Recess Running Program

Starting this week at recess on Tuesdays and Thursdays first and second graders at UMS have the fun and healthy opportunity to participate in a running fitness challenge! There are four large signs on our playground, labeled 1-4, set up so that when students run around the playground and touch each number in order four times they have run a mile! A recess duty teacher holds foot-shaped punch cards for each child to record how many laps they have run. After running a mile and receiving four hole punches students receive a little plastic foot charm with a bracelet to hang it on. Students collect these feet and after running 5 miles they receive a "5 mile medal" charm for their bracelet. If students reach 20 miles they receive a special rubber bracelet that reads "Mileage Club!" The children have all been very excited about this program and the majority of them chose to run a mile at recess both on Tuesday and on Thursday of this week! Running at recess will be a choice every Tuesday and Thursday weather permitting and is such a fun way to excercise! Here are a couple photos of kids with the "feet" they earned. I will post more photos of the program soon!

Readers' Workshop

Readers' Workshop is well under way in our first grade classroom and I wanted to take a moment to share about it. Each day Readers' Workshop begins with a focus lesson where the class learns something new. At this point in the year lessons are focused on topics such as how to pick out "good fit books," how to use our classroom library, how to read silently and read quietly with a partner, how to choose a reading spot in the classroom, how to use a book box (for student choice books) and book bag (for good fit books picked by the teacher). After the short focus lesson students have time to practice independently reading to self, reading to a partner, and practicing the skill taught in the focus lesson. The third and final component to Readers' Workshop is a share time. The class comes back together and students have a chance to share what they practiced related to the focus lesson. For example today's focus lesson focused on how to pick a good reading spot in the classroom. Our share time gave students an opportunity to tell the group how they picked a successful spot and what they did there to make it a successful choice during silent reading. Below are some photos of the kids in action during Readers' Workshop on a few different days.

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Guidance

Every Tuesday morning Mrs. McCleary, our school guidance counselor, comes to teach a lesson in our classroom! She has been teaching us about important social skills for the beginning of first grade such as tattling versus reporting (reporting is when something is unsafe or someone might get hurt), interrupting, and personal space. If you click on the tab that says "UMS/CSD links" at the top of my blog you will be taken to a page with links for other teacher blogs. One of those links is for Mrs. McCleary's blog. Below are a few photos taken during guidance lessons in our room.

Self Portraits

During the first six weeks of school at UMS students are spending lots of time learning about themselves and each other as we all build classroom community, develop rules, jobs, and hopes and dreams together. One of our favorite September activities in first grade is the creation of self portraits. We have been reading books, singing songs, and doing activities to celebrate how we are alike, different, and how we all are special. We have been working hard with paint, paper collage, scissors, and glue to create beautiful portraits of ourselves over the last three weeks. These will all be hung up in the classroom for everyone to see at Open House in October! Below are some photos of our process. Enjoy!

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Counting Project

As part of math workshop this September our class has been doing lots and lots of counting. We made a long list of all the things we could count in our classroom and started counting them and recording our results in pairs. We did lots of great math thinking as the children discovered that counting large quantities by 1 could take a very long time and could get very frustrating if they lost count! Pairs moved from counting by 1 to grouping items they counted and practicing counting by 5s and 10s. We had many great discussions about ways to count and record, how to keep track of our counting, how to check our answers, and how to work on counting with a partner. After many days of counting lots of different items both in our classroom and out on the playground we decided that we were going to try counting all of our unifix cubes as a class (and we have Lots of them!). This project took us several days but we learned a lot! We used ziploc bags to make groups of 10 cubes, then decided to put groups of 10 ziploc bags into plastic grocery bags (to make groups of 100 cubes). The class did a fantastic job of working together, grouping, bagging, and checking their answers until we were ready to do a final count. We ended up with 17 grocery bags of 100, 4 ziploc bags of 10, and 1 extra unifix cubes giving us a grand total of 1,741 unifix cubes! The class was very excited when we reached our final answer. Here are some photos of our process!

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Constitution Day

Monday September 17 was Constitution Day. This is great timing in our school year because each September we spend lots of time talking about school rules and why we need rules. On Monday Ms. Barnes' class led us in a Constitution Day assembly and the children learned that the Constitution is like a set of rules for our whole country!

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Word Study

We have been working on word study every morning in class, starting last week. We have been reviewing consonant and vowel sounds, introducing sight words, singing songs, playing games, making little books for sight words, and working in penmanship books practicing writing the letters we review in word study. We will add many more word study activities as the year goes on. So far we have reviewed sight words, "I," "a," "can," "the," and "see." We have reviewed consonants s, t, and b, and are working on the short "a" vowel, focusing this week on the "-at" chunk. Below you will see some photos of kids working in their penmanship books and working on sight word poems, as well as a photo of our Word Wall, where we post the sight words we are learning and reviewing!

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Hopes and Dreams

Over the past week our class has been working on developing hopes and dreams for the school year. We read books about characters who have big dreams and high hopes and work hard to achieve their goals. We also spent time creating lists of dreams that we might have both for school and our lives outside of school. Each student came up with one hope and dream for this school year and we are working on putting them all into a book to show at Open House! This week we are discussing how our school and classroom rules can help us to achieve our hopes and dreams (if a classmate has the hope and dream of becoming a better reader then following rules like "use a quiet voice" and "help others" could help that friend to meet their goal). The wonderful hopes and dreams generated in our class include becoming a better reader, learning to do harder math, learning to use the computer and ipad in class, learning to hatch chicks (already looking forward to May!), learning to do homework, making new friends, reading more books, and getting better at PE skills. Below are photos of kids showing what their hopes and dreams are!

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Guided Discovery of the Bus

On Friday our class had a Guided Discovery of the school bus with Mrs. McCleary, our school counselor. We reviewed bus safety, both when riding the bus and walking near a bus, then took a short bus ride to practice. If you click on the tab that says, "UMS Links" at the top of the blog, then click the link for Student Services and Guidance you will be able to see information about this from Mrs. McCleary as well as some photos!

First Week of School!

Hi Everyone, I moved classrooms over the summer and am having some trouble finding my camera cord, so please forgive the delay in photos posted to the blog! I bought a back-up camera cord and here come the photos! Please remember to send in the signed blog photo permission slip so that I can post photos of our everyone in our class. Below are slide shows of some things we did during our first week of school. There are some photos of the children exploring classroom math, drawing, and choice time materials, photos of us playing outside, and some photos of students writing pages for our first class book of the year! Enjoy.

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