What a wonderful week we had really stretching ourselves and learners and as teachers to our peers! Here's what we were up to:
During Writer's Workshop we continued to work with our reviews. Our focus this past week was on revisiting introductions...
On Tuesday we spent time focusing closely on capitalization and punctuation. As our first graders have more and more to say, it seems that those basic conventions get a bit lost in the process. Because this is an end-of-year first grade expectation, this will be an ongoing focus for the rest of the year. Here are a couple of our writing partners editing a review written by one of my first graders from last year. They are checking very carefully for missing punctuation and capital letters as well as capital letters where they don't belong. For this editing, we use our special editing pencils!
I encourage you to include writing in your child's weekly homework diet. Writing just a few sentences about the best or worst part of his/her day would offer some great opportunities to practice these skills as well as serve as a conversation starter between you and your child. With this activity, they won't be able to just respond with "nothing" when you ask them what they did in school!
Wednesday was a pretty exciting day during writing workshop. We worked with our partners to give each other writing checkups! I likened this to a trip to the doctor for a physical. After some discussion of this analogy, we worked together to give one of my reviews a writing checkup. After that, the kiddos gave each other writing checkups, letting their "patients" know what they did well and offering our kind suggestions for what they could work on next. We even signed our name Dr. _____________. They really enjoyed this!
Here is Dr. Art writing a prescription for his patient.
During Reader's Workshop this past week we spent a good deal of time with comprehension strategies. Some of our teaching points were:
* Readers think about what is happening in the story and
what might happen next before they start to read a page or part.
* Readers pay attention to the setting , using pictures and
words to watch for where the story is taking place.
We also learned another accuracy strategy...
* Readers think about the kind of word when they come to a tricky word.
and an expanding vocabulary strategy...
* Readers are on the look out for new words to learn.
With this strategy, we didn't just focus on figuring out what the word means and moving on. Instead, we talked about how it's important for us to understand the word well enough that we could explain it to someone else. In addition, we talked about knowing it so well that we begin to USE that word when we talk and write! One of our examples was the word "clustered." I hope some of you will hear your first grader using this word!
In math this week we focused on creating and solving teen story problems using both addition and subtraction. The unknown was in various places in these problems. We had to determine if it was an unknown total or an unknown partner. Here we are working with small groups and showing our group members what strategies we used to come up with our solutions:
And here is one of our friend's solutions:
In science this week we worked with sugar grains again. This time we completed an experiment to see if the temperature of the water would have an effect on how quickly the sugar grains dissolved. Ask your first grader to tell you what happened in his/her experiment.
Finally, we ended our week with Maurice Sendak's poem "March" from his book Chicken Soup with Rice and, of course, enjoyed eating chicken soup with rice together. It was a perfect tummy-warmer for such a chilly day!
Just a reminder: Monday is our trip to see Ivy and Bean. We will eat early in our classrooms that day, and it would really expedite the process if the children brought a lunch to school. While this is not necessary, it would be very helpful. Feel free to choose hot lunch though. We will be out of the building from 11:05-2:00 pm that day.
Thank you so much for all of the coins, dollars and checks that were sent in this week! We'll keep our fingers crossed that we win an ice cream party! If not though, this money will still go toward new books for our classroom library, and what could be better than that?!
Thanks for stopping by our blog!
Michelle Mullen
Mark your calendars:
March 9: Ivy and Bean play at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center
March 10: Book Fair/Cake Walk Event
March 28: Spring Break begins
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