Catching Up With Our Class!

Sorry it's been so long since the last post! We have been busy in first grade. Even though the students are on break, I am still thinking about them and wanted to share some of our activities from November and December.

One of our favorite activities in November was making homemade butter!  Since we learned about how things were long ago, we tried making butter using heavy whipping cream, baby food containers, marbles, and our own muscles! Students had a container with whipping cream and one marble and shook it until the cream turned to butter. It took quite a bit of shaking but the results were delicious!

December gave us an opportunity to complete some great STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) projects. First, we built shapes using marshmallows and toothpicks.

Next up we read the Gingerbread Man, and in the version we had, the Gingerbread Man gets eaten by the fox while crossing the river.  :(  We decided to construct our own bridges to help the Gingerbread Man make it safely across the river. Students were given different materials to test out and even tried different numbers of cubes to see how much weight their bridges could hold.

Finally, we had two very special visitors: Mrs. Coots' mother-in-law and aunt-in-law! They graciously brought in pre-made gingerbread houses and the students were able to decorate them using a variety of candies. The gingerbread houses and candies were an exciting way for us to review what we had learned earlier about shapes!