Measurement Trees

Our class has been reading and learning about different holidays that happen in December and we have made a few projects to go along with them. We made hand print menorahs when we learned about Hannukah, poinsettias when we learned about Las Posadas, and today we made Christmas trees using rulers to measure the parts of our trees during math. Last week we made the backgrounds for our trees using crayon resist (drawing snowflakes with white crayon on white paper then watching them appear when we painted over them with blue watercolor paint) and today we used our new skills using rulers to measure strips of green paper to the nearest inch for our tree branches (our recent math unit had a focus on learning to measure). We finished the project by decorating our trees to make them unique! These will go home tomorrow.

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Mapping, Mexico, and Poinsettias

First graders have been learning about maps and globes during our science/social studies time since returning from Thanksgiving break and we will continue with the theme after our December break as well. Our class has been blogging with and following (on Twitter) other first grade and kindergarten classes around the world throughout the school year and we have been using our giant USA and world maps on the wall to record and discuss these other places almost daily. This month we moved on to discussing maps and globes more specifically, learning about the cardinal directions and compass rose, what maps are used for, what the seven continents are, and what the major countries on our specific continent are. After the December break we will learn about map keys, how to read maps, what many of the different types of maps are, and we will create a lapbook full of different maps.

In a few months we will do a focused country study on our neighbor to the south, Mexico, so I am taking the opportunity now, during both the mapping unit and the holiday season, to introduce some things about Mexico! Our class is now familiar with the North America, Canada, the USA, and Mexico on a world map, and we have been learning about a special holiday going on right now in Mexico. Christmas is celebrated in Mexico but, before hand (from December 16-24), Mexicans celebrate the holiday Las Posadas, which celebrates the part of the Christmas story in which Mary and Joseph traveled in search of an Inn for Christmas Eve. Our class has been learning about this holiday (as well as other prominent December holidays) and about the poinsettia, which is a plant that originated in Mexico, blooming there each December. This week I brought a poinsettia to school, we read the book The Legend of the Poinsettia retold by Tomie DePaola, and the students each made a poinsettia art project (now hanging on our bulletin board in the hallway). Here are a few photos of our projects!

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Vermont Symphony Orchestra Percussion Trio

Today we had a special assembly at school because UMS had a visit from part of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra! A percussion trio from the VSO taught us about many different percussion instruments and played several short pieces from around the world using these different instruments! We heard percussion music from Africa, the middle east, China, and South America as well as a piece using percussion instruments we are used to seeing in American marching bands. The performance was great and we learned many interesting things about percussion instruments used around the world!

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Blog Buddies

Students in our class have been blogging for about two months now and are having lots of fun with it! To extend our "real world" application of blogs as a way to have online conversations with other people Ms. Barnett's class and our class have now partnered up so that each student has a blog buddy in the class next door! Students started practicing commenting on posts on their buddy's blog last week and their buddies began commenting on theirs. We will continue teaching students about having online conversations through their blogs at school but students are welcome to continue these at home as well! Students know who their buddy is but, if they need a reminder, just send me a note and I will send you their buddy's name!

Nonfiction, hooray!

We are now into our second trimester of first grade and we are making a shift from studying fiction to studying nonfiction during Readers' Workshop and Writers's Workshop. I always find that first graders are very excited about nonfiction, especially when the texts are about animals, and it is always very fun when we dive into this bend of our instruction. This week we have been reading and writing nonfiction and exploring the differences between nonfiction and fiction. 

As a new shift in instruction (as we work to align instruction with the Common Core State Standards) students are now really being asked to find text based evidence to support their thinking as well as to do research and use outside sources of information to support their writing. Today our class started talking about doing research by using nonfiction books and the kid friendly google search engine Kidrex.org to look up information to use in our nonfiction writing. We also started practicing putting the information we found into our own words. Students in our class had a lot of fun looking up facts about the nonfiction topics they had chosen to write about today! Below are a few photos of them working today.

Thankful Turkeys

Last Thursday and Friday our class talked a lot about Thanksgiving, read some fiction and nonfiction books about the holiday, and made turkeys with speech bubbles telling what they were thankful for to go on our hallway bulletin board! Parents, you can check them out when you come in for conferences today and tomorrow! Here are some photos taken while the kids were making their turkeys.

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Ben and Jerry's Field Trip

Today all four first grade classes took a field trip to the Ben and Jerry's Factory in Waterbury to connect our learning about solids and liquids to the way that ice cream is made! We had lots of fun and got to see and hear about the change from liquids to solids in the ice cream making process.

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Guidance Class Update

Click the link below for updates on what our students are working on during guidance class with Mrs. McCleary!

http://umsschoolcounseling.blogspot.com/

Solids and Liquids

Today and tomorrow we are wrapping up our unit on solids and liquids! Here is a padlet we made today to showcase our understanding of the states of matter.

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Ben and Jerry's Trip Chaperone Info

Our first grade field trip to Ben and Jerry's is coming up this Thursday, November 20! If you sent in money to come with us as a chaperone, please meet us in our classroom at 8:45 Thursday morning. We will be leaving school just before 9:00. Looking forward to our trip!

Solids and Liquids

First graders have been spending the last month learning about solids and liquids (and some about gas) to have an introduction to matter and its states! Try asking your child to explain to you what the words solid, liquid, gas, and matter mean. They should all be able to describe these four things now!

During this unit our class explored different solids and learned about their properties. We then explored different liquids and their properties and took time to compare how the properties of solids and liquids are quite different from one another. Yesterday we read the Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, then made our own oobleck by mixing corn starch and water. The kids had fun with this experiment because the oobleck appears to have both properties of a solid and a liquid and it becomes more solid throughout the day. The kids got to play with it a few times throughout the day describing its properties as they did so.

Students made another lapbook for this theme, which is a folder of all the different things they learned throughout the unit. We will wrap up our unit this Thursday with a field trip to the Ben and Jerry's factory in Waterbury where we will get a tour focused on solids and liquids in the ice cream making process!

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Editing Our Writing

It's hard to believe but we are coming to the end of our fist trimester in first grade! We are finishing up different units of study including our writing unit on personal narratives. Our class has been taking some time to learn about the editing process and is using two editing checklists to help us improve some of our finished pieces of writing. We have used the one titled " strategies good editors use" and are moving on to the the "editing checklist II" next. I am posting from my iPad and apologize that the photos are coming out sideways!

Dreambox

Today our class learned about our Dreambox math accounts! Students each have an account where they are able to play math games and, like RAZ kids and their blogs, they may use this at home and at school. Dreambox is a new learning tool at our school so I will be learning much about how it works along with the kids. Today we all explored it together at math time, it seems like fun, and the kids are very excited about it!

To use Dreambox at home go to the top right hand side of this blog where it says "student links," and click "Dreambox math." The kids usernames are their first names and their passwords are their last names, just as with their blogs and RAZ kids. Enjoy!

**I just explored the use of Dreambox through the app (we had been using it on computers and Chromebooks) and discovered that you do have to use a school code. It is 5spm/unionms.**

Twitter

Our class has been using Twitter each afternoon to connect with and learn about other first graders in the USA and Canada (we hope to expand beyond our continent in the future) and yesterday/today we used Twitter to learn about Veteran's Day by checking out and posting to the hashtag #VeteransDay. We have been learning about hashtags, Twitter handles, "tweeting," and replying to tweets, what it is to follow or be followed by others on Twitter, what our online profile is, and more!

If your child has been coming home talking about Twitter and you are hoping to understand more of what it's all about, consider the offering below. The tech integration specialist in the Williston elementary schools will be hosting an online class through CVU Wednesday night to introduce the basics of Twitter!

 http://cvuweb.cvuhs.org/access/#a609

Ben and Jerry's Field Trip

First graders have all been studying solids and liquids this month and on November 20th we will all be going on a field trip to the Ben and Jerry's factory in Waterbury to connect our learning to the ice cream making process! Please be on the lookout for a permission slip coming home today. Student admission for the tour is free and adult admission is $2. Please let me know if you would like to join us!

Twitter and Blogs

This week and last our class has been doing some very exciting new learning! We began using Twitter and blogs, learning how to use social media to connect with and learn about people all over our country and the world!

We have a class twitter account that you are welcome to follow @mrskellysclass (you can also see the tweets we send out by looking at the left side bar on my class blog where we have a Twitter feed) and we are currently following 5 other classes, 4 first grades (one in Illinois, one in California, and two in Canada), and one Kindergarten (in Williston, VT) because that Kindergarten teacher is the one who taught us how to use Twitter in class! I have spent the last week and a half teaching students about what Twitter is and how we can use it to connect with other classes, what a Twitter handle and a hashtag are, what "following" and "posting" are, and how to make concise, quality comments! Now every afternoon right after recess we have "Twitter time" where we project our Twitter account up on the smartboard, read tweets made by the classes we are following, make connections and reply to them, check what tweets we received, and make a new tweet for the day telling the first grade classes who follow us what we are learning! We are using both giant wall maps of the USA and world as well as an interactive Google map to chart the locations of all the different classes we are connecting with. Our class is loving this experience!

We have also started blogging, which kids are loving as well. We have a classroom blog (this one) and have been using it to start learning about what a blog is and what it is used for. One of my favorite ways to introduce blogging to the kids each year is by familiarizing them with this blog participating, as a class, in a quad blog, which we started last week. Our class is partnering with three other classrooms (one other in VT and two in the UK -- England/Wales) to make the quad and over the next few months the four classes will take turns being the "focus class of the week," posting to our blog and receiving/responding to comments from the other three classes. This is wonderful for teaching the kids about making quality posts, quality comments, sustaining a conversation on line, and learning about students in other places! I am also very focused on teaching our class about being good digital citizens by learning about online safety (not giving out personal information), being kind and appropriate because what we say on the internet is fairly permanent, and connecting with others for learning purposes. The kids are seeming to grasp the idea of being digital citizens in an online community very well after just finishing our unit on Community Helpers where we learned much about being citizens in communities. This was a great segue!

After diving deeper into the features of our blog and checking out the blogs of our quad members students in our class started learning about their own individual blogs (which they love!). Our class blog is supported by blogger but the students' blogs are supported by a much simpler, kid friendly forum called KidBlog. All of the students' KidBlog accounts can be found as links on the right hand side of this blog. Kids are encouraged to use them at home and it would be wonderful if family members checked out the blogs and made comments to the students. They are so excited when people comment on their posts! Each week when it is a students' day to share in class it will also be their computer day during literacy block and they will use that time to use both their RAZ kids reading accounts and their KidBlog accounts. Therefore each child will have at least once a week when they will use RAZ and blogs in class but they are encouraged to do more at home as well! After we have practiced blogging on our own for a bit our class will pair up with the class next door to us so that each student can have a blogging buddy. The two students will get to go back and forth reading and commenting on each other's posts each week, giving them a more authentic audience.

I get very excited about technology and using social media in class (especially since the students are just as thrilled by it) and could go on and on (I see that I already have) but I'll stop for now. Below are some photos of us beginning to blog and tweet. Stay tuned for more social media adventures from room 5 (including Skype connections)!

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Firefighters Visit

Today, as part of our unit studying community helpers, we had a visit from two members of the Colchester Volunteer Fire department! They answered lots of questions for us, showed us their gear and how it works, and told us about their jobs and how to become a firefighter! It has been really great meeting and learning so much about different helpers in our community throughout this unit of study. Here are some photos from the fire fighters' visit today.

Burnham Library Trip

Today our class and Ms. Barnett's class took a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library in town as part of our unit studying community helpers! Students got to learn about how libraries and librarians work, learn a little bit of the history of our town library, and read/check out books! Below are some photos from our trip.

Last week we had a visit at school from members of the Colchester Police Department, today we went to the library, and on Monday we will have a visit at school from some of the members of the Colchester Fire Department. We will wrap up our unit studying community helpers on Monday and then move onto a science theme unit studying solids and liquids!

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Writers' Share

This week our class did a writers' share where students from our class paired up with students from Ms. Barnett's class and got to read some of their writing to a buddy! Here are some photos taken of the students who shared in our classroom (the other half of the students shared in the other room).

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Class Party on October 31

Next Friday, October 31, from 2-3pm our class will have our annual fall/Halloween party! Families are welcome to join us at our party and you may bring or send in party snacks as long as they are nut free (and have an ingredients list with them if they are home made). Please see the sign-up genius I emailed out for details on snacks to sign up for and please let me know if you didn't receive the sign-up but would like to. We will do a few fun crafts and have some special treats at our party but please save all costumes at home for trick-or-treating. We hope to see you there!

Writing Coming Home Today

Dear families,

First graders are at a turning point in our first writing unit so today a stack of student writing to date went home in green folders! We will continue to fill our writing folders with the new things we are working on so you can see that work and conferences and for now we hope that you enjoy reading the work that went home today!

Community Helpers

First graders at UMS have been studying a theme unit called Community Helpers over the past few weeks. We have been reading many books about different Community Helpers and listing the different community helpers in categories based on the ways they help the community (such as making a "healthy" category and listing doctors, nurses, vets, EMTs, a "safety" category and listing fire fighters and police, a "learning" category and listing teachers and librarians, etc). Students each interviewed an adult at home about their job, and we have been sharing these in class and discussing how each job helps the community and where they fit into our chart as well. Students each made a folder (we are calling them lap books) to contain the different things they are learning about community helpers throughout the unit including a list of vocabulary we have been using (our words are school, neighborhood, town, job, volunteer, community, contribute, clean, safe, pleasant).

As part of our unit we are meeting some of the different community helpers in our town. Today the two school officers from the Colchester Police Department came to our classroom to teach us about some of the important ways police officers help the community. Next Friday our class will take a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library down the road to learn about libraries and librarians (family members please let me know if you would like to join us!) and we are hoping to have a visit with members of the Colchester Fire Department soon as well. Below you will see a few photos taken during our unit so far!

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Math Workshop and Making 10

Our class has been spending the past week and a half on both getting our math workshop/math stations underway and exploring facts to 10 in different ways. We started the school year with whole group math lessons and a big counting project (see a previous post). We are now transitioning into our math workshop model where we will start each math class with a whole group math meeting (where we will review number sense in different ways) and/or a mini-lesson connected to a new topic. After our whole group meeting the students split into three different groups and begin math stations. The stations will be "teacher," (generally working on an activity directly related to the day's lesson) "technology," (using our chromebooks or iPads to do math games and practice -- this week kids have been using a great iPad app called "wet, dry, try" to practice penmanship of their numbers) and "independent," (which will typically be a partner math game station).

As we begin stations we are also working on exploring facts to 10. We came up with the addition facts that make 10 and charted them in different ways in order to help us become familiar with the facts and notice patterns (such as the "turn around facts" ie -- 8+2, 2+8). The students have also been playing lots of great partners games to reinforce these facts. Here is one great partner game for practicing facts to 10 that you can try easily at home. Take 10 pennies, show them to your partner, have the partner close his/her eyes, and grab some of the pennies (hiding them in your hands or under a cup in front of you). Have your partner open his/her eyes, count how many pennies are still visible, and tell you how many you have hidden by using what he/she knows about our facts to 10 (or using fingers to help at first). You can then let your partner check if he/she was correct. The students in our class are getting very good at this game! The game could work well for other facts too just by changing the number of pennies you start the game with.

Below are some photos of kids working on different "make 10" activities in math stations.

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Conference Sign Up

If you already sent in your parent conference sign up sheet I signed you up for a time on my schedule and tomorrow I will be sending the forms back to you with your conference time highlighted. Please be on the lookout for those. If you have not returned the conference sign up sheet yet, please send it back to school in your child's folder as soon as you are able to. Thank you!

Parent Conferences

Today UMS teachers sent home forms for families to sign up for fall parent-teacher conferences, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday November 24 and 25. Please look for those in your child's green folder today and please let me know if, for whatever reason, you did not receive a new one and I will send another! I schedule conferences as I receive the forms back at school so please return them promptly. Thank you very much!

Volunteer Reading Program

Just a reminder, our first grade volunteer reading program begins on Monday October 13 from 10:30-11:30! We are excited to have volunteers begin reading with us. If you signed up to volunteer and need me to remind you what day you signed up for please let me know. If you did not get to sign up yet but would like to please let me know as well! We love our reading volunteers!

Burnham Library Field Trip

We just scheduled our walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library and I am sending out a "save the date!" Each fall the first grades study Community Helpers as a theme unit. We visit (or have visits from) the fire department, police department, and town librarians as part of our learning about the different jobs in our community. On Friday October 24 our class and Ms. Barnett's class will be taking a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library at 1pm. If you would like to join us it would be wonderful! We could use as many adults as are available to help us walk safely to the library and back. Please email me or send in a note if you are able to join us!

Readers' Workshop and Writers' Workshop

Our class has been working hard in Readers' Workshop and Writers' Workshop each day and I took some great photos to show off some of the things going on!

During Readers' Workshop we begin each day with a mini-lesson (recently we have been learning reading strategies for decoding words as well as learning about the story elements of character, setting, and character traits -- up next: main idea and supporting details), followed by time where students read to themselves (we are practicing building stamina for reading silently for a little bit longer each day), then a literacy center time where students are either partner reading, reading on their RAZ kids online reading accounts, or working on literacy apps on iPads (we will be practicing adding in more center choices such as listening and word work activities one at a time as we go along). We end Readers' Workshop with a group share related to the day's mini-lesson.

During Writers' Workshop we begin each day with a mini-lesson (we are currently learning about writing "small moments" which are personal narratives about things happening in our lives), followed by time for students to work on writing independently, and finally a share time, where students are able to share their work with the class. Yesterday we did a different type of share where everyone partnered up and got to share a piece they have been working on and editing with one partner!

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Open House

Reminder! Tonight, Thursday, from 6:30-7:30 is Open House at UMS! I hope to see you there!

RAZ Kids

Today we started learning about (and practicing with) our RAZ Kids reading accounts in class and the students are really excited to start using them. In order to do this at home kids should go to my blog (this one), click the tab along the top that says "RAZ Kids," then click on the link and type in my username (hkellyg) if prompted to do so, then type in their last name (beginning with an uppercase letter) as a password. When you click the RAZ Kids tab you will find these same instructions. The students will then be taken to a page full of books at their good fit reading level that they can both listen to and read on their own. Kids will each have one day a week where they can read their RAZ Kids books during silent reading in class and they are welcome and encouraged to read them at home as well! They will earn stars for books read which can then be used to build a robot or rocket ship in the RAZ Kids program! I did tell students that this bonus part of the program needs to be saved for use at home and that we will only be doing the reading part here at school. Everyone was very excited about this and we opened up our brand new classroom Chromebooks to get started with this today! Please let me know if you have any questions regarding RAZ Kids and enjoy!

Counting Project

Every September my first grade class does a counting project where we explore counting collections of different things in different ways. We spend several days with kids counting different collections with partners then recording the way they counted. I always love to see how their methods of counting, keeping track, and recording morph and become more efficient over the course of several days as they think up and try out different strategies with their partner. When we begin counting larger collections the kids begin to realize that they need more efficient ways to count and keep track than their original counting by 1 strategy and they start to develop more effective strategies such as grouping and counting by 5s and 10s.

After counting, exploring, discussing, thinking up new ideas, and repeating the process for several days we take on the whole class project of counting all of the unifix cubes in our math area. I always start by telling the class that there are over 1,000 cubes in the bin and we plan out how we could use our grouping strategies to help us count to such a high number. We decided that everyone in our class is good a counting by 10s and 100s so we could use those numbers to help us. The students started by sorting all of the cubes into ziploc bags in groups of 10 (leaving out the few extras that didn't fit into a group). The next day they worked together to create bags of 100 by putting 10 bags of 10 into gallon sized ziploc bags. The kids discovered that they were able to count above 1,000 once we were counting by 100! Once we had the cubes organized into bags of 100 plus the extra 10s and 1s left over we were able to have one of our first place value discussions and learn that we have 1, 769 unifix cubes total!

This is always a great project because it gets kids thinking about efficient ways to count and record their work through exploration with partners. It also gets them thinking about creating a strategy, trying it, modifying it, trying it again, and working toward more efficient strategies. It is one of the ways I like to get the class working on number sense and problem solving early in the school year and the class always loves doing it. Below are photos taken throughout our process (which took place on and off over the course of the last three weeks).

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Class Photos

I always like to get a photo of our class at the beginning of the school year for the kids to look back on at the end of the year. Here they are (a "serious" photo and a "silly photo")!

Apple Project

We have been reviewing tally marks as part of our first math unit in first grade. We have been creating different tally charts to help us practice and our next one will go with an art project we did this afternoon. Each student made a collage apple in either red, green, or yellow, and on Monday we will count up how many of each color were made and then create a tally chart to record the results. These were a lot of fun and will all be hung up for families to see at Open House on October 6! Below are a few photos of kids working on the project today.