Morning Meeting, Guidance, and a special visit!

Morning Meeting

We always begin our day with Morning Meeting. Each day we greet each other, have sharing time, do an activity, and read our morning message. On Thursday, students revisited an activity that is a familiar favorite: Coseeki! In this activity, one student goes to the hall and we choose a "secret leader" in our circle. They guesser then comes back into the classroom and tries to figure out who is leading the class in the motions we are doing. The leader has to be careful not to change the motion while the guesser is looking! We are getting very good at this activity--the guessers are using their power of observation and the leaders are being strategic about when to change the motion to the guesser doesn't see! 

Guidance

Mrs. McCleary, our school counselor, comes in for Guidance lessons weekly. Currently, the class is working on knowing the difference between tattling and reporting. They played a game on Friday to help distinguish the two. Ask a first grader to explain the difference! Be sure to check out Mrs. McCleary's blog to see the latest news in Guidance and for many great family resources.

Community Helpers

As mentioned in an earlier post, our latest social studies unit is about Community Helpers. We were fortunate to have Officer Jeff Fontaine and Chief Jennifer Morrison visit our classroom on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Hughes' class joined us as well. We had prepared questions for the officers, and our students displayed excellent audience behavior. I wonder how many first graders want to be a police officer when they grow up?

Day 2!

Boys and girls eased right into Day 2 of first grade. Impressive! They were especially engaged and attentive during our Math Workshop. We have yet to implement many of the routines of Math Workshop, but taking it slowly is what will help make it successful in the long run. Students are getting familiar with the Math Meeting part of our math time, which includes reviewing the calendar (date, days of the week, months of the year, etc.) and the number of the day routine (watch for a post on this coming soon!). These activities lead into our math mini-lesson, which is a whole-group teaching time about a skill or concept that will help the entire group of mathematicians further their math skills. Since everyone is coming to first grade with different readiness levels, it's important to differentiate our math work, and this will happen during math station time, which will begin sometime next week. This is the time that I can meet with small groups of students to meet their individual needs. 

Today's math mini-lesson was about a tool that we will be using quite a bit in our Math Workshop--Pattern Blocks. We will use Pattern Blocks to explore several skills--parts of a whole (fractions), comparing attributes, patterning, and symmetry--just to name a few. 

You will learn that I like to use pictures to help tell the story of what we do in first grade. I can't photograph everything, but I hope that throughout this school year this blog helps you get a glimpse into life in first grade...enjoy (and leave comments)!

Students already love our document camera as much as I do. It allows us to project anything that we put under it onto our interactive white board. Today we used it to review the Pattern Block shape names and then to allow a few students to show their ideas for how to use Pattern Blocks (we have a very creative group!). They are brave too--it takes a lot of courage to share ideas in front of the whole group so early in the year!

I love it when students look so happy to be sharing their ideas/thinking!

After we explored Pattern Blocks as a whole group, students were given the choice of working alone or with classmates, at tables or on the floor, to create something. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended our exploration of Pattern Blocks with a "Museum Walk." This is a time when students can look at each other's creations to get ideas from one another and have the opportunity to "show off" their great work!

We have now completed two "Mystery Names of the Day." This is an activity that is part of our SWR time (Spelling, Writing, and Reading), which is a time of the day that we explore spelling, phonics, and word study in general. It's a fun (and meaningful) way to review letters/sounds, putting letters together to form words, vowels vs. consonants, etc. Most importantly, the class seems to enjoy it! :-)

Mrs. McCleary, our School Counselor, is awesome! She stopped by today to say hello and read us a book. She will be in each Thursday morning starting next week for regular Guidance classes. I will post updates about her lessons as the year goes on, but be sure to also check out her blog. It's listed in the UMS/CSD Links tab above. 

 

Guidance Update

I don't think I've introduced Mrs. McCleary's intern, Miss Rocca. She is an intern from UVM who is at UMS on Tuesdays and Fridays and at MBS the other days of the week. She is doing a wonderful job in her role, and she taught the Guidance lesson on Tuesday this week. The focus of our recent Guidance lessons is bullying, and this week's lesson focused on what it means to be a bystander when bullying is happening. Students had lots of insight to offer in the discussion, and most students realized that watching bullying happen without reporting it to an adult is almost as harmful as being the bully. It's important to stand up to bullies and to do our part in reporting when we think bullying is happening.

Four Winds, Guidance, and iPad

I hope you are having a great week! We're busy as always (in a good way) at school. Here's a look at some of what we've been up to on Monday and Tuesday this week...

The Four Winds puppet show--this month's theme is snow. I am always so amazed with how well students retain information from these puppet shows. It's remarkable!

These coffee filter snowflakes were amazing! I think I need to do a quick video tutorial to share with everyone. They were just so gorgeous and so much easier to cut than regular paper. Thanks, Mrs. Gamelin!

So intent on his work!

Beautiful!

Look at those snowflakes!

More gorgeous snowflakes!

Students collected snow (yes, we managed to find some behind our school!) and put it in cups. They then drew a line and predicted how much water would be left when the snow melted. Many were surprised at how little water was in the cup today when they returned to school and checked out their cups. It will be interesting to repeat this experiment when we study solids/liquids. I hope we'll have some fresh fluffy snow by then to use for comparison!

Guidance--we summarized some of the things people can do to "attract" rather than "repel" our friends and everyone chose one of these tips to put on a friendship magnet to bring home. Most didn't make it home today as you will see below. I will encourage students to bring them home tomorrow!

"Be friendly!"

"Be a good sport!"

Careful artists...quality work takes time! :-)

These were left on the easel after school...I think everyone liked how they look together!

SWR--I found another great app to use for working with word families (Word Wizard). Students love the iPad and we made this a whole group activity by putting it under the document camera and projecting it onto the Smartboard. We have some more tech-savvy ways of sharing the iPad in the works. Stay tuned! Also, I know a lot of great apps but am always looking for more. Feel free to send any recommendations to me!

We are spending some time this week reviewing strategies to help when you're stuck on a word in reading. We have some great new beanie baby animals to use as props to help remember the strategies (thank you, Kaleb's grandmother!). The strategies reviewed today and tomorrow are pictured below.

Guidance Update

Mrs. McCleary's Guidance lesson was a perfect connection to our current science unit about magnets. Today, Mrs. McCleary helped students think about how people can be like magnets--we can either "attract" or "repel" people by what we say and how we act. Students really seemed to connect with this analogy and came up with a great list of ways we can "attract" friends to us and not "repel" them! 

The lesson started with a funny book, How to Lose All Your Friends

Students' ideas for attracting friends.