Singing at Our School Holiday Program

Today, we performed the last set of four performances at the 2008 Holiday Program of Delevan Drive Elementary School. It was so crowded today because of all our school parents. If you missed our songs, we recited Over the Hill and followed up with the famous Alvin and the Chipmunks holiday hit, The Chipmunk Song. Here's your chance to see us in action as we sang in front of the rest of the school children yesterday.

Speaking with a Park Interpreter by Videoconference

We had an exciting time on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 going into Room D with other First Grade students. That was because we were treated to a virtual field trip to one of our California beaches, Crystal Cove State Park. Through the generosity of Los Angeles Unified School District Educational Technology, we were able to check-out equipment to connect by videoconference with a park interpreter at the beach. This was part of the California State Parks PORTS Program, and the unit of study we focused on was on tidepools.

We were treated to a look at some tidepool creatures that call Crystal Cove State Park their home. Some of us connected before with the state park when we were in kindergarten (see: Videoconference with California State Parks), but many of us had not because we came from different kindergarten classes. This time, though, we learned more about how the plants and animals live and depend on the tidepool habitat.

This more than made up for having our Los Angeles Zoo field trip on November 26, 2008 cancelled because of rain.

Jumping with the Jump Rope Master

On November 10, 2008, the day before we would stay home to observe Veterans Day, we were visited by the Jump Rope Masters and watched 7-Time World Champion Peter Nestler perform some great jump roping. We were even able to see him jump with glow ropes, which he used to create some neat designs as he used them for jump roping. Everyone in our school gathered in the school multi-purpose room in order to see the effects of the lights in his jump ropes.

Even though there were so many students watching, some of us from Room C were picked to jump with him. We really enjoyed watching each other jump.

Costume Parade

As promised, we are sharing pictures of us on the last day of Red Ribbon Week at our school. That day just happened to be the last day of October, which is Halloween. We dressed up in costumes and walked around the school yard for a parade. Can you guess what each of us dressed up as?

Red Ribbon Week

We are in the middle of Red Ribbon Week. Our school is doing something each day. On Monday, Ocober 27, 2008, it was "Silly Sock" day. Mrs. Rivera wore fuzzy, green socks. The next day, we all wore red clothes for Red Ribbon Day, hoping to tell others to stay drug-free. On October 29, 2008, we all put something on our heads for "Hat" day at Delevan Drive Elementary School. We all looked funny on October 30, 2008 when we dressed up in clothes the "wrong way" for "Backwards" day.

Tomorrow, we will end Red Ribbon Week with our Halloween Fair. Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks to see us dressed up for that occasion.

Good-bye to One of Our Teachers

One of our teachers, Mr. Carreon, is leaving our classroom so he can teach in a school for older students. When we leave Delevan Drive Elementary School, maybe he will be teaching us again if we go to the middle school he might teach at. We will miss him because he helped us learn many things. His last day is in November.

We are making cards to wish him well, and we will be giving him a card. We know he will be a good teacher at his new school. Good-bye, Mr. Carreon.

Look Who's Reading!

We are learning to read. Before our "Back to School" Night on September 23, 2008, we even checked our fluency. Here we are reading in the class.

Field Trip to the J. Paul Getty Museum

After just a week of school, we went on our first field trip. On September 9, 2008 we went to the J. Paul Getty Museum. We were taken up a hill on a tram to where the museum was located.

We enjoyed walking through the garden and over the bridges. We also saw the city of Los Angeles from on top of the hill. It was beautiful! We are looking forward to another field trip soon.

We're First Graders!

It is our first day of school, and we are no longer in kindergarten. Our classroom is Room C this year.



We will be showing you what we learn this year. So please join us in finding out what is happening in Mrs. Rivera's classroom.

The End of Kindergarten

Today was our last day of school as kindergarten students. We said good-bye to each other and looked back at what we learned this year. It was great to share with everyone what we want to be when we grow up. This happened in front of our parents at our kindergarten culmination on June 13, 2008. Each of us had a chance to go up and announce our future careers. Some of us want to be doctors while some of us want to be dentists. One of us plans on being a veterinarian. Of course, there several of us that want to be teachers. One of us wants to teach karate but said he wanted to be something else in front of everyone. That's okay since we still have a long time to think about what we will be. Other fellow classmates said they wanted to be the following: a chef, a toy store owner, an artist, a police officer, a firefighter, a race car driver, a farmer, and a "Santa Claus". Today, we got to view ourselves as our teacher showed us video from that day. We enjoyed hearing ourselves sing songs like the "Macarena Months" and "5 Little Monkeys". Our teacher gave each of us a DVD of our culminating performance as well as a collection of other events like our Billy Goats Gruff dramatic play and our Snow Day. What a wonderful end to our year. Too bad we didn't get a chance to see moths come out of the silkworm cocoons before the year let out. Oh well! First grade, here we come.

Silkworms Spin Cocoons

Over the weekend some of our silkworms spun silk into cocoons. We were surprised to find that the silk was yellow. A while back when we first began looking at our silkworms, our teacher showed us pictures of silkworm cocoons, and we saw that they could be white or yellow. But we thought these would be white just like the real examples our teacher brought in from last year's group of silkworms. We wonder why some cocoons are white and others are yellow. We are hoping to see at least one of our silkworms as an adult before school lets out on June 20. If one does, we'll make sure we take a picture and share it. Can you find the cocoon hidden in the photograph taken by our student of the month?

Silkworms Invade Our Classroom!

We now have 14 silkworms crawling around in our classroom. We will be updating the progress of our little visitors. They are really eating a lot of mulberry leaves. They are growing so fast. They are currently in the larva stage. We have learned about four stages in the life cycle of the silkworm. And third graders came to our classroom yesterday and read to us a story about a similar animal in its larva stage called a caterpillar. We are waiting for them to begin spinning their cocoon.

Our student of the week took this photograph of them on May 21, 2008. In the next couple of weeks, we hope to share some of the changes we see.

Presentations on Wind

We've finally finished our projects on wind. For the past month, we used our digital cameras to capture images that represented what we created in our storyboards. Third grade students then came in to help us type the words for our wind stories, which we pasted into PowerPoint presentations. Below is a look at our work from storyboards to finished digital photographs uploaded into Google Docs. Enjoy!

Group 1 Presentation



Group 2 Presentation



Group 3 Presentation



Group 4 Presentation



Group 5 Presentation

Jump Rope For Heart

We raised a lot of money for the American Heart Association! On Friday, May 2, 2008, our school had its Jump Rope for Heart event. Our class jumped along with the rest of the school, and we had lots of fun. We also enjoyed watching our principal, assistant principal, and out teacher jumping along. The way we raised money was by having our family and friends donate money before the day we jumped. Our class was able to raise more than $200 alone. We can't wait till we do this again in first grade.

Videoconference with California State Parks

Yesterday, we had Open House. Many people in our community came into our classroom to see the many things we are learning. Some of them even came in when we were spending some time learning about tide pools during a videoconference with a California State Park interpreter at Crystal Cove State Park. We were able to do this because of the assistance of LAUSD Educational Technology Group loaning the necessary equipment to hold this event.

Did you miss our Open House? Have no worries! That is why we are also sharing our classroom in this way. And below is your chance to see highlights of our videoconference session, which was edited using Windows Movie Maker and uploaded to TeacherTube.

Field Trip to Cabrillo Beach and Marine Aquarium

Yesterday, we went to Cabrillo Beach and Marine Aquarium. For many of us, it was our first time seeing the beach. While we were there, we observed the wind, since we are also learning about it as well.

A-Hunting We Will Go

We just came back from our Spring Break, but we recalled the day before we went on break when we looked all over our kindergarten playground for colorful eggs. First, we decorated our bags to welcome the coming of Spring. Then, we went outside our classroom and discovered that eggs were scattered all over our playground. We each had to find no more than 15 eggs on this day. Some of us finished early and began helping our classmates find others that were hidden in places not easily found. After our egg hunt, we went into the classroom to count the number of eggs we each collected. After making sure that everyone had 15 eggs, we opened them to find surprises inside the egg containers.

Did you go on your own egg hunt this past break? How many did you find? What do you discover inside your eggs?

Happy Birthday Hat for Dr. Seuss

In celebration of Dr. Seuss' birthday (March 2, 1904) and Read Across America, which was recognized this year on March 3, 2008, every classroom in Delevan Drive Elementary School created a hat using the basic design of the "Cat in the Hat". To the right is a photograph of the hat our class submitted to the school library where it is currently being displayed. We chose Horton Hears a Who! as our theme for the project for several reasons. First, the animated movie version of the story is soon to be shown in theaters, and we felt that it would gather a lot of attention from our schoolmates. Second, we identify with the book's main message mentioned throughout, "a person's a person, no matter how small." You will notice in the photograph that each of the Whos displayed all over the hat we made shows a picture of each of our faces. We have thought about who in our lives represents Horton, the elephant that does his best to be our protector.

Who is your Horton? And do you agree with us that "a person is a person, no matter how small?"

Best Buy Teach Award

Hooray! Our classroom was recognized for its learning by Best Buy. Because we have been talking and sharing our learning with others outside our classroom through videoconferencing, our classroom blog, and other projects that allowed us to share "our living world", we were recognized with a Best Buy Teach Award. We treasure times like our connection with Los Angeles County Mueseum of Art back in January and our oppportunity to participate in the world-wide student conference called Megaconference Jr.

What's next? We'll be connecting with a park ranger at Crystal Cove State Beach to share our learning on tide pools and to ask a number of questions the students themselves will develop in preparation for the event. We will be preparing a set of images gathered by taking digital photos with cameras, finding/citing resources from the Internet, and scanning hand-drawn work. With our award, projects such as this one are supported through materials and tools that allow us to create, share, and learn about "our living world".

Virtual Field Trip to Museum by Videoconference

On January 30, 2008, we had a special trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), but we never left our school. Instead, we used a videoconferencing unit to connect with Toni Guglielmo through the museum's Distance Learning Program. Toni Guglielmo is the LACMA program coordinator for their distance learning program, and she served as our guide on this day. We learned to look at paintings, and really focused on the various characteristics found in portraits such as emotion. For example, we looked closely at the English artist Thomas Lawrence's Portrait of Arthur Atherley as an Etonian (circa 1791) pictured on the right.

We learned that the boy in the painting was showing how proud he was to be a student at his school. Far in the background you can see his school, Eton. His pride showed in his face as well as by the way he positioned his arms. We all wanted to show our pride in our school, Delevan Drive Elementary School, too. So we also stood up with Toni Guglielmo's guidance and tried to stand as proud as the boy in the portrait. Our arms were positioned just like the arms of Arthur Atherley.

We had a great virtual trip to LACMA, and Toni Guglielmo also provided each of us an Arts for NexGen LACMA free youth membership. We received our membership enrollment forms this past Thursday, February 14, 2008. What a wonderful Valentine's Day gift that the museum provided our class!

Our next classroom videoconference will be just as exciting as we virtually attend a conference just for students called Megaconference Jr. That's this Thursday, February 21, 2008!

T-Shirts Designed By Us

On Friday, February 2, our classroom t-shirts were delivered. Each one of us, including our teachers, took time to draw a self-portrait that was included in the t-shirt. Take a look at each of these drawings in the slideshow generated from our classroom Picasa Web Album.



Can you figure out who each of us is? Happy guessing!

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

This school year has definitely been busy for us. We are currently working on an arts project that you will read about later. But we already performed a play depicting our version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. With help from our drama teacher, we worked on our set as well as practiced our lines. We hope you enjoy this rendition performed on December 6, 2007.



This video was edited using Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and uploaded to TeacherTube.

Back from Winter Break - Boomer is Still Here!

We finally returned from a long Winter break. It was reassuring to find that Boomer, our dog, was still around. This was unlike the time in September when he decided to have a "day out" wandering around the school. Based on a book, Boomer Goes to School by Constance W. McGeorge, our adventure was well documented with pictures of our search for Boomer. We used Microsoft Photostory to help us create this synopsis of our day looking for the dog. Of course, we were also learning to spell. Can you find the misspelled word in our story?

During Back to School Night in October, our parents were able to hear our voices and see pictures of our expedition as we learned to describe the experience. We now know how to tell our story orally from creating presentations like this one. And now we wanted to share it here as we continue to show what is happening in our classroom.