To help us celebrate Valentine's Day, we went over to our science lab and preformed an experiment on a popular Valentine's candy, Conversation Hearts. We broke up into groups and each group had 3 cups of liquids, water, vinegar, and soda and a bowl of candy hearts. Before we began, we talked about predications and predicated what we thought would happen whenever we drop the candies into each liquid. One student even pointed out that he thought that the candy would be less dense in the soda because of the bubbles in the liquid. We had a lot of good thoughts going on during our discussion, prior to the experiment. Then, it was time to try it out,  each member in the groups took turns dropping the candies, while the other group members observed what happened when they were dropped in. The kids loved getting to do this experiment! We even left the candies in each liquid for the remainder of the day and we went back at the end of the day and observed what happened to the candies in each liquid. 

We have already had a busy start to the month of February.

We have been preparing for our Grandparents' Day program at school. Our class has worked on learning all 50 states in the United States of America. Not only do we know them all, but we can say them in alphabetical order! We will preform the song "Fifty Nifty United Sates" for all of the grandparents and special friends who attend  our program. Also for our Grandparents' Day, our class made outdoor decorative tree stumps as an item to be auctioned off to help raise money for our school. Each child in the class signed the bottom of a stump and we all worked together to place mosaic tiles on the top. We  were able to discuss the different shapes we used on each stump. 

February is National Children's Dental Health Month, so the tooth fairy, Twinkle paid our class a visit to share the importance of taking care of our teeth. She was so much fun and the children LOVED asking her questions and giving her hugs! She also had a goodie bag with a new tooth brush and other items for each child.

Finally, in chapel this week, my first graders were able to have chapel papers for the first time. Their reading has progressed so much already this year, so they were ready to read along during our chapel service. It was a proud moment for me to look over and see each of them reading along! 

We have wrapped up our unit on "Around Our Town" and finished it off with a fun project. Each child chose a place in the community to build with their parents' help. This project really tied in all of our subjects and I think the parents enjoyed building as much as the kids did. Their projects turned out SO awesome and I can't wait to display them for others to see all of our hard work! 

We have already had a busy start to the new year! We were able to wrap up our Christmas Around the World studies before we left for our Christmas break and now we will wrap up our unit by building our community. We are right in the middle of a big project that the kids are working on, each child is building their version of a place in our community. They will be working with their parents to build 3-D models of places around our town and once they are finished, we will design streets through the town and display our community. I will update you when we finish our projects soon, in the mean time, stay warm (and well)!

This month, we began our study of "Around our World". As we learned about how different each country is, we discovered that each country also celebrates the Christmas holiday differently. Then, each child chose a country to research and present to the class about their Holiday traditions. This has been such a neat way for the children to practice researching and putting a project together with their parents, while also learning from their peers! The students have also gotten the opportunity to see pictures, trinkets and taste foods from these various countries!

Oh what fun!