Ms. Matteson's First Grade

        Ms. Matteson is beautiful. She has blondish-brownish hair. She wears pretty clothes.  She likes to teach about monarch butterflies.
    We had 3 Monarch caterpillars in our room this year. They were really small at the beginning. We had more than three caterpillars, but we gave some to Mrs. Babcock. They got very large because they ate a lot of milkweed. They went into a "j form" and then they went into a chrysallis. The chrysallis changed color. It got very black. Right before the butterflies hatched, the chrysallis was clear. Some of us got to see the butterfly hatch. When it first hatched, it pumped its wings to get the blood into the wings. When their wings dry, then they are ready to fly.
     We make our own math problems in first grade. We made ladybugs out of stickers and then we stuck them on the math paper. We drew the heads, legs with permanent marker to make them really look like ladybugs. You could use 10 or less ladybugs in the math problem. A math problem might be " The mother ladybug was leaving and the dad stayed with the three kids. How many ladybugs stayed home?" The answer would be 4 ladybugs.
    We have reading groups. Some of us go into Mrs. Babcock's room and some go into Ms. Matteson's room and some just work on other games. Then later, the groups switch.
    Four Winds is a group that comes to our room to teach us about science. We learned about spiders. When an insect gets caught in the spider web, the spider can tell because the web will move. Spiders can molt or shed their skin. They do that so they can grow.
    First grade is a lot different than kindergarten. Kindergarten has a lot of recesses. They go out before lunch, after lunch, and after snack. They have a block corner and a lot of other toys to play with.  Sometimes we miss kindergarten.
    We learn a lot more in first grade. We do a lot of writing and math in first grade. We are learning how to make our letters correctly. We know how to make our lower case letters the right way. We also have learned some upper case letters. We like to write, but it is hard work.
   
We have morning message after we take care of our snack money and put away our coats and backpacks. We do the calendar everyday. We count how many days that we have been in school. We put a straw in a box for each day that we are in school. We have three boxes: a hundred box, a ten box and a one box. When we have ten straws in the one box, we bundle the ten straws up and move them to the 10s box. That way we can count quickly. We know how to count by 10s. We also count how many people lose a tooth each month. We also have a weather chart. We keep track of sunny days, cloudy days, rainy days and snowy days for the month. We make a different chart each month. Ms. Matteson puts them up high on the wall after we finish the month. We use unifix cubes to show what day of the month it is. We make two stacks of unifix cubes. We can  tell if the number is odd or even. If the cube has a partner on the other stack of cubes, then it is even. If it does NOT have a partner, then it is an odd number. The unifix colors for October are orange and black. We use different colors every month for our unifix cubes.
    We like everything about first grade. We are glad that we are going to study ladybugs this year. We are going to get ladybugs that we can watch in our classroom. We are learning a lot this year. We are learning how to read, how to add and subtract and how to write.

    by Xander and Kate

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