language Arts class by learning new phonics skills. We spent time practicing decoding and reading compound words. Working in groups, we matched peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to form compound words. Next, we practiced blending and decoding words with vowels ew, ui, and ue. In addition to these skills, we practiced identifying the characters, setting, and plot of a story. We also focused on finding adjectives for how many in sentences. 

Language Arts class also included many fun Easter activities this week. We wrote about places where we would hide Easter eggs. After reading The Easter Egg by Jan Brett, we designed our own incredible egg and wrote why it is incredible. The highlight of course was the Easter Egg show and tell. The students loved reading their clues and have others guess what was inside their egg. Thank you for helping in this project!

During Math class this week, we learned new subtraction facts: subtracting a number from 10. We created our own fact cards and used a wrap-up to help us learn these facts. Finally, we identified a dozen and half-dozen. 

On Thursday morning, the students were surprised to see that the Easter bunny visited the classroom and left them Easter baskets. Their smiles and laughter were incredible to watch and hear. Here is what the Easter bunny left: 

Happy Easter!