We are busy now working hard to finish our iReady diagnostics and I am assessing reading levels. All of the kids have been working so hard and have definitely earned their break!
We have been so busy since Halloween! In math we have been adding three numbers using our make a ten and doubles strategies to help us, learning about place value with ones, tens and hundreds and also comparing numbers using <, >, and =. The video below is a song and dance we use to help us review comparing numbers. We are busy now working hard to finish our iReady diagnostics and I am assessing reading levels. All of the kids have been working so hard and have definitely earned their break! This week and last week we read about reindeer! Our story this week was Olive the Other Reindeer. Next week we will use stories to help us review skills we have learned so far this year. Skills we have learned include making predictions, inferring using illustrations, comparing and contrasting using two stories, and using the text to answer comprehension questions.
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It has been a busy 2 weeks! We have been using bats and pumpkins to help us review science, reading and writing skills. One of our favorite brain breaks was doing the moves along with the song Vowel Bat! Check out the video below to do the Vowel Bat song at home. We have also been reviewing and learning about nouns. We use the noun song to help us remember that nouns are a person, place or thing. We add animal when we use our anchor chart though ;). We make a lot of anchor charts throughout the year. These are so helpful in giving us something to look at and reference as we progress throughout the year. This is the noun anchor chart we have started. The video below is our noun song. Ask your student to show you the moves that go along with the noun song below! We also had Halloween and Book Character day AND Red Ribbon Week...phew! It has been a fun and super busy week! For Halloween we did a lot of fun review activities. One of my favorites is the Candy Corn Bandit (thank you Abby Mullins)! We use predictions and inference to answer clues to find where someone hid our candy corn in the school. We write about the bandit and what we experience and then create him or her to go along with our writing. For Halloween math we did Math Or Treat! We worked in groups to complete addition and subtraction and word problems. When everyone in the group answered all the questions correctly each group member got a piece of candy. To conclude the day, we went to the library and used Google Expedition interactive goggles to visit outer space and see the planets, sun and moon. This week was jam packed! We worked so hard to get our work finished after we got back from our unexpected long weekend. One of our favorite parts of the day is our chapter book read aloud time. This week we started a new chapter book series: The Magic Tree House! We are really enjoying learning about Dinosaurs with Annie and her brother Jack. The video below is a "book trailer" showing various books in the series. In math we continued building our number sense by learning some more games. One of our favorites is Make a Ten Match. To play you get a deck of cards and remove the K, Q, and J. Then place all the cards face down in rows of four. Take turns flipping over two cards and if they equal 10 you made a match! Another way you could play to help build math skills would be to have them laid out four in a row face down and then flip two over. If you can tell how much they equal together you get to keep them! This is a great game to play to help build beginning addition skills. In reading we spent a lot of time discussing characters and used this to help build our writing skills too. We brainstormed characters we like and characters we can write about. The picture shows the anchor chart we use to help us if we need ideas. The video is our parts of a story song.
At the beginning of the year we spend a lot of time learning about our classmates. One activity we did last week helped us learn how kind words spread to help fill other peoples "buckets". We read the book How Full Is Your Bucket and then practiced saying kind things to our classmates. To show how those kind words spread and stick we dipped into our bucket (that was full of glitter) and saw how it stuck to our hand and our classmates hands. This week we spent a lot of time building our reading stamina. This is such an important skill because we will have a lot of independent reading time this year and we are already almost half way to our goal of reading for 20 minutes! In math we spent time reviewing and building our number sense by subitizing! With this we are also building our math vocabulary and talking through how we see and make numbers, This will build our addition and subtraction skills as well. We all read a lot of books this week! What were some of your students favorite books they read at home or at school?
We had a great first week of first grade! We read lots of books, did a scavenger hunt, made crafts, and learned a lot about each other! There is so much that could be shared so I am including a gallery of photos for you to enjoy with your student! I'm also including a copy of our newsletter. If you go to the parent link section of the blog you can find a copy of our newsletter. It was such a busy and fun week! We also learned a few energizers that we can do to help energize our brain between lessons. I have included one below that they can show you at home :) Have a great weekend! I love using songs and music to help build students skills. This week we have learned a lot of new songs. The friends of ten song and what makes a sentence are 2 that we sing E-V-E-R-Y single day. For the sentence song you will have to get your student to teach you the words but it is to the tune of the Hannah Montana theme song (I know I'm throwing it back a bit here but they seem to like it). When they teach it to you make sure to ask them to show you the moves too! (Note: the song we sing doesn't last the entire length of Hannah Montana's music.) The friends of ten song doesn't have background music but with as much as we sing that I'm sure they can teach it to you LOL! We have started learning a song to share where we are from. Another skill we have started learning about is verbs. We have a verb song that we use to help us remember that verbs are things we do. I've also introduced them to school house rock, because, well it's a classic and they thought it was a comic book so they paid very close attention. It was exciting when the School House rock song mention nouns and the kids all made the connection that they already learned about that! I love when they see how things work together! I wanted to take some time this week to share with you a glimpse into our morning. Our mornings are a very busy but very productive time in our day. We start with breakfast and morning centers. During this time students are allowed to choose from math, reading, phonics, and writing activities that build on skills we are learning and help review skills we have already learned. It is amazing how much work they get in all before 8:30 in the morning and they don't even realize that they are reviewing and learning! After morning centers we have our morning meeting. At morning meeting we start with a greeting so that we can tell all of our classmates good morning. After the greeting we review with a morning message. The message on this particular morning included a question that led to our sorting of characters and settings using the hula hoops. After morning message we review our calendar skills and patterns then we get to do a GoNoodle activity. If you aren't familiar with GoNoodle (www.gonoodle.com) it is a free online program that has physical activities that students can participate in. We rotate between coordination building activities and dance and even some yoga. Once all of our morning routines are finished we move into writing. At this point in the year we do a whole group lesson to learn about writing strong sentences and review skills needed for writing. After the lesson we have journal writing for 7-10 minutes. When the writing timer goes off we have a time for class authors to share their writing. I hope you have enjoyed a glimpse into our morning. All of this takes us up to around 9:30. We have a very busy morning but we also have a lot of fun! This week we also learned about characters and settings. We read the story If You Take A Mouse to School. After reading we talked about the character (the mouse) and the setting (the school). We talked about how we are in a school so if we were the story we are missing the mouse! We made the mouse and wrote about what we thought the mouse might do if he came to school with us. These turned out AWESOME! I've included a youtube link to a video read aloud of the story. We have had an absolutely AMAZING start to our year! You truly have some amazing kids and I am so enjoying our time together learning each day! This week we have been hard at work building reading stamina. Our goal is to read for 20 minutes uninterrupted at a time and we are already at 7 minutes! We have also been hard at work learning about nouns. We love,love, love the Noun Song (I've included the video below) and the song/video Vowel Bat (also found below).
We have also worked a lot this week on our writing. We have been building our writing stamina too and we can write without stopping for 10 minutes! That is a HUGE HUGE HUGE achievement for first graders at this point in the year! We use several books to help us get ideas and learn about being great writers. A few of our favorites have been Ralph Tells a Story and Rocket Writes a Story. We have even started sharing our writing with our classmates and are enjoying hearing what everyone has worked so hard on writing. One skill that we are still going to spend time focusing on is handwriting. We are taking time to learn that good writers use capitals, spaces, punctuation and neat handwriting.
There is so much more that we have done so far but we will share more later. Just wanted to give an update to let you see a glimpse into our day so far. Welcome back! This year is going to be a wonderful year and I am so excited about everything that we have planned for this school year! I wanted to take a minute and share a virtual tour of our room so that you have a better feel for the place your child will spend their next 180 days. Our first stop is the morning meeting area. This is where we will start and end each school day. We will have a morning message to do together everyday and do our calendar time here. Calendar is an important part of our day because it allows us to cover a lot of our math skills and build on what we learn during our math time. Our morning meeting is a special time of our day because it is when we get to build our classroom community. Morning meeting is possibly my favorite time of the day and I can't wait to get to share it with your student this year! Next, we will stop at the small group table. This is the area where we will have our guided reading and guided math lessons. This is the place where I will work with your student in a small group of peers to provide instruction on their specific level and better meet their individual needs as learners. Below is a table, this is one of our areas where students can choose to work during independent math and reading or can work with a small group of classmates on projects we will do throughout the year. It is front of our math materials station (which I will also include a closer up picture of below). I try to keep our classroom materials organized to make it easier for students to locate things we need independently. I feel that teaching children to be independent is helpful in aiding them in learning to take more responsibility and ownership of their learning and our classroom environment. It is also fun to see how excited they get when a visitor comes in the room and they are able to show them where everything is. I like them to know that this room is not just mine, but it is our room and we all have a role in helping keep it clean and take care of not only the room but also the materials in the room. A final area I will share with you today is our classroom library. This is a very active part of our room and I try to keep it. The numbered bins on top are where your student will keep their books and a notebook to use during read to self and independent writing time. The baskets below containing all the books are sorted based on the reading level of the book. Your student will have a reading level that is used based on Fontas and Pinnell reading level and is how students find books that are a good fit for them. Back to school is one of the most exciting times of the year for students, parents and teachers! Feel free to comment below and share what you are the most excited about for this school year!
This week we started adding the sounds in motion to our morning meeting. This a wonderful way to help build students understanding of phonics so we have started doing it everyday. I've included the video that we use below. We have also started working with fact families. To introduce them we had some classmates model how you can use 3 numbers to make 4 different number sentences. As the week went on we learned some other fun fact family games. We also used our morning message to explore ways to show, tell, and make different numbers.
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MRs. RayHi! My name is Jessica Ray. Archives
October 2018
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