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!