Learning is Fun in Grade One!: 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?