Ciao!
For the past 3 days, the chef's in Miss Leslie's 1st grade class have been busy preparing for the cooking of  garden tomato sauce. They originally got the idea of making tomato sauce from the abundance of tomatoes we have in our school yard. It would only make sense to  make something that required many tomatoes! On Wednesday, we went out and spent some time in our beautiful school garden harvesting the tomatoes. We compared what ripe tomatoes looked like compared to rotten tomatoes, and talked about why it was healthy to harvest vegetables straight from your own garden. Incorporating math into this scenario, the children thought of different number stories they could tell using the tomatoes and we had a "story share" on the logs. With the small cherry tomatoes, the children demonstrated what skip counting looked like (2 tomatoes, 4 tomatoes, etc...) On Thursday, the children learned the importance of washing hands before cooking, washing vegetables before we eat/cook with them, and what the term "blanching" meant. After the children washed the tomatoes, they put an "x" on it, and dropped it in a slow cooker filled with hot water. Would the tomatoes sink or would they float? The children used their schema from what they learned from COSI day of last year to investigate this question.  Shortly after, the children learned to gently peel off the skin of the tomatoes. They were comparing this cooking skill to brain surgery. Everyone participated, even the children who are not fond of tomatoes!

Above: J'Lyn, Isabella, Melania and Michael eagerly harvest tomatoes from the school garden.

Picture on Left: Evelyn and Kaydence just can't get over how juicy the tomatoes were!
Picture on Right: Sophia blanching her tomato. 

On Friday,  we added the onion, garlic and herbs, creating a delicious aroma throughout the classroom, and making us very hungry! Thank you to J'Lyn's mom for taking time out of her busy schedule to help us with the cooking. Her impressive garden knowledge made the day run smoother. Grazie!

 In math, the children have been exploring all the different ways we use numbers each day. The children discussed different reasons on why we need to be able to "read" and write numbers correctly:
Claire- Speedometers
Aaliyah- Clocks
Kaydence- Microwaves
Alexis- Money
Sophia- The calendar
It was interesting to hear all the different possibilities that the children came up with. We learned about the different parts of our phone numbers (area code, prefix, etc...) and noticed different number patterns found within a number grid. Math Daily 5 is really teaching the children independence, cooperation, and peer-to-peer checking, guiding, and praising.

Your child has been introduced to the accuracy strategy of cross checking. It is important to slow readers down when they come to a word they don’t know and teach them to apply the strategy of cross checking so they are able to fix the meaning and not just skip the word. Cross checking requires a person to constantly think and monitor meaning. It is a strategy for ensuring the words and pictures read make sense and match the letters on a page. To make your child aware of using this strategy, give him or her a piece of paper and tell him to make a tally mark each time he uses the cross checking strategy at home.

** FYI: Danimals Smoothie is giving away $30 000 to 5 schools for a playground makeover! Participants need to collect the codes that are found on the inside of the package, and then register that code under our school name at RallyForRecess.com. Our school has been registered but has not yet been validated, so I will let you know as soon as you can start registering the codes! For now, if you could start a collection of the Danimals Smoothie packages, you can register the codes as soon as our school is validated.

 

 With many thoughts always,

Miss Leslie