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1R loves when secret readers come to visit, especially when we get to take a silly photograph with them!  
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March of the penguins Penguins in 1R! Today is Penguin Day in 1R! The boys and girls watched March of the Penguins as the culminating activity for our penguin unit. It was exciting for us to see penguins in action in their environment! The film discussed many of the interesting facts we have learned in the past several weeks. We particularly enjoyed watching the fluffy chicks! 
We have been learning about non fiction text features as we create our penguin book! This week the students created a glossary and table of contents. Take a look at some of our authors!
This week in 1R, students continued to learn about penguins. The boys and girls completed several activities in literacy, computer lab, science and social studies that helped us become better observers, map makers and writers!  writing about penguins
becoming an expert
1R cartographersWe have been learning about where in the world different penguins live. Did you know that no penguins species are native to the Northern hemisphere? Students labeled maps of the world to add to their books showing where penguin species live and where the equator is located. Here are a few of our map makers hard at work! how do penguins stay warm?Throughout our explorations, we have learned that there are many different ways you can learn about a topic. As a class, we discussed how you can look for information in a book or computer, ask an expert, or conduct an investigation. When learning about how penguins stay warm, 1R students wanted to do an investigation and try it out for themselves! We had fun learning about ways in which the penguins that live in cold environments are able to keep warm.  Did you know that penguins stay insulated with a layer of air under their feathers? 1R students felt what this was like by putting a small bag of ice on top of their hands, and boy did it feel cold! We then layered a bag filled with air underneath the bag filled with ice. The layer of air completely insulated us from the cold! This helped us understand one way penguins are able to stay warm in cold environments.
The students below are learning about the layer of fat that penguins have under their skin called blubber. Blubber helps keep penguins warm when swimming in icy water! The boys and girls stayed warm in their own small bin of cold water when their hands were wrapped in a bag layered with crisco, a cooking fat similar to blubber. We were impressed by how well this worked to keep our hands dry and warm!
The boys and girls also learned about the wax that penguins make. They rub this wax over their feathers to help make them waterproof and windproof. Students recreated this by using the wax from crayons on paper. Students dropped water on top and noticed how the image they colored in crayon repelled the water and stayed dry, while the other they colored in marker did not.
This week we learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his dream to make the world a more peaceful place. 1R students read two books with our new Boston College intern, Miss O'Reilly. Additionally, we watched a part of his famous speech, I Have a Dream. We thought Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to live in a world where all people are treated fairly and equally made him a kind man. The boys and girls each wrote a dream they have that would help to make the world a better place along with what they can do to make their dream come true! Students then did an art project, using paper collage to make a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Make sure to check out your child's blog to hear his/her dream and see his/her artwork!
Many of our students will say that "Speed Math" is one of their favorite activities in 1R! Every week we have been practicing our math facts. Students use three different colors, one for each minute. It is fun to see how many math problems we can complete in three minutes! The boys and girls are using different strategies to help them learn these math facts. Some strategies we have practiced include putting the bigger number in our head and counting up, using our fingers and using the number line on our desks. Take a look at a few of our mathematicians hard at work! We love when our kindergarten partners come visit IR! This week, we did a shape trading activity which involved triangles and rhombuses. It is always wonderful to mentor our kindergarten pals in math.
 We love a challenge! Students applied this new knowledge to a practice game using ten frames followed by an activity done in small groups. Looking at various ten frame cards, the boys and girls wrote down the matching number sentences on their own white boards. We had fun with this as we became faster and faster at the number sentences! The students later worked in small groups to build as many towers of ten as they could with the cubes they had. We practiced counting our total number of cubes and discussed the digits we saw in the ones, tens, and hundreds places for each group's total. It was a fun challenge to then try to split these cubes evenly among our group peers! Ten frame game
Towers of ten We are excited about starting our new unit on penguins! Students in 1R will be exploring all species of this animal in the month of January. So far, we have had fun learning the different names of penguins and talking about the similarities and differences between them. Students worked as a class and with partners to make observations based on pictures of different penguins.
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