Learning is Fun in Grade One!: Sparkling Writers

Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop

Students continued the writing process integrating the 6+1 traits of writing into their Small Moments. The bold traits below have been the area of focus for the past few weeks.

Ideas, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Voice, Conventions

Students have been actively engaged in the writing process; students have been collaborating, adding to their stories, and editing to make their writing stronger. Students had a blast learning about "sparkle words". Author's use "sparkle words" to capture the readers attention. Students worked hard to replace "tired words", such as"good, bad, happy, nice", in their writing with more interesting synonyms. "Tired words" are simple words that you hear often. While it is okay to use these words sometimes, students agreed they could think of more interesting words to engage their reader.

It has been eye opening to see the drastic gains the students have made in writing since September!

The following chart from Ruth Culham’s book, 6+1 Traits of Writing, demonstrates the qualities of my process-centered classroom for writing.

We had a strong focus this week on inquiry based questioning and focusing on the point of view of texts/characters and the author’s purpose of certain ideas and words.

Many books were used as mentors for both reading and writing. The following 3 books were student favorites!

Math

Tying up the most recent math topic, students continued to practice and generalize strategies for addition and apply them to 2 part word problems and addition with 3 numbers.

What’s Ahead?

Subtraction is a challenging concept developmentally for first graders. Providing hands on and tangible learning experiences in conjunction with lots of practice are essential for understanding.

For the month of March students will focus on strategies for subtraction facts to 20. Earlier in the year, children used the relationship between addition and subtraction to solve problems. In the coming weeks, children will learn to extend their understanding to larger numbers.

What are subtraction fact strategies?

Think Addition is a powerful way to think about subtraction facts. As students have spent a better part of the year understanding relationships between parts and wholes, now they will be able to use this knowledge to make subtraction easier.

For example, if a student sees the problem 8-3=? Using the Think Addition strategy a student would reason, “ I know the problem is asking me to take 3 away from 8. I know that the 8 is the whole in the problem and the 3 is one part. I also know that 3 + 5 equals 8, so 5 must be the missing part in this problem. The missing part is what I am trying to find for my answer.”

Fact Families are groups of related facts. Children will continue to connect the relationship between addition and subtraction in fact families. All number sentences use the same numbers. If you know one fact in a family, you can figure out the other facts in the family.

For example,

6+8=14

8+6+14

14-6=8

14-8+6

In this example, you can see that 6 and 8 are the parts and 14 is the whole. Continuing to think about a whole and its parts will help children build on their understanding of fact families and the relationship between addition and subtraction.

Valentine’s Day and the 100^th Day of School

We integrated math, reading and writing activities for both celebrations. From graphing and organizing valentines and cards, to sorting and counting the cans and figuring out how many times we could write our name in 100 seconds…the kids had a blast! Making a class list of all of the things we would each want to eat 100 of and not eat 100 of was a highlight. We also focused on the themes of love, family and friendship for the month of February. We teamed up with Ms. Keough’s class to create a human friendship train! Students wrote compliments on one another’s back.