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.