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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Continuing Our Counting Project

Here in room 5 we have been moving forward with our big counting project. This week as partners continue counting sets of objects and recording their counting, we are discussing grouping. So far we explored different types of grouping and decided which were the most useful when it came to counting the groups. Students made important discoveries, learning that grouping by number is more effective than grouping by color, each group has to contain the same number of items, and we need to group items in a way that we know how to count (grouping by 5 or 10, rather than a grouping we are unfamiliar counting). Through this discovery project students have developed their thinking about how to organize and count large sets of objects effectively and efficiently in a short time! It is exciting to see how they help each other to try new strategies and, through discussion and exploration, develop more successful methods of counting and keeping track of their work! Below are a number of great photos of students at work. If you look at the photos from the first day of our counting project, then compare them to these photos from the last few days, you will see the developing organizational strategies students are using to help them count.

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Hopes and Dreams

This week our class has been reading, writing, and discussing hopes and dreams. We discussed different hopes and dreams (or goals) that people might have and which ones would be good goals to set for school this year (dreams that I can help them achieve in the classroom during first grade). Some of the first grade hopes and dreams chosen in our class were to learn to read, to do hard math work, to learn to use computers and ipads, to become writers, to tie shoes, and many more! After picking hopes and dreams, our class discussed rules and how having a set of rules helps us to be safe, have fun, and also to reach our hopes and dreams. For example, if my hope and dream is to get better at math, rules of working kindly with a partner, using quiet voices in the classroom, taking care of math materials, etc would help me to achieve that goal! Below are photos both of students acting out what their hope and dream is, and photos of us working to define our school/classroom rules.

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Counting Project

Students in room 5 have been working hard at learning to be successful work partners during math time! Below are more photos of kids in our class practicing partner work while playing a math game yesterday.

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Today our class began our big September counting project. I did this project with my class last year and it was a lot of fun and made for some wonderful hands-on learning through discovery. Part of why I love it so much is that I get to talk students through their thinking as they problem solve with partners, then watch and support their powerful "ah-ha!" moments as we move through our discovery! Today we began by my asking the students questions like, "why do we count," and "what are some things we could count?" Students then began working with partners to count different things in our classroom (books in a basket, a bucket full of pattern blocks, a bin of crayons, etc) and to record their counting on a clipboard. Today, as the first day in the project, I did not tell the students how to count or how to record their work but rather watched students work and asked them questions to guide their thinking. As they worked together I would ask questions such as, "how are you choosing to count these things," "how are you keeping track of your counting," "what could you do if you lost count," "how could you check your answer," "how are you recording what you counted?" The way that students are able to try a counting strategy they generate, answer my questions to explain their thinking, realize where they are getting stuck, then devise a way to modify their counting/recording strategy makes for wonderful discovery of effective ways to count a set of objects and to reason through a problem. In the following days students will have more opportunities to count collections of objects, refine counting strategies, learn from what other students are trying, and find effective ways to count, record, and keep track of their counting. Our final project will be problem solving "the best way" to count our entire class collection of unifix cubes (we have over 1,000!). Last year my students loved doing this project! I will post more along the way and you may also look at last year's project in my archived posts from last September. Below are photos of our first day working on the project.

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Math Partners

Yesterday during math, students in our class worked with partners for the first time this year. They did a wonderful job reviewing turn taking, using materials safely, and working successfully with an academic work partner while they reviewed the math skills of counting and working with coins! Below are photos from this work time with a few other photos from the day mixed in.

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