We had a great week! We worked on the reading comprehension strategy of summarizing. We used this strategy in cooperative learning groups while reading The Grinch. Students wrote an opinion paragraph about if the Grinch should grin or not. They analyzed the Grinch by describing him, applying the lesson he learned, arguing for or against him, comparing/contrasting, and making associations. We also read The Smallest Gift of Christmas and we discussed this theme and made connections to the theme in the Grinch. With theme in mind, students wrote about what Christmas means to them. We enjoyed two whole school assemblies this week. We had our school music program. On Tuesday the students learned about our solar system through the COSI presentation and hands-on stations. We hope you enjoy the holidays with your family! We look forward to seeing everyone again on January 4th! Padlet- Click on the link to let us know what you liked most about gingerbread week. http://padlet.com/jspicuzza/4wwv1ugal669
This week we did many activities that revolve around the story The Gingerbread Man. The gingerbread man theme was present throughout the week in reading, math, writing and science. We had a lot of fun and learned so much!! First, we read two different versions of the story The Gingerbread Man. Together we compared and contrasted the stories. The students did a great job noticing which characters were the same and different in each story, the difference in the refrain and similarities with the endings. After reading we analyzed the two main characters, the gingerbread man and the fox. The students were given a partner to reread the story The Gingerbread Man. After reading they went to their seats to record the beginning, middle, and end. We put the three gingerbread men together to sequence the story. The students made a fox and gingerbread puppet to retell the story. We hope you got to hear the retelling at home. At the end of the story the gingerbread man comes to a river. With everyone chasing him from behind he is stuck with nowhere to go. The fox offers to take him across the river. The gingerbread man climbs onto the fox's back, head and nose and is then eaten by the sly fox. In science today we asked the question, "What would happen if you put a gingerbread man in water?" Together we discussed and conducted the five parts of a scientific experiment: 1. question 2. hypothesis 3. experiment 4. results 5. conclusion Can you help me find my gingerbread man? After reviewing what it means to write a descriptive piece the students wrote to describe their gingerbread boy / girl. A book of student descriptive writing pieces came home on Friday. Have fun reading through each of the pieces and see if you can match the description to the correct gingerbread boy / girl. Good luck! Finally, the students got to eat a gingerbread cookie for our writing and math lesson. They recorded which part of the cookie they ate first, second, third and forth. They did a great job writing about how they ate their gingerbread cookie. After eating our gingerbread cookie we collected data and completed a few graphs. First, we graphed how many students liked gingerbread cookies and how many students did not. Next, we completed bar graphs and pie graphs to show who ate the head first, arm first, or leg first. The students were able to answer questions such as which had the most, which had the least, how many more people ate the head before the arm, and how many total people were surveyed by using their graphs. I'm sure you have heard by now....We have a classroom Elf! The students wrote an opinion paragraph telling the reasons why we should adopt an Elf on the Shelf for our classroom. They did an outstanding job and were VERY motivated. Our elf arrived and we voted on a name: Jack. Every morning student will write in their "Elf Journal" where Jack is and what he is doing. Last week, we focused on making predictions while reading (predicting the problem, setting, lesson, etc). This week, we focused on also asking questions. We read two fiction stories (The Littlest Elf and Elf Help) and a nonfiction leveled reader about reindeer. We sometimes worked in cooperative learning groups and other times worked with a partner to "think-pair-share" their questions and predictions. The goal is that these strategies are modeled and used so much in class that students use them in their independent reading. It is so important in first grade to establish that reading is more than fluently saying words. It's about making meaning. They are doing a great job. Since we worked so much with elves this week and two of our read alouds were about the different jobs elves have, students filled out an elf application and created their own elf. In math, our focus was on using related facts to find missing numbers in given number sentences. We hope you enjoy taking a peak into what we did this week in our class! We had a great start to the week! We focused on making predictions in reading. We are now encouraging the students to think about more specific aspects of a story that they can generate predictions for. For example, prior to reading they can predict the setting, the characters, what problem the main character might face, and the lesson in the story. We are working on making predictions throughout the story, not just before reading. This helps ensure students are thinking (not just reading words) and reading with a purpose. Students had the opportunity to work in cooperative learning groups this week to complete several activities using the story Olive, the Other Reindeer. Students made predictions about all of the story elements prior to reading. We stopped throughout the story to write new predictions in their groups. After reading the story, we wrote about all of the story elements. Students worked together to sequence the events in the story. For our writing activity, students were challenged to think of an animal (other than a reindeer or dog) that would be good to lead Santa's sleigh. They were required to write a topic sentence, 2-3 reasons, and a closing sentence. They seemed to really enjoy writing these and hearing about the other animals their classmates chose. In small groups, we worked on reading and writing words with ending blends. All groups are working on answering comprehension questions by providing text evidence. In math we worked on using a bar model to solve word problems. We also worked more with fact families. |
Archives
May 2017
Categories |