First Grade: April 20 - 24, 2026

First Grade

Apr 27

Dear First Grade Families,

Thank you for attending our annual auction! It was wonderful to gather with the wider school community in support of our mission. The class auction project was roundly admired. Rightly so! Our beautiful wreaths will bring seasonal cheer all year and a piece of our class history to the Kistler family. Thank you for placing that generous winning bid, and huge thanks to our students, volunteers, Renee, our energetic auction rep, and our dedicated Handwork teacher, Ki Ieva, for turning our vision into a reality. We are so grateful. Finally, many thanks to those of you who turned out for our work day the following morning. It was gratifying to celebrate the success of the night before and to get everything tidy again.

The class is now off book (free of scripts) during rehearsals! This is an impressive feat. For most of the play, the whole class narrates the action chorally, meaning everyone is aiming to memorize all the lines. In addition to daily practice to commit their cues and lines to memory, students have played games to improve focus and build their capacity for memorization. In two of these games, one including speech and the other simply motions, each child contributes an original phrase (alliterative with their name) or a two-beat rhythm. After each turn, the next student must remember the preceding contributions after offering their own. By the end of the circle, there is a lot to remember! Students noticed that it was sometimes easier to remember the two-beat rhythm when it involved a more visual, such as hand clapping, as opposed to tongue clicking.

The current look of our campus is a marked contrast with the way it appeared just a couple of short months ago. Back in February, the wetland was frozen solid! Students were thrilled by the spectacle of the ice, but more so with breaking it! Last week, after a sunny lunch on the dock, the class ventured over to the now largely dried up wetland for XML. In pairs, students shared their observations about the sights, sounds, and smells of the environment. The star of the show must have been the bullfrog tadpole that seemed to be greeting students, gradually drawing nearer to their rapt gaze as they observed from the marsh dock. Students also described the appearance and odor of the mud all around. One student noticed how the shallow waterways intersected (rather like a canal system), and another said that she smelled life! Walking on the mud was a strange experience; everyone remembered the water that had been there before when rainfall was more plentiful. Finally, the class wound their way into the “deep woods,” where they noticed the tree canopy and how that made the setting feel different from the sunbaked dock. More nature adventures are in store before the end of the year!

Announcements & Reminders:

TGS Families are invited to attend Class Plays, Presentations, and School Assemblies!

We hope you will join us!