The Very Blue Thingamajig - Visualizing

Tuesday was our first back after our Easter break. I always forget after holidays how good other workers have it by being able to go to the bathroom whenever they want!

Anyway... on Tuesday we reviewed Picturing Penguin while reading The Very Blue Thingamajig by Narelle Oliver. This book is great for teaching about visualising because of the rich descriptive text about the physical characteristics of the very blue thingamajig (as well as being a great text to celebrate difference!).

Before reading, we reviewed Picturing Penguin and then I read the book without showing the pictures. Many students closed their eyes as I was reading to help them see a picture in their mind.

After reading, I displayed the final page that describes what he looks like on the interactive whiteboard. We read through it several times while examining the meanings of some of the vocabulary used to describe his physical characteristics (twisty twirly, ferocious, waxy, tangerine etc), including the mathematical language like odd, even, four lots of two etc.
Each student was then given a piece of paper and as we went through the description one last time, they drew what they pictured the very blue thingamajig looked like based on the description. Here is what they came up with:

Side note, one little girl had a very PINK thingamajig... because pink is cuter, why else?

We also did some work this week on identifying the nouns and adjectives and writing sentences. We'll continue working with it next week. I'm sure many of my Qld readers have also read this book this week... do you have any great ideas to share?




Next week, my school is starting to stream our Year 1s for reading. I've got 24 of the highest readers from across our 6 classes for an hour each day. Has anyone else tried this at their school and have some tips for making it as successful as possible? 

 

Photo Dump

I know that I've been all over the place and quite absent with my blogging for about a year now, I just can't seem to get ahead now that I'm teaching year 1! I don't know how other bloggers are able to blog a few times a week!

Anywho, I have been trying to remember to take photos of what we've been doing and even though I'm a bit sporadic with it, here are some that I haven't shared before.

I updated our whole brain teaching rules for this year. I'll be able to share this file with you once I receive the back up of my hard drive (which I dropped and broke.... and have just paid over $600 to have the data restored from...luckily they were able to retrieve 100% of the files, yippee!!).  

Random charts. I have made a simple editing checklist that my kids use along with the chart when writing. I'll be able to share that too. 

Crafts. 

Adjectives About Me is from this Parts of Speech pack by Amy Lemons.

Cat the Splat Easter craft is from this Splat the Cat Easter pack by Christie at First Grade Fever. Inside the egg book, the kids wrote about some story elements which was a good review of our English unit in Term 1. Some of the kids chose to also make a little Seymour to join Splat - isn't this one cute!

  Guided reading and spelling choices (from Term 1) drawers.

Random photos of the back of my classroom.

If you're in Australia, I hope you are enjoying your Easter break. I'm back to school tomorrow!