To help build our fact family skills we played scoot. Each table had a number bond card on it and the students "scooted" to new tables each time they completed a card.
We also worked with partners to use dominos to create fact families.
Links |
This is mostly to catch everyone up on what all has been going on in class. It will mostly be a picture gallery. Enjoy! To help build our fact family skills we played scoot. Each table had a number bond card on it and the students "scooted" to new tables each time they completed a card. We also worked with partners to use dominos to create fact families. On Valentine's Day we based our activities around the book Froggy's First Kiss. We made a Froggy bag to hold our special Valentine's cards.
1 Comment
The past 2 weeks have been so busy. This will just be a short post to let everyone know a little bit of what all we have been up to. I will do a better one this coming Friday.
We have been back in full swing of learning. We spent a lot of time learning about fact families and even started working on a song to help us remember them that is to the tune of "We Are Family". The lyrics are still a bit of a work in progress. We also have been busy writing lots and lots of opinion pieces during our writing time. Friday we had our Valentine's celebration. The kids were all so sweet and kept making extra valentine's for each other throughout the day. I'll put pictures up later in the week. We also read Froggy's First Kiss and made a Froggy bag to hold our special cards and presents from each other.
Our test about the moon is being moved to Monday due to the 100th day of school. Please go over the study guide with your student. I have included the study guide below.
Also, next week students will be bringing home a 2 week moon observation journal. This will be counted as a test grade.
Well folks, we are officially half way through first grade! We have passed day 90! Since we are halfway through the year this week we took our mid-year benchmark tests. There are 5 tests: reading (split over 2 days), writing (split over 2 days), math (also a 2 day test), science, and social studies. This week we took the reading portion. We will finish up our testing next week with the writing, math, science, and social studies. We spent the bulk of this week reviewing and getting ready for everything since the tests cover all of the skills we have learned the first half of the year. In math we took sometime to build on our math strategies by reviewing the doubles strategy and many others. We have also started using a 120 chart during our morning meeting to help build our math skills. Below are some videos that will help explain what we do in class.
In writing we started "squiggle writing" and wrote about if we lived in a snow globe (I got this idea from my friend Hope at http://shenanigansinsecond.blogspot.com/2012/01/love-me-tender-snow-globe-fun.html). The kids did such a great job on this! We used cup lids from our plant unit that were in the science lab to create the globe. We based this writing off of the book The Snow Globe Family. If you click on the book title it takes you to a link at Amazon that has a description of the book. We also started 2 other writing activities. One is for morning work, we call it "squiggle writing" and the other is for one of our daily work on writing, independent writing times. For that one students can pick a picture from a magazine to cut out and write about. I like to try to incorporate a lot of variety into writing so that kids learn about different places and resources they can use to get ideas to write about (we've all experienced the all too familiar writers block). Here is what squiggle writing looks like: We also started a new chapter book for our read aloud. This week we are reading The Little's. I try to read them one chapter book a week and use different series so that they get exposed to new authors and genres. Some of the books we have read that they really enjoyed are: Andrew Lost, Magic Tree House, Junie B. Jones, A-Z Mysteries and Nate the Great.
Clicking on the titles will take you to links in Amazon so that you can read descriptions about the series. I think the absolute favorite has been Andrew Lost, so I am going to try to order more. He is a relatively new author to me but the kids just loved his book! As you can tell we have had a VERY busy week. They have worked so hard, they definitely earned a nice long weekend! And we're back!!!! From what the kids have shared it sounds like everyone enjoyed their break!
Before we left we celebrated our Polar Express Day. I've put in a slide show so everyone can see what all we did. :) We have reviewed phonics skills of magic e and how when he is at the end of a word he hops over to help the vowel to say its name. We also review 3d shapes, ways to make numbers, synonyms and antonyms. During reading group time we got to review and rebuild our reading stamina. The kids have grown so much as readers this year and it is always amazing to think back on how much they have changed since the first day of school! As of today we have been in school 86 days! That means that at the end of next week we will be officially half way through the school year! Crazy how fast it goes by! PS: for some reason the pictures won't upload the right way again, so I'll have to try to fix it over the weekend. :) This week we used a special friend to review our writing skills. We wrote about how we would help the Grinch like Christmas! They came up with some very clever and thoughtful ideas! Watching them write this week I just kept thinking that it's hard to believe that we are pretty much already at Christmas Break! This year is really flying by, I have been doing mid-year reading assessments on all the kids and it is AMAZINNG to see just how much they have grown in these last few months. We use the Fountas and Pinnell system to level all of the students at school. Below is a chart from http://www.heinemann.com/fountasandpinnell/supportingMaterials.aspx that helps explain better where students should be during the year. Our goal for the end of first grade is for every student to be reading on a level I. At this point in the year students should be reading on a level E or F. I know that we have a nice 2 week break coming up but I will be putting together a packet that students can use to review over the break. Also, when reading any books over the break be sure to ask them questions using the page in the front of their F.R.O.G. folder. These questions are helpful in building students reading comprehension. Another helpful thing to review over the break are all of their sight words. You can use online resources such as www.abcya.com and www.starfall.com to review both sight words and phonics skills. Next week we have so many fun things planned. We will have a theme for each day. Monday will be based around snowmen, Tuesday will be all about reindeers, Wednesday we will review inference using an activity from www.theinspiredapple.blogspot.com called Snowy Day Case Files, Thursday we will get ready for Polar Express Day by watching the movie and doing Polar Express themed review activities, and Friday will be the always popular Polar Express Day. Remember to bring you $1.25 to ride the train and whatever item was written on your Polar Express letters.
You can tell it's that time of year where everything and everyone gets busy! Last week we spent a great deal of time in math working on solving word problems using a helpful strategy I found on Pinterest last year. It looks similar to this but I modify it to only have 4 steps. (This example came from www.theteachingthief.blogspot.com).
We will continue working with this strategy and using the next two weeks to review all of our math skills in order to prepare for our middle of the year benchmark testing. As promised last week here is what our finished bat writing looked like: This 9 weeks we are focusing on narrative writing so the main focuses are: ~Title ~Topic sentence ~First, Next, Then, Last at the beginning of each sentence (to show order of events in their writing) ~Closing sentence In math we have been working on subtraction. We have been using number lines, counting cubes, and partner activities to help reinforce subtraction strategies. We are going to continue working on building our subtraction skills Monday and Tuesday so that when we get back from Thanksgiving break we can move into solving word problems. Note about next week: a newsletter was not sent home this week because of only being at school Monday and Tuesday of next week. Students will bring home a newsletter on Tuesday for the week after break. there will not be a spelling pretest next week because Monday and Tuesday we will be doing review activities.A lot has happened since we went on fall break. We have started using number lines, changed our writing from writing informative pieces to now writing narratives (writing to tell a story) and finished our pop rocks writing project. Thank you pinterest for this idea, the kids loved it! With the new Common Core standards for math it is important that first graders know a variety of strategies to use for addition. Over the past few weeks we have worked with the strategies of counting on by 1,2, or 3 and usinga number line to add. We played Number Line SCOOT to help us get familiar with a number line and how to fill in a number line. Scoot is a game where everyone sits in a circle and has a problem card in front of them, each card has a number that corresponds to an answer recording page. The students sit down at a problem card and write the answer on their recording page. After everyone has answered they all "scoot" to the next problem. (The picture is blurry because I tried to catch them "scooting" and it is an activity with a lot of moving around). After we mastered the number line we played a game on the computer and used our number lines to practice adding. The next step was to start learning about the counting on by 1,2, or 3 strategy. For this strategy we needed to use all our number line skills and apply them (our goal for first grade is to not rely on counting using our fingers so we are learning to use tools to help us as we build up our math fluency). We played Counting On Mingle where we were each given a flashcard and had to find other people with cards that had the same strategy as ours (for example: 1 + 5 and 6+1 are botht eh counting on by 1 strategy so they could group together). We also played a game called Spin a Strategy (another amazing pinterest find:) ). The kids loved getting to work with a partner to show off everything they learned about the strategy. We also wrote about if we were bats, but since those are still drying I'll just let you wait for those eagerly over the weekend and will share them next week with you. :)
Have a great weekend! |
MRs. RayHi! My name is Jessica Ray. Archives
October 2018
Categories |