First Grade Buzzzz - Special Days

Welcome to a year of celebrations! Traditional holiday celebrations are fun and important, but celebrations that we dream up and share together have a special flavor!

Take a peek into the future to see what we are planning!!!

      SEPTEMBER     

Clifford, the Big Red Dog, is as much of a class mascot as Curious George!

After reading numerous events of his life with Emily Elizabeth, we plan to attend Clifford's birthday party. He will probably leave a few Clifford books for us to read throughout the day. He may even allow us to use his red food dish to see how good our eye-hand coordination is in tossing beanbags into his dish. We hope to end up with a treat. Clifford has brought treats in the past. Several children asked if I thought Clifford used dog food to make his treats! Let's hope not!!!

The month of September is quite warm in our desert. It provides a perfect environment for our first science experiment of the year...solar heat. After learning about different types of heat energy and their uses, we plan to choose a friend and build a solar cooker!

Our month of Mother Goose rhymes will come to a culmination with a short skit of rhymes to recite for our families. We will prepare "hat/headband" costumes and practice reciting our lines clearly and loudly! It should be fun to see how old Mother Goose finally finds her gander!

      OCTOBER     

This happy month of Halloween is fun for all of us. We traditionally celebrate Red Ribbon Week by learning how to stay healthy, active, and drug-free. We wear ribbons, share positive activities and we enjoy singing our "Better Choices" song.

As a culmination to writing our first non-fiction story, we plan to invite a docent from Maturango Museum to share her bat treasures with us.

We will finish our "Night Creature" unit by spending a day IN THE DARK! With the help of flashlights, we gather around a "campfire" and read stories and poems about being in the dark, as we listen to crickets chirp and night creatures howl in the background. We can curl up with our pillow and read by flashlight. We may even search for our compound word partner as we match puzzle pieces of nighttime words, in the dark. Hmmm…would a day in the dark be complete without a midnight snack of milk and cookies?!

      NOVEMBER     

We will begin the month of November building our family tree of saints and sharing with class members what we know about our favorite saint.

Thanksgiving finds us preparing to sail away on the Mayflower. We will make butter before sailing on our ship and enjoy it with some cornbread we will bake. The week of Thanksgiving, we pack our provisions and set sail on a ship chalked out in actual length and width on our playground. On sailing day, we board it for a morning of reading from the Bible, doing school lessons on our slates and having playtime with marbles. In between activities, we will nibble on our provisions. When we finally reach America, we will give thanks to God as we end our day in prayer.

The month of November traditionally ends with the annual St. Ann Bazaar, which raises money for our school. Since parents and grandparents work so hard to support our school, we feel we need to also help make the bazaar a success. We will bake pumpkin bread in our classroom and present it as our donation to help our great school.

      DECEMBER     

This month our focus is on giving as Jesus taught us to give...unselfishly. We will take our pennies from our weekly Penny Friday activity and take a field trip to the grocery store to purchase food for our parish food bank sponsored by the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

The class brings the spirit of St. Nicholas to the Senior Citizen Christmas luncheon as the children recite a Christmas poem and sing a Christmas song.

      JANUARY     

The month of January focuses on learning about the living things in God's world. Our focus will be on the rainforest. Our room will come alive with the growth of a treetop canopy, leaves, and flowers. Sloths and tree boas may even hang above our heads!

We will continue to learn about becoming a peaceful people as we learn about Martin Luther King and celebrate Catholic School Week. We have great plans for the start of this New Year!

     
THIS ENDS OUR PLANS FOR OUR FIRST SEMESTER OF FIRST GRADE. PLEASE CONTINUE ON WITH THE SECOND SEMESTER'S SPECIAL DAYS!!!