Mrs. DeMey's 1st Grade: Butterflies & Tye Dye

Well, do you remember those amazing chrysalis' that we had in our classroom? There are very few left! Don't worry, they didn't die - the butterflies emerged this week! We tagged 14 butterflies this past week and there are more that have come out over the weekend ready to be tagged Monday morning! This has been an incredible life cycle for the kids to watch all the way through! Now we have some new caterpillars that we are watching closely. We are going to see if they will be butterflies or moths, since we now know how to tell the difference!

Math

The kids are doing AMAZING solving problems using tens. We solved multiplication and division problems this week using tens and also some 5's. One of our problems even went something like this: The butterfly had 4 wings. There were 11 spots on each wing. How many spots did the butterfly have? So some of the kids used cubes and acted it out with cubes and counted each one. Some of the kids drew pictures of the spots and counted them. Some of them even recognized that 11 is actually a 10 and a 1, so they counted by 10's (10, 20, 30, 40) and then added the ones (41, 42, 43, 44). Great strategies for so early in the year! Here's a video clip of Lexi and Laney solving a division problem. (For some reason the image is flipped and all of their numbers look like they were writing them backwards - but it's just the image!) The story was: The butterfly laid 45 eggs. She laid 5 on each leaf. How many leaves did the butterfly lay eggs on? You'll notice that they start out differently, but that they both are able to explain what they did to solve the problem. After the problem is over, the girls talked about their solutions and both ended up agreeing that it took 9 leaves. They also continued on to the next problem, working on it on their own and then sharing their strategy with each other.

Tie Dye!

Friday afternoon was spent tie dying our shirts for homecoming week. We had some great helpers come in to the classroom to help! Thanks to Sam's mom, Emma's mom, Lexi M.'s mom, and Jaden's mom for the great help! I couldn't have done it without them! The t-shirts turned out great and the kids were excited! We hung them on the fence outside (it was a beautiful afternoon) to dry and the kids took them home on Friday. Here are a few pictures, but Mrs. Barber also helped out and took more pictures. I hope to post those in a few days!