Posted on July 20, 2012 by sdescamps
Thank you for visiting our website! Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the blog. I have tried to add many pieces of important information regarding our class. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If there is something you would like to me to add, please let me know. This blog is a work in progress:-) I look forward to working with all of you. My contact e-mail is shannon.descamps@fraserk12.org
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Posted on November 29, 2013 by sdescamps
Happy Black Friday!
As you start (or maybe finish) your holiday online shopping, please keep our class is mind. We have an Amazon Associates account. By clicking on the amazon.com search link on the right side of the blog you can help our class earn money. If you enter their site through our classroom blog, a percentage of your purchase total will go towards books/items for our classroom! Please feel free to share with friends or families. Thank you in advance:-)
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Posted on November 27, 2013 by sdescamps
The last two weeks we spent time learning about the Thanksgiving holiday, but we also spent time sharing why we are thankful. We have a lot of reasons to be thankful! Yesterday, the students worked with a partner and wrote down one of the things they are thankful for. Here are the pictures from what they shared.
I am also attaching the photos from our feast. We had a wonderful time with all of our 1st grade friends. A special thank you to all the families who donated items to the feast and who volunteered their time. Everyone had fun!
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Posted on November 24, 2013 by sdescamps
I thought it would be fun to put together a little movie trailer with some of the pictures from our 1st trimester. We’ve learned a lot and had a great time doing it:-) I hope you enjoy The 1st Grade Tales. I made it in iMovie.
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Posted on November 22, 2013 by sdescamps
On November 13th, we celebrated World Kindness Day. We heard about this day though our school social worker, Mrs. Madeleine. We found some great ideas about doing kind things for others through the Random Acts of Kindness Foundations’s website. As a class, we decided to write a thank you note to someone in our lives who makes or has made us feel special. Some of the students chose parents, grandparents, past teachers, specials teachers, and other staff in the school. Our goal was to “Make Someone’s Day” to go along with the FISH philosophy. The children did a great job with the letters and from the feedback I heard, they successfully made someone’s day:-) Some of the letters were brought home and the ones from school were hand-delivered. We had a great conversation in class and brainstormed a lot of ideas about kind things we can do for others. I can’t wait to celebrate Random Acts of Kindness Week in February!
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Posted on November 21, 2013 by sdescamps
I first wrote about Wonder Wednesdays here. We have been having so much fun learning on these days! I honestly have to say it is my favorite part of the week. The children get so excited to explore and learn. At this point of the year it is pretty structured, but my goal is to slowly show them how to do some exploring on their own. We’ve covered some very fun topics during these sessions. In fact, we started devoting 20 minutes to this and we quickly realized more time was needed. Our sessions now last about 40 minutes (depending on the schedule). We continue to use Twitter frequently in class. Here are some tweets from our recent Wonder Wednesdays…
Here is a video we made on the day we were learning about different languages:-)
The best part about these sessions is the students have chosen the topic. They have this time each week to choose what they want to learn. As a teacher, I am inspired by their excitement and curiosity. Ask them about some of the wonders they have come up with. I’m sure it will make for a great conversation:-)
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Posted on November 11, 2013 by sdescamps
We spent a lot of time today learning why Veteran’s Day is so special. We started our day with a special pledge. Our favorite Wonderopolis website also had a great summary we checked out here. We then read 2 informational texts about what a veteran is and the different branches of the military. The students also had a chance to share the names of family members who have served in military- some of us have grandparents who fought in wars, parents, and even a brother who has/is serving our country. Tomorrow we will be writing special thank you notes to veterans.
We also had a special guest visitor come speak to our 1st graders today. A mom in Mrs. Gargasoulas’ class came to talk with us about her time in the army. She had some great stories and experiences to share. The students loved seeing some of the clothes she had to wear. They had many questions about what it was like to live in the desert, the type of food she had access to, and many other topics! We’re so glad she was able to come and speak with us. We really learned why Veteran’s Day is so important.
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Posted on November 6, 2013 by sdescamps
We’ve been learning about a lot of great topics in class lately. Here are some of the things we’ve been doing recently.
Science-
We are continuing with our weather unit. On Monday we learned how a cloud is formed by conducting an experiment with plastic bottle, air, water, and a match (this part was done by Mrs. Descamps). Today we learned about the types of rain and how to use a rain gauge to see how much rain has fallen. Tomorrow the students will be bringing home a laminated strip to help them create a rain gauge at home.
Writing-
We have continued to focus on providing important details in our writing. We’ve learned it is important to include a setting and provide descriptions. Today we looked at different types of sentences and discussed how we are using punctuation with our sentences.
Math-
We have started time to the half hour. We continue to do a lot of practice with number stories with both addition and subtraction. Counting is practiced daily.
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Posted on November 3, 2013 by sdescamps
We had a lot of fun last Tuesday with Pattern Day. In math, we have been talking about basic patterns/patterns in life and then moved to even and odd numbers and patterns on a number grid (counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, etc.) We read the book Even Steven and Odd Todd and watched a short video about even and odd numbers through the school’s Brainpop Jr. subscription. Many of the students dressed in patterns to celebrate this day.
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Posted on October 20, 2013 by sdescamps
One of my goals for this school year is to have the students utilize our Kidblogs account. Through this site I have set up a blog area for each of the students. With Kidblogs, the teacher has full control over anything posted and all comments left must be approved. I want their blogs to be a place where they can respond to a text we read or express how they feel about a current discussion in class. We are in the very EARLY stages of these blogs, but I want to share our progress with all of you. We have logged into the accounts a few times now. This past week we did a coaching session with our 21st Century teacher, Mrs. Zombo so I could ensure all the students could go through the steps of logging in and publishing. Our first “official” post was responding to Chapter 5 of the Marty McGuire book we are reading in the Global Read Aloud. I have also had one of our reading groups log in to tell me something they knew about salamanders as a pre-reading activity. You can check out our Kidblogs at http://kidblog.org/MrsDescampsClass1314/
Let me know what you think! The students are proud of their work and so am I:-)
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Posted on October 17, 2013 by sdescamps
The students have been very busy this week! In science we have moved forward in our weather unit. On Tuesday, we took a nature walk to make weather observations.
Yesterday we learned how air is all around us. We did an experiment with predicting temperatures. The students loved using the thermometers!
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