We recently learned how to analyze and describe the characters in the stories we read. Today we made a list of positive characteristics that would describe students in our class. We came up with cool, fun, funny, friend, helpful, artistic, creative, helpful, musical, and many more. Each student was given a wooden frame to place on their desk. The class went around to each desk and wrote a positive characteristic for that person on their frame. Each student will be able to take their picture frame and painted rock home as a reminder that they are AWESOME!
As 1st grade comes to an end we took some time to remember and discuss the theme of the year....everyone is special in their own way. We began the year talking about how everyone is unique and different. Throughout the year we tried to teach the class that not everyone learns the same way or at the same pace. Everyone has talents and everyone is special. Today I read the book "Only One You" by Linda Kranz. The book is illustrated with painted rocks and the words teach life lessons such as "Find your own way. You don't have to follow the crowd." After reading the book the students got to paint their own rock. Each rock is painted different. Not one rock is better than the other. They are all different, but they are all special. I wrote the message "You are Special" on each rock as a keepsake. We recently learned how to analyze and describe the characters in the stories we read. Today we made a list of positive characteristics that would describe students in our class. We came up with cool, fun, funny, friend, helpful, artistic, creative, helpful, musical, and many more. Each student was given a wooden frame to place on their desk. The class went around to each desk and wrote a positive characteristic for that person on their frame. Each student will be able to take their picture frame and painted rock home as a reminder that they are AWESOME! This week in social studies we learned about economics. The class learned about needs, wants, goods, services, producers, and consumers. As a fun way to practice producer and consumer the students took part in an economic activity. They became producers. They were given colored play doh to create their own cookie. They had to create the cookie and an advertisement. The flier included the name of the cookie, a picture and the price. Once they were finished producing their good, we invited in some consumers. Mr. Boodheshwar and Mr Merrill (the high school principal) came into the classroom with $10.00 fake dollars. They walked around and purchased a few cookies. The students learned that if they priced their cookie too high people would not buy it. Hopefully they learned a lot and had fun in the process. To connect language arts into this lesson we listened to the book MMM, Cookies by Robert Munsch.
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This week we started a new whole class reading goal: determine the main topic(s) and main idea(s) in nonfiction text. This typically is a very difficult skill for students of all grade levels. I was SO IMPRESSED with their work on this. We learned two strategies at the beginning of the week. The first is "Notice What Repeats." Students look through the book, section, passage, chapter, etc and look for words that repeat in the words and the nonfiction text features. This often will help them identify the main topic. We also learned the strategy of "Find the Topic,Subtopic, Details." After the mini lesson where I modeled this strategy, students set off in pairs (or independently if they preferred) to use this strategy on a nonfiction book of their choice. Identifying the subtopic was the most challenging part, but as I walked around to help support students, I saw a huge growth in this skill as we worked through the challenge. In math we began our final unit (number 12) on 2d shapes and fractions. At the beginning of the week we worked on identifying the names and attributes of 2d shapes and then moved on to composing 2d shapes. They loved using the pattern blocks to help them visualize the 2d composition shapes. This week we learned how to identify the point of view of a story. We learned about third person, when a narrator tells the story and you see words such as she, he, they, their, and the character's name. We also learned first person, when the story is told by one of the characters. Words such as I, my, me, I'm are used in a first person story. We used fairy tales and fractured fairy tales to practice identifying point of view. First, I read the classic book Jack and the Beanstalk which is told in third person. Next, I read Trust Me, Jack's Beanstalk Stinks which is a different version of this story told from the Giant's point of view. Continuing with our study of fairy tales, I read the story The Three Little Pigs followed by The True story of the Three Little Pigs told from the Wolf's point of view. We ended Friday afternoon with a collaborative problem solving assignment. Each team was given a paper pig on a plate. They had to work together to construct a house out of a variety of materials to keep their pig safe from the big, bad wolf (my hair dryer). I was so impressed with the team work and positive interactions I saw in each group. They worked together, listened, shared, and uplifted everyone at their table. Each team was able to successfully keep their pig safe inside their structure. Way to go!! The class had a wonderful time at the Cleveland Science Center. I was SO proud of how well behaved and polite our class was. Way to go! The students got to take part in many hands on activities. Whether they built rockets, made water funnels, enjoyed the play area or the lego exhibit everyone had a favorite part! Here are a few pictures from our day. Ask your child to tell you all about it. This week we started a new whole class reading goal. (For the past several weeks, we have been learning strategies to clarify the meaning of unfamiliar words). Now we are working on understanding the characters in the books we read. The first strategy we learned is "How's the character feeling?" Students learned to look at a character's actions, words, and thoughts to help determine how he/she is feeling. Students were given a feelings chart with facial expressions and feeling words so that we can be more descriptive than happy, sad, mad, etc. We modeled how to look at the characters actions to help us determine feelings using the book No, David. Then students applied this strategy to their independent reading. Students used a post-it to mark the page and write a feeling for a character. I conferred with each student and we discussed the clues (action, words, thoughts) that told us the feeling. On Tuesday and Wednesday we built on this strategy and learned "Feelings Change." We discussed how characters feelings don't stay the same. Good things and bad things happen to our characters and their feelings change. Readers pay attention to this and notice when their character's feelings change. We modeled this with two of Kevin Henkes' books: Lilly's Big Day and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. We created a chart that listed the action/word/thoughts and the feeling that corresponded. Students again applied this strategy in their independent reading. (We needed two post-its notes for this of course!) Students also have a spiral notebook that they are allowed to "stop and jot" while reading to record how feelings change for the characters in their books. We noticed that students often want to only tell why the character feels a certain way. Although this is very important, they also need to be able to say what the character did, said, or thought that shows they felt a particular way. We also worked on sequencing the events in a story. We worked on comparing and contrasting using venn diagrams. For any story that has a theme/message/moral, we discuss this as well. This is something that you can do with books at home too. In math we worked on writing and counting tally marks. We also worked on using graphs to help us solve problems. In social studies, we continued learning about maps. Students should know that maps have a map key/legend with symbols, a compass rose, and a scale. They had so much fun exploring maps on Google. We worked on classifying and categorizing objects. Each student was given a picture. They had to look around the room at all of the pictures and determine how they could classify the objects into categories. This was a lot of fun. We talked about how we could take information we read and put it into categories to help us remember details. In math we began chapter 11 which studies 3d shapes. Today we learned how to identify the faces (flat sides), edges, and vertices (corners) on 3d shapes. The students got to explore the shapes to learn more. This week, we are wrapping up our whole class unit on clarifying unfamiliar words. Students learned the "Picture It" strategy. Students were taught that when they think a writer may be using a phrase in a figurative way, not a literal way, to stop and picture it. They should get an image in their mind of what each separate word means and then what the words mean together. They should take a guess at what the phrase might mean keeping in mind what's happening in the rest of the text. This strategy is helpful for understanding figurative language. We read Amelia Bedilia books because they are full of figurative language. We talked about how Amelia doesn't understand figurative language and was never taught the "Picture It" strategy. The students really enjoyed discussing the figurative language we found in these silly books as well as our other books throughout the week. In social studies, we started to explore maps. Students loved looking through our giant atlases at all the different kinds of maps. They discovered there are many types of maps and parts of maps. We will continue learning about maps next week. In math, we began our unit on graphing. Students learned about picture graphs and really enjoyed doing their own survey to create a picture graph of their own. We also spent a day working on using our addition fact strategies. Students took a timed test based on their individual math goal. When students meet their goal, they earn a gumball as a celebration and set a new goal to work on. They love earning those gumballs. Students learned the definition of a syllable (a word or part of a word with one talking vowel sound). They enjoyed practicing counting syllables in our names and other words. We reviewed many of our language skills during stations on Monday. Students worked on identifying base words, counting syllables in words, sorting words as noun/adjective/verb, identifying synonyms, putting words in abc order, and creating words with prefixes/suffixes. ContractionsToday we learned contractions. The students learned that two words could be made shorter with an apostrophe. After practicing together on the smart board the students took part in an activity where they did "contraction surgery." Each group of surgeons put on their Dr. badge, cut apart the two words, and fixed them up with an apostrophe bandaid. It was a fun way to practice and understand contractions. GraphingIn math, chapter 10 we are working on graphing. Today the students practiced reading and creating their own bar graph. First, they surveyed 10 students in the class and tallied the results. Next, they used their data to create a bar graph. Finally, they answered questions about the graph they created. We talked about how they can choose a topic, collect data and create graphs at home too. Have fun! natural History museum- force and motionWe had a special visitor come to room 54 today from the Natural History Museum. She brought many hands on activities for the students to experiment with force and motion. The kids had a lot of fun learning about push, pull, gravity, force, motion, inertia, and acceleration. Kahoot Fun!!This week the class was introduced to a fun new game called Kahoot! We used this game to help us review the math and reading skills we learned this year. The kids were begging for more :) Last week we started a new whole class reading focus: clarify unfamiliar words. Students have been learning strategies for when they come across a word that they don't know the meaning of. In our post last week, we wrote about students can think about multiple meaning words. They should consider how the word is being used if a word isn't making sense within the context. (Force of gravity versus being forced to do something). They also learned a strategy we call "insert a synonym." When students come across an unfamiliar word, they can insert a word they know that fit in the sentence and the larger context. They were taught to then read on to check that it still makes sense. They also learned a third strategy last week that we refer to as "surrounding sentences." A student can try to read the sentence before and after the sentence with the unfamiliar word. Then really think about what's happening in the story/passage. This week the students learned two additional strategies. The first is to use word parts as a clue. Students learned that some longer words are actually made of parts: prefixes, suffixes, and base words. Students can separate the parts of the word, think about what each part means, and then put the word back together. They also learned the strategy of using parts of speech as a clue. We taught them that when they come to an unfamiliar word, they should think about the "job" the word has in a sentence. Their knowledge of the job of the word can help them figure out what they word might mean. We have focused so far on nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This has been AMAZING to teach. We are so surprised at how first graders are applying these strategies so well in their own independent reading. We confer with individuals after teaching the strategy in a mini-lesson. We have been so impressed with their awareness that they need to clarify and how well they are applying the strategies to do so. We continue to model the use of these strategies during our daily read aloud. To practice identifying nouns, verbs and adjectives we did an easter egg hunt. The students collected eggs and opened them up to reveal a word inside. They had to sort the words into three baskets (nouns, verbs, adjectives). We went through each of the baskets to check our work. The students made Easter baskets to take home a special treat. Happy Easter! Clarifying with homonymsThis week the students learned that if a word isn't making sense within the context, it might be a multiple meaning word. They need to read the context before and after, think about how the word is being used and choose a meaning that makes sense. The same word can have different meanings depending on how, when and where it is used. We did a lot of work reading sentences to determine the meaning of homonyms (some that are spelled the same and some that are spelled different) in the context of a sentence. Nonstandard units of measureIn first grade the students learn the basics of measuring. They use nonstandard units of measure such as blocks and paperclips. They learn that it is important to line up the measuring tool to the beginning of the object. They practice making sure that there is no space between the tool used to measure and that they are lined up to the end of the object. ThemeThroughout the week while reading to the class we have been focusing on identifying the theme of the story. This week I read two incredible books to the class: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and my favorite, The Empty Pot. Ask your child to tell you about each story and what the theme was. Alphabetical OrderWe had a lot of fun practicing alphabetical order with hands on stations today. The students got to work in centers to manipulate words into alphabetical order. Once they thought they had the words in the correct order they got to check their own work. They were so excited when they got them all right! Great work! Reading fluencyToday we read the book The Goat and the Singing Wolf. We talked about how good readers read with expression and make their voices sound like the characters in the story. I was so impressed!! They brought home the book to read to you this weekend! Please ask them to share it with you. This week students worked a lot on summarizing to help them better understand what they read. After reading a few pages in a book, students should stop to summarize what has happened. If they can't, then they know they should go back to reread with a focus on understanding. This helps students focus on the meaning and not just saying the words. In math we worked a lot on adding 2 digit numbers with and without regrouping. In small groups our instruction is differentiated so there were some students who were ready to go beyond this and do even larger numbers. In writing workshop, students continued to work on writing book reviews. We worked on creating a brief summary without giving all the details of the book away as part of our reviews. Goodbye HumphreyJust before Spring break we finished reading the book The World According to Humphrey by Betty G. Birney. This was part of the One Book, One School project. We hope you enjoyed reading and discussing the story together as a family! I loved hearing the class talk about the book and make connections to things happening in our own classroom. Many students shared that they liked Mrs. Brisbane's character best. They liked that her feelings for Humphrey changed by the end of the story. The class made Humphrey hats and cheered Humphrey on as he ran the obstacle course. There are many more books in the Humphrey series. We encourage you to check them out and continue reading at home! Obstacle CourseIn our first grade class Olivia, Skylor, and Campbell got to compete in the obstacle course. They all ran hard and did an amazing job! Great job! Duck! Rabbit!To celebrate spring, I thought it would be appropriate to read the book Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse. This is an adorable book that teaches point of view. The students were given a picture. They had to decorate the picture to look like either a duck or a rabbit. Once everyone created their picture I read the story. Throughout the book two characters are arguing if they see a duck or a rabbit. Together as a class we wrote down the evidence that supports it being a duck and the evidence that supports it being a rabbit. The students wrote their own opinion piece that included a topic sentence, evidence and a closing. |
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