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).