Week 10: Oct 14

We had a very special visit from Mr. Tolle- AKA the "Eggman". Mr. Tolle came to our school this week and gave us a fantastic presentation on hatching baby chicken eggs. Now every classroom has an incubator and the children are taking turns making sure the eggs are safe and getting rotated.

We'll most likely be seeing more of the little chicken eggs when we head over to Navera Farms this Monday!

Week 9:

It's difficult to believe that it is already week 9 of school. We finished our first session of surfing lessons and next week we'll be heading to the farm! Remember, this is a short week- early dismissal on Wednesday and no school on Friday.

Things to work on this week:
Continue to review vowel sounds and work on making observations with your children. We're getting ready for our trip to the farm so I want the students to feel comfortable making observations and using scientific terms to describe objects. For example, talk about the texture, size, amount, and movement of different objects.

Also, check out our fabulous primary color paintings!

Week 8: Oct 7

Another action packed week at Seaside. Remember, Parent Teacher Conferences begin next week. I look forward to meeting you all. Some of you may have noticed some pillow cases make their way home yesterday with your child. I was hoping you could all wash those and return them on Monday with your child. This really needs to be done monthly.

We had a very unexpected surprise this week. When we were at the beach for surfing lessons I spotted the Sea Turtle Patrol. When they stopped I told them abou tour nest and how we have been studying sea turtles in school. The Sea Turtle Patrol was kind enough to give us coloring books and they also let us see a real baby Loggerhead sea turtle. It was the most amazing thing!

Also, another fantastic week with the surfers at http://www.jacksonvillesurftraining.com/

The kids are just so excited about surfing and the instructors are really amazing with the students. What an incredible experience it has been. We certainly will miss them. 

Things to work on at home:

Create word problems for your child. Find something they really like (fairies, dragons, dinosaurs, ect.) and create a word problem story. For example, there were 10 fairies flying through the forest. 3 Fairies stopped to fly back to the magical kingdom. How many fairies were left in the forest? Mix the word problems up with addition and subtraction. 

Vowel sounds: /ee/ /i/ /e/ /ae/ /a/ /u/ /o/ /oe/ /uu/ /oo/

Week 7: Gardening, Surf Lessons, Letter from India, and Rockaway Gardens!

What an incredibly exciting week we had. It was full of surfing and gardening, we received our first pen pal letter from India, and we had our first Field trip to Rockaway Gardens.

Our trip to Rockaway Gardens was fabulous. Mr. Walter and Ms. Ronnie took us all around the facility and told us so much about organic gardening. They also told us about how important it is to have nutrients in our soil. Both first grade classes were so well behaved and asked poignant questions.

Our surf instructors from http://www.jacksonvillesurftraining.com/ were absolutely amazing, they made me want to try surfing. In addition to the experienced staff at Jax surf training, we also had Mr. Evan Thompson, local pro surfer, who has been all over the world to surf in competitions, and Mr. Kai Ferguson, a Seaside Father, and one of the beaches best surfers.

Things to work on at home: We learned about smile vowels this week, /ee/ /i/ /e/ /ae/ /a/ /u/, and this week we'll be learning about round vowels, /oe/ /uu/ and /oo/. When you're reading with your child, try and let them sound out some of the vowel sounds. In math, I know most of the students have already been exposed to counting forwards and backwards, but one thing that we're trying to work on is memorizing the order so that when you say count from 20 backwards it is fast and fluent. So ask your child to count backwards, and then ask them "What's 13 minus 6?" Let them count backwards for 13. 

Here are some of the paintings we made this week.