Our final week of January has come to a close and it was a blast! Excuse all of the space references!
This week, our time was spent rotating through the 5 space-themed centers taught by 5 of the first grade teachers in preparation for our field trip to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. In these rotations, your students learned about the phases of the moon, the changing seasons, night and day, the orbital relationship between the sun, Earth, and moon, and about constellations in the night sky. Each lesson culminated in a hands-on activity which I'm sure you've already seen come home! We also were responsible from recording the information we learned throughout the week in our Space Systems Journal (very similar to our Light and Sound Journals from earlier in the year.) These are on their way home this coming week as we add our finishing touches! We had so much fun at the Discovery Center and it was just wonderful to see the students making connections to topics discussed throughout the week while exploring the exhibits that were present. In addition to general exploring of the Discovery Center, we also got to go into the Planetarium to watch a presentation called, "Tonight's Sky" where the anticipated Thursday night sky in Concord, NH was projected onto the dome. This allowed us to examine the position of the moon, constellations, and planets, in our corner of the world! In addition to preparing for our field trip, we also celebrated the conclusion of our second Lucy Calkins Writing Unit: Reviews. We had been adding detailed illustrations to our typed and published reviews all week in order to share them with our friends in Mrs. Galvin's class! We got to read our story to a buddy and share a sweet treat together! Please enjoy the photos below and be on the lookout for report cards coming home this week!
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Congratulations were in order for Team 210 as we officially made it to the 90th day of school! Your kiddos are half-way to becoming second graders! Can you believe it?
I certainly can't! They say, "Time flies when you're having fun," for a reason! I am so proud of how far each student has come! Each has shown growth in reading fluency and decoding skills, fact fluency in math and use of math vocabulary, confidence in participation and demonstration of social skills and self-regulation strategies! Just last week I had to approve our class composite page for the yearbook and each student even LOOKS so much older than they did back in September! I'm sure you've noticed this too! This has been a wonderful period of growth, and we still have half a year to go! This week we celebrated our 90th day of school with first grade rotations on Friday. Each classroom teacher prepared a different lesson around the concept of one-half and shared it with each group of first graders! At the end of the day, we were visited by the "Mad Halfer" who demonstrated for us, that no matter the size of the paper, it can only be folded no more than 7 times! This week begins our week-long science, space rotations, in preparation for our field trip to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, and the continuation of mid-year benchmarking! Have a wonderful week, first-grade families, and enjoy just a few photos of the kids with the Mad Halfer! Though somewhat interrupted, Team 210 made the most of last week! We completed our second i-Ready math benchmark, continued our study of coins and making inferences, and even made use of the 6 fresh inches of snow we received mid-week!
In first grade, we strive to expand our vocabulary in order to better describe and make sense of the world around us! One way Team 210 gets to put this into practice is with our seasonal woods walks. Our first woods walk took place in the fall, tied into our study of using natural resources to make fairy houses. Upon completing our fall walk, students were asked to describe the woods using their five senses, write a fall poem, and also write an entry in our seasons walk journal! Now, in winter, we completed the same activity! We took our walk along the trails behind the school with the goal of using all of our senses to experience the woods around us. This walk was scaffolded so that a part of our walk was dedicated to each of the five senses. We then shared some adjectives to describe what we felt, heard, saw, smelled, and tasted! (Though we were encouraged NOT to eat the snow, we did get a taste when the wind blew snow off of the branches down on us!!) Please enjoy our photos and you can look forward to the completed journal at the end of the school year! We can all agree the Holiday season at home is a busy time of year! The same goes for in the classroom as well. Schedules are hectic, projects need wrapping up, snow days occur, testing begins, reports cards are worked on, etc.
The title of this post addresses that, though we are still very busy and have much on our schedule, with the Holiday season over, we are mostly returning to normalcy! The month of January, no matter how disjointed, is a crucial time for young learners where new gains are made and new skills are acquired. We are almost halfway through the year, so your students are just about closer to being second graders than kindergarteners anymore, and it shows! This month we will be participating in our second math benchmark of the year, starting another round of reading benchmarks, celebrating reaching the halfway point in the year, and taking part in our space rotations leading up to our next field trip to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center! We have a lot going on but I know we are ready to take it all on! This week, we had Mrs. Kurtz, our REACH Coordinator, come in for an experiment! She read the class the book Red Sled by Rita Judge and got us all thinking about how sleds move across the snow. We also made the connection to the Winter Olympics and watched a Go-Pro video of a bobsledder racing down a track. The students then had to make their own sleds using different materials and test, not only which material sled down a makeshift hill the fastest, but also test what happened to the time of their sled when weight was added! Stay tuned for what else is to come during this busy month and enjoy some photos below! First grade is excited to be launching, "Fact Power!". "Fact Power" is the name the first grade has given to the dedicated time that we will be spending each week working on our fact fluency skills. Fact fluency is a vital component to the future success of any student, not only in the areas of more advanced mathematics, but in everyday life as well.
As we build up our fact power, we will be learning certain addition strategies by heart, and will become experts at knowing, not only what the sum of two numbers is, but why the sum is what it is. Our facts are just like our trick words. We know them in our brains and in our hearts. We can immediately identify them and understand their purpose in context. These addition strategies will be taught sequentially, with each student spending their independent as well as small-group time working on the strategy that meets them where they are! Math games and activities will be provided to support each strategy and our strategies will also be applied to word problems. Progress with these facts will be measured by periodic math "check-ins" (short, untimed quizzes) and frequent verbal practice. Be on the lookout for +1 and +2 flashcards coming home in homework packets this week! When you quiz your students, make sure you are asking them why 7+1=8, not just what the sum of 7+1 is. This deeper thought about numbers and frequent practice will help to refine number sense and automaticity which is invaluable! I hope all last week your student was telling you about the light and sound science lessons they participated in during our November science rotations! Instead of rotating for one day, we spread our lessons out over the whole week, with classes traveling together to work with each first grade teacher. This is such a fun way to get to know new students and to give our students a fresh change of pace and environment.
Our science lessons on the topics of light and sound culminated in our successful trip to the Dover Children's Museum! The Children's Museum was a gem that I didn't even know New Hampshire had, so I am grateful to have shared that experience with your children! We had some wonderful chaperones accompany us and their assistance assured that we had a fun, smooth day! At the museum, in addition to experiencing exhibits about sound and light, your student participated in a special lesson on sound taught by museum staff where they got to get hands-on with ways sound travels! As the next holiday steadily approaches, team 210 is back to our more routine day. This week, we will be working on all the ways to make 10, starting our "Writing Reviews" unit in writing, and will dive into deeper discussions in our book groups during literacy. Just a reminder, we have guidance this week, not library! Thanks so much for all you do and please enjoy the photos below! *I will try to add more as chaperones send them to me! Hello First Grade Families!
Thank you for your patience as I have missed out on a few weekends of blog posts! There were conferences, then I was in a musical in Concord that opened the weekend before last and finally, all of a sudden, the holiday was here! Your students have been up to so much and you got to see a piece of that at our First Grade Feast. Thank you again to all who donated and attended! It was a huge success that truly reflected the feeling of community we have been trying to build amongst our first-grade teams. After families left school, our day before break was spent experimenting with the holiday staple, cranberries! We made predictions about what would happen to fresh cranberries in water and dried cranberries in Sprite, determined which cranberries were ripe by whether or not they bounced, and even examined how the natural dyes in cranberries can stain clothes and were once used for that purpose. After these experiments, we also participated in a taste test! We tried fresh cranberries, dried cranberries, cranberry juice, and cranberry sauce and recorded which foods we liked or dislike. I'll tell you this, fresh cranberries...were not a hit!!! Our final portion of the afternoon was spent celebrating your students' Small Moment writing! Students' books were typed, illustrated and bound, and before they went into our classroom library, we had a museum walk of sorts to share our stories! We decorated our tables, shared a special treat, and swapped stories with the friends around us. Please enjoy the photos from our whole day! This past week, though busy, was a wonderful reminder of how grateful I am for this career, this school, your families, and your students. Thank you for all you do for this BES community! ***A few notes:
Though our week got off to a bumpy start (I sure hope everyone's power is back by now!!) we were able to get quite a bit done. Our week was full to the brim!
Tuesday was another day of rotations which is a wonderful opportunity for Team 210 to spend some quality time with students from the other first grade teams who we usually only get to see at recess and lunch! Our students rotated through five different stations where we completed fall-themed educational activities! In Team 210's room, I led "Fall-Themed" Improv games. Improv games are a wonderful way to practice quick thinking and to build confidence and partnership within a group. Over the summers, I am a theater camp counselor at the Derryfield School and we like to practice improv games with our campers everyday! It was so wonderful to see the first graders taking risks, playing along, and not being afraid to be a little silly. Even at this level, improv games can have an impact on future public speaking skills and begin to get students comfortable in front of a group of their peers! I want to send a special thank you to the families who contributed to our special snack! It was so appreciated and a wonderful way to end our day together. Another task that first graders accomplished this week was practicing dictation sentences. Dictation activities are when I say a sentence out loud, and the students are responsible for recording the sentence using proper capitalization and punctuation and identifying the "trick words" present by circling them. This is a very difficult task as it depends on the students' ability to keep those five or six words in their head even after I am done repeating the sentence. These dictations are on our Fundations Unit Assessments from now on so it was so helpful to practice these skills in a whole-group setting. We discussed ways to problem solve, strategies for keeping the sentence in our minds, and ways to make sure we get down just what we hear on paper. Below are some photos from that activity! Be on the lookout for the November calendar coming home tomorrow, and I look forward to meeting with all families at the Parent-Teacher Conferences this Thursday and Friday. I will send out a final confirmation of time and dates tomorrow! After a full week of benchmarking in literacy, completing work with the number 6 in math, focusing on the "yellow" zone of regulation (for feelings) and working towards wrapping up our unit on small moments in writing, we were able to fit in some spooky science!
This science lesson involved a fall favorite, candy corn, which were designated a "science materials" and not candy to be eaten! :) The students were introduced to the concept of a hypothesis, which is different from a guess because it is a guess you can test, as they explored what would happen to a piece of candy corn when put into separate containers of oil, water, salt water, and vinegar. Each student was provided with a scientist's booklet in which to record their predictions, findings, and conclusions. We discussed what might happen to the candy corn in each liquid and our conversations were quite interesting and exciting! Words such as, dissolve and melt were used, in addition to the ideas that maybe the candy corn would lose its color, or remain unchanged. Students sketched their predictions in their booklets, then went out to recess. While they were outside, I placed a candy corn in each container at each table, and by the time the class returned, changes to the candy corn were already happening! Students then needed to use their powers of observation to sketch their findings! We concluded that the candy corn did indeed dissolve in 3 of the 4 liquids, remaining unchanged in only the oil! The leaves open a further discussion of why the liquids had different interactions with the candy corn and the properties of those liquids. Please enjoy some photos from our week below! Did you know your students put on the hard hats of construction workers this week?
Throughout our first math unit, the first grade has been solidifying routines, revisiting place value, describing teens numbers, exploring the hundreds chart, finding a variety of ways to represent a value (through concrete manipulatives as well as pictorial methods), and has spent quite a bit of time on the concept of tally marks. As we engage in "number talks" to strengthen our number sense, tally marks remind us that numbers are simply the written representation of a certain value. We can also represent values with tally marks! We use tally marks to make groups of five which help us count more efficiently, and are also a speedy way to record data! Our extension of tally marks came to fruition in the form of our first performance task! Performance tasks, though a form of assessment, are quite different from a traditional test. Performance tasks are all about real-life application of math skills in a way that challenges student learning through questioning and problem solving and can reach all learners by having a manipulative and pictorial component. There is more freedom in how you demonstrate what you know. Our first grader's challenge was to solve a problem for the Bobcat family who had recently moved to Bow. The Bobcat's have three small children and a puppy, and though they are very happy with their new home, they don't have a fence! In order to make their home safer for their children and dog, the Bobcats needed your student to build a fence for them. It just so happened that the Bobcats had a particular design in mind that looked just like a bundle of five tally marks! Students needed to choose the spacing between their fence posts (to keep the kids and dog safe) but had autonomy in how the fence (made out of popsicle sticks) reached from one end of the yard to the other. This was demonstrated on a place-mat sized piece of paper. There were also accompanying questions that asked the students to count not only how many fence posts were used in all, but how many bundles of five were used. This was a highly engaging activity that allowed students to build, color, count, problem solve, and write and the end products are something to be proud of! We can't wait to display them! Please enjoy some photos of our building process below! Until next week! |
AuthorMusings of a Grade 1 teacher. Outlet for exciting "goings-on" in the classroom. Archives
May 2018
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