Holiday Party

Today we played winter dice games in math, read some holiday favorites during read aloud, and had a party to celebrate the holidays and our school break, which starts tomorrow! I also took a photo of each students posing as a gift in a box and we turned them into ornaments! I am including a slideshow of these photos, as well as some from our party, below! Have a wonderful, safe, happy holiday break!

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Poinsettias

This month our class started a social studies theme unit about mapping and, this week, we tied it to both our learning about different December Holidays as well as some upcoming learning about Mexico (in the spring first graders do a country study where we will focus on Mexico). Through our study of maps and globes, our class has spent time talking about our continent, North America, and the three large countries on it (USA, Canada, Mexico). We learned that Poinsettias originate from Mexico and bloom in December, making them a popular plant in people's celebrations of Christmas and Las Posadas (a Mexican holiday celebrated each night from December 16 until Christmas). We read books about Las Posadas, as well as one called The Legend of the Poinsettia, and created a poinsettia art project to hang on the wall outside our classroom. Here are some photos of the kids working on this project!

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Music Assemblies

Both yesterday and today UMS had whole school music assemblies. Yesterday the Colchester High School choir came to school and performed a wonderful range of different songs for us, including a few holiday favorites that we all got to sing along to! This morning we had our annual whole-school holiday sing-along where everyone sang songs the students have been learning in music class, which relate to the many different December holidays we have been reading about in class! Below are a few photos from the two assemblies.

Programming Apps for Kids

Today our class learned a bit about apps that teach kids a bit about computer code, or giving certain commands to the computer to make a program do what you want it to do. This is tied to an initiative aimed at exposing K-12 students to computer science and I hope to learn more and be able to teach/share some more about it! There are some great apps for exposing kids at our grade level to programming, one of which we tried today. Some of these are Move the Turtle (paid), Bee-bot (paid), Daisy the Dinosaur (free), and Kodable (free), which is the one we tried in class today. There is also a website with programming games for kids called, http://www.tynker.com/hour-of-code/. The students in our class really enjoyed trying Kodable, learning how to program the character to move through a maze on the ipad screen. Give these games a try at home and I hope to do more with them in class as well!

Measurement Trees

Throughout December we have been learning about different December holidays through read-aloud books as well as some fun projects. During Hanukkah we read books to learn about the holiday and also learned to play dreidel as a math activity. Currently, in Mexico (a country we will study later this year), the holiday of Las Posadas is going on. We are reading some books about this holiday and will be making a poinsettia art project to go along with it (stay tuned for photos). Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year's Day are coming up and we will be reading and doing some projects to go along with those December (and January 1) holidays as well. If I have missed a December holiday that you celebrate at home please feel welcome to send me an email and I would be happy to include it with the other holidays we are learning about! kellyh@csdvt.org

One of the main topics of our December math unit has been measurement so our class tied learning about measurement to reading about holidays and created a measurement Christmas tree! Students started by learning a bit about crayon resist to make backgrounds. They drew snow with white crayon on white paper then painted over it with blue allowing the white crayon drawings to pop out! The kids then practiced using rulers to measure different sized strips of green paper to create the tree. They each chose their own way of decorating their trees (or leaving them plain) as our finishing touch. This was a very fun, festive way to practice measuring with rulers! Below is a slideshow from this project.

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Exploring Math Apps

Our class has been using ipads quite a lot this school year! Lately we have been exploring different math apps on the iPads. We have been working to determine which math apps are good quality apps for first grade learning and which are not good ones for us. As part of the new Common Core state standards, students are learning to give evidence and proof for their thinking. To show our evidence proving that an app is or isn't a good one for us to use in class, our class developed a set of criteria for "good apps." We decided that good apps have the following four qualities. They must be easy to use, allow us to practice first grade math skills, check our answers, and they must be fun. After we explored a bit and developed our criteria, students worked with partners to find apps that fit the criteria. We have now been using these apps during some of our math periods to practice skills we are learning! Some of the apps we liked best (and decided were good quality) are Math Bingo, Hungry Fish, Math Puppy, Amazing Coins, AUM Addion, and Monster Squeeze (which is part of our Everyday Math program).

Flynn Theater Permission Slip Reminder

I just wanted to remind everyone that the permission slips for our first grade trip to the Flynn Theater (which parents received at conferences) are due by this Friday, December 6. The trip is in January but the permission slip along with the $8 ticket fee are due by this Friday so that everything can be processed for all four first grade classes in time. Please let me know right away if you need a new permission slip. Thank you!

Oobleck

As one of our last activities with solids and liquids, our class made and experimented with oobleck today! We started by reading Bartholomew and the Oobleck, which is one of Dr. Seuss' wonderful books about a thick, sticky, liquid substance that falls from the sky as a new type of weather! After reading it we made our own oobleck by mixing corn starch with water to create a liquid substance that also seems to have some properties of a solid! Students had the chance to explore the oobleck at different times during the day, observing how it seemed, at times, like a liquid, and at times, like a solid! Below are some photos of us exploring the properties of oobleck!

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Solids and Liquids Padlet

Our class wrapped up our Solids and Liquids science theme today! Kids are bringing home their lapbooks, which are folders full of learning and activities they did during the unit. Our final product as a class was the padlet below. Each student thought of a solid or liquid and explained to me how they know it is a solid or liquid, then we typed it into this padlet! At home, ask your child to name a solid, a liquid, and a gas, and how they know. They can all explain the meaning of the words solid, liquid, gas, and matter now!

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Extra Math and Sight Word Practice Through the Blog!

I have had some questions about practicing math skills and sight words online, at home, since RAZ Kids and the kids' blogs are available from home for kids to practice reading and writing. Today I updated the math and Fry word tabs at the top bar of my blog so that you are better able to practice these other skills at home!

The Fry Words tab provides links for interactive practice of first grade sight words. Memorizing sight words is an important part of learning to read and students would benefit from the opportunity to practice this both at school and at home.

Teachers at our school use the Everyday Math as a guideline for K-2 math instruction. I created a tab at the top of my blog with a link to the student login for the Everyday Math website. Once students/parent log in you will have access to games, practice, and information corresponding to each unit of study in first grade math. The other math tab at the top of my blog leads to many different math practice and math game links.

If you are looking for additional ways to practice first grade skills at home, please click on the tabs along the top of my blog and have a look at what is there! There are links to many different resources you may find useful.

Parent Conferences Are Next Week!

Parent-teacher conferences are right around the corner! Find out more, including why they are important and how you can get the most of them, in today's Spotlight article:
http://csdspotlight.org/2013/11/18/why-are-parent-teacher-conferences-important/

Community Helpers

First graders have finished our theme unit on Community Helpers! During this unit we learned the meaning of "community," and how people in the community do many different jobs to help each other and to keep the community a safe, healthy, and pleasant place to be! Students met police officers and fire fighters at school and did a walking field trip to meet librarians at the Burnham Library down the road. Students also interviewed someone at home about their job, then shared the interview in class, so that the class could learn about many more of the community helpers in our area. Finally students picked a job they think they might like to do when they grow up and wrote how the job would help their community. Students in our class made a "lapbook" (a folder that opens like a book and fits on their lap) to keep some of the projects they worked on during this unit and they will be bringing those home today and tomorrow. Our class also created an iMovie where the students recorded what job they would like to have when they grow up and how it would help the community! The iMovie has been posted to YouTube and can be seen there as well as through the link below.

Community Helpers iMovie

First graders have now moved on to a theme unit studying solids and liquids. More to come on that soon!

Quality Blog Comments

Now that students have begun blogging with pen pals from our partner class in Essex, I want to post a reminder about quality commenting. When we began learning to blog our class watched this video about making quality blog comments, then made a poster about what makes a quality blog comment. We refer to the poster several times each week as we work on blogging, so the kids are getting very good at writing quality blog comments! If you are helping your child blog with their pen pal at home (or comment on friends' blogs in our class), you can refer to these same tips!

Tips for writing a quality blog comment:

1. Give a specific compliment
2. Add new information (about what the blogger posted)
3. Make a connection
4. Ask a question
5. Always proofread your comment before publishing/submitting!

Blogging with Pen Pals -- New Directions

Due to a log-in snafu, I had to change the way we access our pen pals' blogs. It is a little more round-about than I was hoping for, but it works! Please read these new directions if you would like to help your child blog with their pen pal at home!

Directions: Have your child click on their blog link on the right side bar of my blog, then sign in with their last name as the password (they are used to doing this part). Now, have your child click the part that says, "Mrs. Kelly's Class," at the very top of the blog. On the new page that pops up, scroll down to where it says "Blogroll" on the right and click the link that says "Mrs. P's Class." When her classroom blog pops up have your child click on his/her pen pal's name to leave comments.

Unfortunately we have to do these extra steps (and it is not as easy as just going to her blog webpage and clicking the partner's name) because the students in our class have to be logged in to Kid Blog in order to read the posts left by the other class. I am teaching the students in our class how to do this so hopefully it will become second nature soon!

Blogging with Pen Pals

This week our class started blogging with pen pals in Mrs. P's class in Essex, which is one of the classes involved in our Quad Blog project (see an earlier post for more information on the Quad Blog)! Students in our class and students in Mrs. P's class all have their own Kid Blogs and have been practicing using them for about a month now. The list of student blogs for our class can be found on the right side bar of this blog. Just click on your child's name, read their posts, and have fun leaving comments!

This week Mrs. P and I launched our blog pen pal exchange! Students in our two classes were paired up, our classes met through Skype so that students could meet their partner, then the students began blogging to one another as pen pals. We are learning to do this in class but it would be wonderful if kids blogged with their pen pals at home too! Below is a list of the names of partners, in case your child needs a reminder (since these are very new partnerships).

Blog pen pals partnerships:

Sydney and Amina
Dylan and Cadel
Torren and Christopher
Maura, Hannah, and Emma
Damian and Evan
Garrett, Longshore, and Gage
Rishon and Ira
Vito and Isaac
Laila and Izzy
Nabeeha and Bella
Lily and Jade
Parker and Joe
Mackenzie and Katie
Mustafa and Liam
Melanie and Mirabelle
Trevor and Rory
Jaylee and Sarah
Grant and Tegan
Zoe and Keaton

Halloween

Yesterday was a very exciting day at school! The Colchester High School drama department will be putting on the play "The Wizard of Oz" in two weeks at the high school (Nov 14-16) and yesterday morning some of the cast came to UMS in costume to perform some of the songs from the play for us! In the afternoon our class had our annual harvest party where many family members came to join us in making some festive crafts and eating fun, festive treats! Thank you so much to all of the family members who came to join us and help organize and support our party!

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4 Winds

Today our class had our first 4 Winds lesson of the year! 4 Winds is a wonderful science and nature program run by parent volunteers and our class is fortunate enough to have two parents teaching 4 Winds in our class this year! Today's lesson focused on leaves as part of the food chain and started with a puppet show followed by explorations and sorting of leaves both in our classroom and out on the playground. We got very excited about the activities and I forgot to take photos, so unfortunately I have none to post. I will try to have my camera at the ready for our next 4 Winds lesson (we plan to have about one each month). Thank you Jenn and Bradley for teaching our 4 Winds lessons this year!

Fire Fighters' Visit to First Grade

Today members of the Colchester Center Fire Department came to school to teach about fire safety! Ms. Barnett's class and ours met the fire fighters during the afternoon and were able to learn more about this important type of community helper and review some of what we learned during fire safety week. We also watched one of the fire fighters put on his bunker gear, learned about the gear and we got the chance to go explore one of the fire trucks out in front of our school building!

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Burnham Library Field Trip

Yesterday both our class and Ms. Barnett's class took a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library down the street from school as part of our theme unit on Community Helpers. We learned about the library and about the things librarians can help us learn and do at the library! Student who already have library cards with the Burnham checked out books at the end of our visit. If your child does not have a library card with our town library, but would like one, you are welcome to send me a note and I will send home a registration card so you can sign up for one (I took some registration cards back to school with us yesterday) or you can make a visit to the Burnham Library just up the street from school!

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Sight Words

My last post detailed our recent practice with decoding strategies in reading. Another important component to reading in first grade is memorizing sight words. In first grade, students learn the first 100 words on the Fry Sight Word List. This is a list of the most commonly read words in the English language, many of which cannot be sounded out. Because these words often cannot be sounded out, yet are seen so frequently in the books students read, it is very helpful for the words to be memorized. One of the links at the top of my blog will direct you to a list of the 100 sight words students are expected to learn to read during first grade, if you would like to practice these at home. A page listing these same words also went home in the packet given out at curriculum night, if you prefer to use that list.

Reading Strategies

For the past two weeks our class has been focused on learning reading strategies to help decode (or figure out) unfamiliar words while reading. We have a reading strategy bulletin board in our classroom with eight decoding strategies posted and space to the left of them where we will add in strategies for reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and vocabulary expansion as the year goes on and we become stronger readers! You can see our eight decoding strategies and the bulletin board in the photos below. You can ask your child what each of these strategies means and he or she should be able to tell you. We have been practicing using these strategies during reading mini-lessons, silent reading, and in reading groups at school so you may find it helpful to refer to the same strategies when helping your child read at home! Here are the eight strategies:

Eagle Eye- look at the picture to help figure out the word

Lips the Fish- get your mouth ready to make the first sound in the word

Stretchy Snake- stretch out the sounds in the word slowly then put them together to make the word

Skippy Frog- skip the unfamiliar word, finish the sentence, think of what would make sense, then re-read the sentence adding the word in

Chunky Monkey- look for familiar word chunks (like -an, -it, etc) inside of a bigger word

Detective Kangaroo- look to see if you have already seen the word in the book you are reading and try to remember it

Tryin' Lion- if what you read didn't make sense, try again.

Flippy Dolphin- if the word didn't sound right, try flipping the vowel sound (flipping from a short vowel sound to a long vowel sound or vice versa)

Try these out at home! The kids have found that they often use more than one strategy at a time, such as using lips the fish to get the first sound of a word, then stretchy snake to stretch out the rest.

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RAZ Kids Password Change

I just wanted to let families know that I changed the login passwords for RAZ Kids so that they are now the same as the login passwords for students' Kid Blogs. Passwords for both are now the student's last name (starting with an uppercase letter) so that they will be easier to remember. Students in our class have begun using their blogs and will soon learn to use RAZ kids too. If you know how to use the website and would like to show them (or if they have an older sibling who knows how to show them) you are welcome to begin! RAZ Kids can be accessed through a tab at the top of this blog and the Kid Blogs can be accessed from the right sidebar of this blog.

Community Helpers

This week first graders began a social studies theme unit called Community Helpers! We have been discussing what the word "community" means, what different jobs people do in our community, and how the workers doing these jobs help the community. Coincidentally this week was also Fire Safety Week, so we spent a lot of our theme time learning about fire fighters and fire safety. Today, at the end of our discussion about fire safety, kids in our class made Dalmation fire hats/crowns as a fun, Friday afternoon activity. Kids are also bringing home worksheets about fire safety at home. These are one way that kids and families can make a plan for what to do in a fire emergency at home. Later this month first grade classes hope to take a walking field trip to the fire station down the street from our school to continue learning about fire safety and how fire fighters are important community helpers. Below are some photos of the kids making their hats!

This afternoon our new Colchester Chief of Police and Officer Fontaine (our school's DARE officer) came to school to talk to first graders about how police officers are community helpers in our town! We hope meet and learn about lots of different community helpers during our unit and we are off to a great start.

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Kid Blogs are up!

This afternoon our class got to try out using their Kid Blogs for the first time. Kid blog is an app that you can download for free on your ipad, or you can access your child's Kid Blog by visiting my blog on your computer, ipad, or wherever you have the internet. You will notice a sidebar on the right of my blog with a list of all student names in our class. Simply click on your child's name and he/she can log in to write a post and you can read what he/she wrote and leave a comment! Each child's password is their last name (several students told me that theirs didn't work today and I reminded them that their last name begins with an uppercase letter so please remind them of that if logging in at home!) and, should you need it, the class username is mrskellysclass-19, though the blogs should be all set without it. Today we practiced typing our passwords and logging in. Some students had time to try writing a post, too. You are welcome to blog with your child at home through their Kid Blog (these are very easy to access from my blog home page) and kids will have begin having more opportunities to blog in class as well once we set up a blogging routine!

Quad Blogging -- Learning to Make Quality Comments

As we have continued our Quad Blog experience, our class has begun to focus on making quality comments to others' blog posts. We watched the great Youtube video below and then discussed what makes for a "quality comment." After our discussion we tried our hand at making a few quality comments to Mrs. Darling's Class blog (the class in our Quad who is this week's "spotlight class"). If you'd like you can have a look at the comments we made by checking out her blog. Learning to write quality posts and quality comments will help our students prepare for successfully blogging on their own as we will soon be launching our Kid Blogs in class!

Video on writing quality comments

Mrs. Darling's class blog - England

Making 10

This week during math we focused quite a bit on making the number 10. We created different visual representations paired with our number sentences to show the different facts to 10. As you will see in some of the photos below, some number sentences are arranged with either the missing number or the sum in different positions. It is important for students to see that, with addition, the order of numbers in a number sentence can be rearranged without changing the sum. It is also helpful for students to work with number sentences both beginning and ending with the sum to reinforce the idea that the sum can come on either side of the equation (for example, 10=4+6, 4+6=10). We also spent time discussing what we call "turn around facts" this week and practiced identifying the turn around facts for each number sentence we created. (turn around facts may also be known as the commutative property of addition, an example being 4+6 and 6+4). Tomorrow we will discuss how we have created balanced equations, balancing the numbers across the equals sign (6+4=10 is balanced because it has 10 on each side of the = sign).

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Writer's Workshop

In an earlier post I mentioned how reading, writing, and math blocks in first grade follow a general "workshop model," where teachers begin by teaching a whole group a "mini-lesson," then students have a practice time where they work on skills learned in the mini lesson (individually, in pairs, or in groups) while the teacher confers with students, then the group generally comes back together for a "share" at the end of the lesson where we review the teaching point and students discuss the work they did. I wanted to included some photos taken during Writers' Workshop in our classroom recently so that you can see some of what we have been doing. Recent lessons have included using our writing folders/materials, using "spacemen" to make spaces between words, remembering where to write capital vs. lowercase letters, remembering periods at the ends of sentences, writing a "small moment" (personal narrative) story across several pages, and building stamina for independent work time. 

 

Quad Blogging

Our class has begun an exciting project called Quad Blogging! To gear up for creating our own student blogs this school year we are trying something new -- the Quad Blog. Quad Blogging is a great project that connects classrooms and students around the world via blogs so that we can see what others are doing and practice posting and commenting. This summer my friend Mrs. Pariseau (a first grade teacher in Essex) and I signed up for a "Quad Blog" together, and we were grouped with two other first grade classrooms (to make our quad), one in England, and one in Wales! For three months (October, November, December) the four of our classes will take turns reading each other's classroom blog posts and leaving comments. This will both help us to learn more about students our age in other parts of the world and will help us learn how to write blog posts, comment on other's blog posts, and reply to comments left for us! Our four classes will rotate being the "spotlight" class for the week, meaning that during our week "in the spotlight" we will focus on posting new photos and information while the other three classes read and comment on our posts. On weeks when we are not the spotlight class we will focus on reading posts written by the class who is "in the spotlight" and leaving quality comments for them! Below are the blog web addresses for the other three classes in our quad, if you would like to have a look!

Mrs. Pariseau's class, Essex VT

Mrs. Darling's class, England UK

Mrs. Thomas' class, Wales UK

After we get under way with Quad Blogging Mrs. Pariseau and I have the goal of having our students become blog pen pals (once the students have learned to post, comment, and have set up their own Kid Blogs)! Students in my class last year blogged each week as a kind of online journaling (to practice writing skills but also 21st Century technology skills) and they loved it! This year Mrs. P and I plan to add the element of having our students blog with specific first grade pen pals to give our students. This will give our students a specific and regular audience to have in mind when posting and a regular partner to practice commenting with. Mrs. P and I are hoping that this will make blogging this year even more fun and dynamic than in the past!

Stay tuned for more information on our Quad Blogging, Kid blogs, and blogging with pen pals.

All About Us

In first grade, we have six science and social studies theme units of study which are: weather, solids and liquids, community helpers, mapping, places in our world (a country study of Mexico), and a life cycles unit where we hatch chicks. We like to kick off the year with a mini-theme called All About Me where we read, write, discuss, and create projects around the topic of ourselves, friendships, and how we are alike, different, and special. We hope to be about finished with these projects by this Thursday so that we have a number of great things to show off at Open House Thursday evening! Below are two slide shows of some of these projects. The first shows kids working on a couple of different All About Me projects, and the second shows photos of our process making self portraits. The self portraits are one of my favorite projects we do in first grade and will hang on our classroom wall all year. We begin by reading a book called, The Colors of Us by Karen Katz and tie into different activities we have done such as math graphs of hair and eye color, and other projects where we have discussed what we look like and how we are similar and different from other people around us. The kids pick a paint color (from the set of Crayola's Multicultural Paints) that they think looks most like their skin tone, then use mirrors to decide on their face shape, hair color, and eye color, and create a collage self portrait over a number of days. These always turn out beautifully and make our classroom feel warmer and more "like us" when they are hung up on the wall! The second slideshow below shows the process and the finished portraits and everyone coming to Open House will be able to see them in person!

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Here are our portraits all hung on the wall on one side of our classroom!

Here we are making our portraits!

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Jobs and Rules

As part of the Responsive Classroom approach to building classroom climate and community we spend time each September practicing expectations and creating rules and jobs for our classroom to help carry us successfully throughout the year. Having the students share in creating our rules and jobs helps them to understand the purpose and importance of having these in our classroom, and helps the students to take ownership of the management and care of our space, our materials, and each other throughout the year. In my previous post about hopes and dreams I described how our discussion of hopes and dreams for first grade led into our discussion of the school rules (discussing how following the rules helps create an environment where we can all achieve our hopes and dreams). We created three posters, one for each school rule, giving examples of what they look and sound like inside of our classroom (the school rules are Be Safe, Be Kind, and Do Your Best). This week we moved on to a discussion of classroom jobs and how we all do different, important jobs to help make our classroom a clean, safe, organized place to learn. The students chose the following jobs: pencil sharpener, # of the day recorder, line leader, messenger, snack drink helper, calendar/weather recorder, chair stacker, floor checker, lunch name tag mover, lights helper, book checker, table washer, and substitute. Below are two photos, one of the rules posters we created, and one of our job chart.

Guidance

Every Tuesday Mrs. McCleary, our school counselor, comes to our class to teach a guidance lesson. So far in first grade lessons have focused on listening without interrupting (you can ask your child about "the volcano mouth"), personal space, and tattling vs. reporting (you can ask your child about the story of the tattle tongue). A newsletter giving an update about guidance lessons went home a few days ago and if you would like to see more about what is happening in guidance lessons or what services are available through guidance, click on the tab at the top of my blog titled "UMS/CSD links," then click "Student Services," then "Guidance." Below are some photos from this week's lesson on tattling vs. reporting.

Counting Project Finale

Today we completed our big counting project! Throughout the last two weeks students practiced counting many different collections of objects exploring different ways to count and adapting their counting and recording strategies as they went along. This week we worked together as a whole class to decide how to count a collection of over 1,000 unifix cubes (see my previous post about this project)! Today we finished our project, by arriving at the final answer of, "just how many unifix cubes do we have in our classroom?" The answer turned out to be 1,744! Today during math we started with our groups of 100 (created yesterday) and counted them until we knew that we had 1,700. We have been discussing place value a little bit each day at the beginning of our math block when we find many ways to make "the number of the day," so, during a whole class discussion, we used what we know about place value to add the extra 4 groups of 10 and 4 single cubes left over from our previous days' counting to reach 1,744. Wow! The students were very excited to realize that, by using grouping and organizing, they were able to count to such large number of cubes! Below are two photos of our final result (the photo with the class shows, from left to right, a group of 1 thousand, a group of 7 hundreds, a group of 4 tens, and a group of 4 ones bagged by their quantity).

Readers' Workshop

In our first grade classroom, reading, writing, and math blocks will all follow a general "workshop model." What this looks like is that the whole class will start by meeting together for a "mini-lesson" on a teaching point for that day's reading, writing, or math, the students will then move out into the classroom to do some sort of independent practice related to the lesson, then the whole class will come back together at the end of the block for a share, connecting what they learned and practiced back to the teaching point. During the beginning of the school year we focused our reading time on learning the set up of our classroom library care, practicing book care and how to respect other readers, what it looks and sounds like to read quietly to ourselves, etc. This week we began putting the pieces together and really started to practice what Readers' Workshop will look like in first grade. Students in our class practiced choosing books, using book boxes to store the books they are working with, and reading "good fit" books at their independent reading levels. They also practiced reading silently to themselves, respecting other readers, re-reading, and began building stamina for silent reading a few minutes at a time. Readers' Workshop will evolve throughout the year as students build independence and stamina and as they learn do do many different literacy activities, including reading to themselves, reading to partners, word work, writing, listening to reading at a listening center, reading with the RAZ Kids internet reading program (there is a tab for this at the top of my blog and you are welcome to try it out with your child at home ahead of time), and even blogging! Below are some photos of our class beginning to practice the routine of Readers' Workshop.

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Counting Project - Starting on The Big Set!

The counting project continues! Now that students in our class have had many opportunities to count different sets of objects in different ways we have moved on to our class project: deciding how to count our class set of unifix cubes (we have over 1,000). We began by pulling out our two large tubs of unifix cubes and having a discussion about different ways we could count them all. We decided, after all of our other counting work, that grouping and organizing before we count would help us to count more quickly, keep track of our counting, and give us a quick way to check our answer if we need to. The class decided on grouping unifix cubes in 10s, since we all know how to count by 10. Students set to work creating sets of 10 cubes, then putting each group into a small ziploc bag. Some of our students decided that we have several hundred cubes all together, so, after grouping all of our cubes in bags of 10, we had to decide how to proceed! Since we decided that only some of us know how to count by 10 beyond 100, we needed to choose another way to group. After discussion, students realized that they know how to count by 100 and that we could easily make groups of 100 by putting 10 small bags of 10 into a large bag. Yesterday students worked with partners to create groups of 100 in this way. Today during math time we will decide what to do next! Here are some photos of our process.

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