American Symbol Historians

How To Blow a Bubble

We continued the writing process for How-To Writing.  As students are now aware the importance of explicit directions and vivid details, they were ready to write their second drafts!  As students completed the writing portion, they went outside to test their procedures.  The hands-on component was powerful as students were able to fix any steps that weren't clear or in the correct sequence.  To conclude the Bubble Writing assignment students worked hard to transfer their writing onto a final draft.  They used their best "author handwriting" and colored detailed pictures for each step.  Stop by the bulletin board outside of our classroom to see the final products!

How To Writing at Home-  After vacation students will continue this process at home with a topic that they are an expert on.  Be on the look out in homework packets!

Math

For math students continued to explore and learn about the base-ten system.  Materials such as the hundred chart, cubes and digiblocks were used to represent the meaning of addition.

Up until this point in the year students have learned many computational strategies for adding and subtracting single digit numbers.  Many of these strategies apply to adding/subtracting multi-digit numbers as well.  Fluency for math problems with multi-digit numbers requires a conceptual understanding of numbers.  It is important to remember that number sense (i.e. mental math and estimation) for adding and subtracting whole numbers needs to be developed.  This number sense provides a foundation for understanding and remembering algorithms.  

DigiBlocks at home

Continue to explore the base-ten system by making digiblock trains on the interactive website!

http://digiblock.com/digi-block-guide/labs/

Students were very excited to earn their classroom goal of pajama and movie day.  We integrated graphing and data collection throughout the day.  Last time the students earned their class goal, we collected votes for the movie using tally marks and creating a bar graph.  This time, we collected votes for the movie by creating a picture graph.  Students worked in groups to analyze the data.  We then created a life size "picture graph" on the rug of all the stuffed animals students brought in!  As a class we created categories.  Students worked independently to analyze the data of our real live graph!

Students thought it was hilarious to "trick" Ms. Schlank and put all of their stuffed animals on the teacher chair.

American Symbol Research

Students completed their cooperative grouping research on their American Symbols.  By exploring authentic brochures (i.e. Dakin Farm, Caribbean Resort, Colgate, Library etc.) they were able to figure out the purpose of a brochure and its features .  Students determined...

Purpose of a Brochure:

- To give the reader facts about something or someplace

- To give lots of information

Features of a Brochure:

-words and sentences

- photographs

- drawings

-headings

- title

-has flaps

- lists

- visually appealing

As students finished up their group research they are working independently to use their research to create their own brochures to inform a reader about their American Symbol.  To provide students with a real and purposeful audience, we emailed Ms. Downes (the librarian) and asked her if we could display our brochures in the library for other people in the school to use to learn about American Symbols.  Ms. Downes graciously accepted our offer! This informative writing is preparing students for insect research and report writing after vacation.

Students are also integrating everything they have learned about How-To Writing on the back of their brochures; one of the tasks is describe to the reader "How to See" the given American Symbol. From giving the distance from the airport to Mount Rushmore, to giving the address of the White House, to explaining various places in the community to see American Flags... Students are being extremely creative with their approach to this How-To Writing.  They have truly become experts on their symbols and have done a fabulous job teaching the rest of us about their learnings!

                               

We ended the week with a first grade sing along of Patriotic songs!  "Fifty Nifty", a song helping us remember the 50 states can be viewed and practiced at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv5VhuUfwC4

 Habitat Frog

We were lucky to have the PTA funded, Habitat From program join us!  They worked with students to explore life cycles and brought in real animals for us to observe.

Mystery Readers

Author's Chair

How-To to be Happy in First Grade!

American Symbols

Students have enjoyed learning about American symbols.  Students have worked in small groups participating in a Cooperative Learning Classroom model, to research given symbols.  Each student has a role within their group and have worked together to research important facts about their assigned symbol.   Students are preparing to be experts about their symbol so they can teach the class! 

What is Cooperative Learning?

Cooperative Learning involves structuring small groups that work together in such a way that each group member's success is dependent on the group's success.

Extensive research has been done on cooperative learning.

On the average:

·      Students who engage in cooperative learning learn significantly more, remember it longer, and develop better critical-thinking skills than their counterparts in traditional lecture classes.

·      Students enjoy cooperative learning so they are actively engaged

·      Students are going to go on to jobs that require teamwork. Cooperative learning helps students develop the skills necessary to work on projects too difficult and complex for any one person to do in a reasonable amount of time. 

·      Cooperative learning processes prepare students to assess outcomes and problem solve

                         

Students have spent the past few weeks examining text features of informational texts.  They have learned how to read a non-fiction book to gather new information.

How-To-Writing (Procedural Writing)

The goal when teaching procedural writing is help students write with their audience in mind providing explicit details and careful sequencing to allow the reader to successfully complete the task.   We kicked off our new writing unit by exploring the text features of procedural texts.  We went outside and blew bubbles…students were extremely motivated and engaged!  When we came back in, with no prior instruction, students were told to write a procedure for blowing a bubble.  Then, I used all 22 procedures in front of the class while attempting to blow a bubble.  I pretended I had never seen a bottle of bubbles before and desperately needed the children’s procedures to assist me.  Children were in hysterics as I attempted to use their procedures and crucial steps were missing.  Some procedures guided me to blow a bubble…without opening the cap!  Some procedures guided me to use the wand…but did not tell me how!  Students took away key factors about procedural writing: the importance of including details, transition words, steps in order, pictures and numbers.  Since then, students have been extensively reading “How-To” texts and have been working on another draft of their “How-To Blow a Bubble” procedures.

Students were very exciting about our new class member, Pandi.  A student motivated our class for How-To writing by teaching us her special art technique of using pastels, colored pencils and tissues.  She taught us how to use to her mediums during a “How-To-Draw Pandi” lesson!

             

                                    

Tall Tales

   Students will be introduced to traditional American tall tales.  Tall tales were often told orally around a campfire in America's pioneering days.  The humorous stories were meant to boost the spirits of the settlers as they faced an inhospitable land. The stories were sometimes, but not always, based on real people and places. The students will explore how exaggeration and hyperbole contribute to the humor of these tall tales, and are an essential element to the genre.  Three friends in our class gave us a Chinese lesson and shared their background knowledge with us about China after he read a Chinese Folktale.

        

                 

                 

Math

Our number system is called base-ten system because each place represents an increasing power of 10 – ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on.  This system allows us to express infinitely large and infinitely small numbers.  A thorough understanding of the base-ten number system is one of the critical building blocks for computational fluency.  Recently your child has learned how to:

·     Notice place value patterns on a hundreds chart

·     Use skip counting to find the total number of objects from collection of equal groups

·     Use DIGI Blocks and Unifix cubes to visually represent 2 digit numbers

   What's Ahead?

·     Use inequality symbols to compare 2-digit numbers using place value

Practice Base 10 at home at abcya.com- http://www.abcya.com/base_ten_fun.htm
 

                          

Fundations

Our focus the last 2 weeks has been on building our knowledge of glued sounds.  A glued sound is one in which the letters carry their own sounds but are difficult to separate- hence they’re “stuck together”.

When students tap words that include a glued sound, they keep either 2 or 3 fingers together and say the sound with 1 tap.  For example to tap the word hang, students tap /h/ (1 tap) and then /ang/ (1 tap- 3 fingers).  Last week our focus was on ing, ong, ang, ung.  This week we focused on ank, ink, unk, onk.

Students had lots of fun writing sentences about Ms. Schlank.   We had a good laugh discussing…what if my name was Frank Hank Schlank?

                                      

 Author's Chair!

Mystery Reader

April Fools Day...who is who???