We had a fun time celebrating St. Patrick's Day today. When we arrived in the morning we found 6 clues in our classroom sending us on a search around the school for a leprechaun. Together we read each of the clues and used the text and our schema to make inferences about where the leprechaun ran off to. We traveled around the school to find goodies left behind for us to share! In writing the students wrote about what makes them lucky. They created a cute shamrock to go along with their writing. We were so lucky to have a bagpipe player come in and play us a tune. His daughter and grandaughter (one of the first grade students) did a Irish jig as he played. In math we took a survey and graphed our favorite color of the rainbow. At the end of the day we had a green shake to end this fun day!
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This week in math we learned about fractions. The students learned how to split rectangles and circles into halves and fourths. We practiced writing fractions with a numerator and denominator. We also learned how to represent fractions by shading parts of the whole. We had so much fun using what we know about fractions to make pizzas. The students were given a pizza with four equal slices. They added a topping to each of the four slices and then wrote fractions to describe their pizza. The students loved using their Phones as we learned to identify the theme in stories. I told them I couldn't afford to buy them all real iPhones, but they were so excited to have their laminated, cardstock versions. Several of them came up to me and thanked me at the end of the day-so sweet! They loved pretending to text or make calls. This is why I love first graders! We made an enormous iPhone to hang in the class where we put a list of themes from books we've read since the beginning of the year. We read two Berenstain Bear books and as a class talked about the theme. These books are great for identifying theme because most of the books have a clear lesson that students can relate to. Students read Bonk's New Bike in cooperative learning groups where they made predictions, asked questions, clarified, and summarized as they read. We then spent some time discussing the theme and completed a graphic organizer with the details in the story that support the theme. The students learned that to correctly identify the theme, they need to think about what the main character learned (not what the other characters usually). When reading with your child and working on this skill, ask your child who the main character is. Then ask them what problem he/she had and what they learned by the end of the story. In Bonk's New Bike, Bonk wanted a new bike, but didn't have enough money saved. He decided to earn money by walking dogs, but he didn't want his friends helped when they offered. Walking dogs was a struggle and Bonk couldn't take care of all the dogs. So when his friends offered to help again, he said yes. Together, they walked the dogs and earned enough money for the new bike. Bonk's friends gave their money to Bonk and he promised to let them take turns riding his new bike. So by working together, all of the characters benefited. Bonk learned that teamwork is important. We then spent some time digging deeper into the theme. Students worked with a partner and had to describe, compare, apply, analyze, associate, and argue (for or against) the theme in Bonk's New Bike. We called this activity cubing (each word was on the face of the cube). Through their discussions with partners and the whole class, the students strengthened their understanding of the theme and how to use details to support it. The following day we worked in cooperative learning groups. I read aloud several shorter passages and students worked with their groups to identify the theme. Then they were challenged to find a detail to support the theme and write it on the back of their iPhones. They also could roll their cube (which of course we constructed last week during our geometry unit in math) and think more deeply about the theme. They are doing so well with such a difficult concept! We will continue to work on this next week. We will then switch to nonfiction texts and students will learn to identify the main idea. I think of theme as the main idea for fiction, so we're hoping that all of this work will help them with identifying nonfiction main idea too. The second geometry standard we have been working on is composing shapes. In this activity, the students had basic two-dimensional shapes and they had to use those to create new shapes. For example, 3 triangles can be use to make a trapezoid. This was a fun and challenging assignment. The students were allowed to create something "fun" with their leftover shapes. They were so creative!
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