Getting Acquainted and Learning to Work Together

For the first few days of school we played some "interview" type games to get acquainted with each other. This got us up and moving around the room, helped us learn each other's names, what we did over the summer, and our favorite foods, colors, sports, etc. These activities helped to create a feeling of community in our room from day one.

 

We graphed our names to compare how many letters were in each.  This helped us learn how to recognize and spell each other's names.

We practice spelling words with a variety of partners to help get better aquainted and to feel more comfortable working with each other.

 

During journal time the boys and girls confer with partners.  They read their writing to a partner who then asks questions and offers suggestions for improvement.  The two also edit each others journal writing for the conventions of capitalization and punctuation.

As shown in an earlier post, students read with each other at times, sharing favorite books and coaching each other to become better readers.

 

During math students play games with partners and work with each other to solve problems.

 

Our little classroom is really beginning to feel like a team in which everyone is working well together and our year is off to a great beginning!

Get Ready! Get Set! Read!

  Our book boxes are full of "good fit" books now that reading assessments are complete.  These are books that we can read easily in order to practice fluency, expression, and comprehension.  Students also get to pick out one or two books of high interest. These may or may not be at the student's reading level, but are topics they love.  We want to make sure that reading time is very enjoyable!

 

We practice reading to increase stamina and become better readers.  Sometimes we read to a partner. Our partner asks questions, helps with unknown words, and gives us "stars" (things done well) and "wishes" (things they wish were done, or things that need more practice).

 Our reading stamina is increasing each and every day!

 

 

Our "Book-in-a-Bag" program will begin this week.  Students will be taking home four books on Monday to practice during the week.  These will be returned on Friday when a new set of books will be chosen by the students.  Our school participates in the Pizza Hut Book-It program, so, the boys and girls can earn coupons for a free personal pan pizza each month, October through March, if they meet the goal of 4 books read at home each week. We appreciate all of the encouragement and help families give our 1st graders at home.

A New School Year Begins!

We are off to a great start in Mrs. Nelson's first grade classroom!  It has been very warm in our classroom, but we are managing with many trips to the water fountain!
Backpack night was fun as I got to meet parents and siblings as the families helped bring in supplies for their special first grader. There are 16 students in our room made up of 10 boys and 6 girls.

The first few days were filled with activities to help my kiddos get acquainted with one another and learn how to work with a partner.  Of course, we reviewed our school's PBIS expectations.  I was so proud of my "firsties" as they exhibited wonderful behavior and could recite most of the rules. We use Class Dojo, an online classroom management tool, and the boys and girls were very excited to see their own special "avatar."  Even though we have only used it a couple of days, the kiddos are already setting class and personal goals, as well as, looking forward to seeing the results at the end of each day.

I am very excited at the prospects for each and everyone of my special first graders.  I know it is going to be a wonderful year filled with lots of fun, learning, and growth for each child. 

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Expanding Vocabulary Daily

Through all of the reading and writing that goes on each and every day, students are always expanding their vocabulary.  In addition, here are a few of the resources students have right at their fingertips, and some of the activities we use to encourage and practice the learning of new words!

Our Word Wall continues to grow each week.  Students are expected to use this as a resource when reading and writing.

These "Popcorn" words are those words that "pop" up frequently in our writing, but are not yet Word Wall Words.  This bulletin board is another resource in our classroom that students are welcome to use when writing.  

In addition to the above resources, every student has their own personal copy of a "Children's Dictionary" in their desk to use, as well as, an "ABC" booklet containing a list of all of this year's Word Wall Words.   We practice using our dictionaries often just to make sure we don't forget about this valuable resource.  

Having a variety of resources available eliminates a lot of the "Can you help me spell . . .?" requests from students.  We want the boys and girls to become more independent when working. A large part of this is enabling them to know where resources are located, how to use them, and when it is appropriate to use them. 

 Another activity we do is to brainstorm and look for new "exciting" words to take the place of older "tired" words.  We discuss the shades of meaning in the new words as we add them to an anchor chart that is displayed in the room.  Eventually, this chart will be reduced to a notebook size that can be added to each student's writing folder.  This folder is full of reference pages to use during writing.

  

Poetry is such a fun way to introduce new vocabulary.  The boys and girls look forward to our poetry time each day and remind me if I forget!  

As we learn about new topics through math, science, and social studies, we also add new vocabulary words to our ever-expanding list.

As shown in a previous post, our math and language arts vocabulary terms are posted in the room as a visual reminder.  Below, students get "hands-on" practice to create a concrete model to help them further understand those concepts and terms.  (Ex. compare, bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, greater, less than, measure)  The kiddos are to use these terms whenever we talk about math, write about math, or play math games.  

Here students are using connecting cubes to compare lengths.  They have to be able to read and understand the terms on the recording sheet as they write in their results.






























These are just a few of the activities and resources we use to "Expand Vocabulary" each and every day in our classroom! Watch for more as our year progresses!

Our First Full Week of School

It was so good to begin a regular full-day schedule last week.  We are beginning to learn our schedule and work on stamina for reading and writing.  

We are well into our sight word or word wall word practice now.  One activity we did to practice the sight word "as" was to write similes comparing an animal to some other inanimate object.

Before doing any writing, we read the book "Easy as Pie" and discussed the many sayings that were new to the boys and girls.  Then, everyone picked an animal and let their creative "juices" flow!  Here are some examples:

"The dog is (as) brown as the dirt.:

"The cheetah can run as fast as a car."

"The zebra is as striped as a candy cane."

"The snake is green as grass."

 

In writing, we have been working hard to include at least one adjective in our sentences. We also talked about "stretching" out unknown words and underlining those we aren't sure how to spell.  By doing this students can just keep writing down their thoughts without getting hung-up on the spelling.  Of course, it is an expectation that word wall or sight words be spelled correctly if we have introduced them in class.

In math we have been practicing reading or interpreting data, creating graphs, and discussing the graphs.  We use specific math vocabulary words as seen above during writing and discussions.

As a formulative assessment, the boys and girls worked with a partner to sort, graph, interpret, and discuss a baggie of colored 1" wooden cubes.  They then had to formulate a question and write an answer.

We also play many math games during the week to practice counting.  The game pictured below is called "Ordering Numbers."  Students rolled dice and wrote the numbers in order.  To differentiate we used 6, 10, and 12-sided dice and a number line if needed.

To serve as a remembrance for 9-11, a group of Monmouth College students visited our school.  They read a book tittled "America the Beautiful," had the students listen to the song via CD, and had the boys and girls join in for a verse of the song.

We've had a busy last couple of weeks! The boys and girls have been hard workers in spite of the hot weather!