1st Grade began their work in the lab in February by finishing their Penguin Math Books. These and the completed Penguin Glyphs will be shared on their page on the Winter Wonderland Wiki very soon. For Valentine’s Day, 2nd Grade did some graphing of Valentine’s hearts in Excel. We visited the Necco web site to learn how Conversation Hearts are made. Each student then got a box of Conversation Hearts which they grouped by color and counted. Then each student entered their numbers in the Excel spreadsheet found on the Activities page to create their graph. All of the results were combined on to a single spreadsheet and you can see the results on the 1st Grade Winter Wonderland Wiki page.
Much of the rest of February and March concentrated on keyboarding with the continued Adventures in Keyboarding focusing on letters “H” through “P”. In addition to this, 1st Grade also played the following keyboarding games which they can play online at home too:
March also brought World Math Day which is an International event with students from around the world competing against one another in mental math games to try to set a world record for the most correct math answers in a 2 day period – 2 days because the event ran during the time that it was March 4, 2009 anywhere in the world. 1st Grade participated in this event on March 5th and helped add 953 correct math answers to the world record. Here are just a few statistics from World Math Day:
- 204 Countries represented
- 12,647 Cities/Towns participating
- 38,058 Schools participating
- 1,952,879 Students participating
- 452,682,682 Questions correctly answered
In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, 1st Grade did a project about rainbows. They first watched an online book about how rainbows are formed and then each 1st Grader created Rainbow Alphabets in Microsoft Excel. This helped them to learn about rows, columns and cells and a little bit about formatting in Excel. The Rainbow Alphabets have been printed and sent home.
To celebrate Easter, 1st Grade first brainstormed ideas about Easter and we used an online tool called Wordle to create a picture of their ideas:
After creating the Wordle, each 1st grader then drew an Easter picture in KidPix. These will be shared online soon.
In addition to everything else, 1st Grade also worked in Jumpstart 1st Grade this month.