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!

First Grade Round Up

Here's how we've been spending the past week in Year 1. 

1.Smartie Spellers
I've been a little tired of my firsties asking me to spell every. single. word for them. We made up this chart last week to give them some strategies to use instead of asking me. I'd prefer them to try and work out the word as best as they can and move on so that they don't lose their flow of ideas. So far it's working!

2. Author's Purpose
We've been learning about author's purpose the last couple of weeks - just to entertain and inform for the moment, since we are only in our 6th week of the school year. We've compared and sorted books, identified non-fiction text features and story elements and graphed our preferences. I was very surprised that with 14 out of 24 kids being boys that only 6 preferred information books! 

3. Representing Numbers 
We've been rockin with our number unit! The chart below was incomplete - we added number sentences, 20-bead strings and a number line as we learned how to use them to represent numbers. You can pick up the sheet below here in google drive.

4. Digraphs
We've been learning about digraphs the past 4 weeks. Each week we've made a new phonics crown. They are a huge hit! I bought them from The Primary Techie. I also love her Freeze Dance videos (kids LOVE the Gangnam style ones!), Move It and More Flash, Less Cards packs! They make great brain breaks and warm ups. 

5. Spending too much money :(
This week I received a number of packages. Lots of goodies from Really Good Stuff and Lakeshore plus more books to contact from Scholastic!

I'm headed for the couch to watch chick flicks and contact some books. Hopefully your evening is a tad more exciting than mine!

Peek at last week

Last week we went over 2D shapes. I like one activity in the planning given to us through C2C. Students made a triangle and quadrilateral using straws they cut to different lengths and pipe cleaners cut into 5cm pieces. They used sticky tape to attach their shapes to a piece of paper.

 

You can see the pipe cleaners inside the straws. The pipe cleaners bend, creating the shapes. Some students made more than 2 shapes which also worked out well.

Next, they coloured in each shape they made within their larger shape. 

Finally (not shown) they labelled each of the shapes they coloured. Students were able to make pentagons, hexagons, right angled triangles, rectangles, rhombuses and just plain quadrilaterals.  The kids really enjoyed it and since I demonstrated it to the class first, it was a very successful small-group lesson for my first year student teachers to take on. The kids couldn't wait for it to be time for their group to do this activity!

Here's just a random chart....

I teach 'theme' as THE MEssage so we always talk about "The theme, or message, that the author..." Writing it like this helps them remember what 'the theme' means since the letters for 'theme' is spelled in 'THE MEssage'.

Peek at Last Week

We've been comparing and contrasting like crazy lately. We've compared food, clothes etc of traditional Australian Aboriginals with us today in SOSE, characters/settings/plots in English, insects in science and shapes in math. We've used Venn diagrams, comparison matrices and double bubble maps.

 Totally pinterest inspired!

We're finishing up our unit of procedural texts. Here are two charts we made earlier in the unit. 

 

Because I don't have a lot of wall space, I hang a lot of charts up on string going across the room. But sometimes a gust of wind will come in the windows and blow the charts up and they hit the fan... tear! rip! So I fold sticky tape around the edges of the chart and it stops them ripping. 

I'm always too busy during math to take photos, but some of kiddos have had a lot of trouble counting money, so we've worked on that the last week.

   

I've updated my Word Family, Blends and Digraphs pack with about 30 more cards. You can go to your Purchases page to redownload. 

I also made up a Fast Finishers board freebie based on a request. The lady wanted a similar style to my CAFE board cards. You can grab it in Google Docs here.  

I also uploaded a Fall writing craftivity that my class did earlier in the year. You can check it out here:

Oh, we won the Green Gnome for our garden too! :D

Daily 5 Write About Reading

Thanks everyone for your feedback on my Multiplication Madness freebie! I'm glad so many people could use it.

This is the first post in my Daily 5 series - doesn't that sound all fancy! Basically, I'm just going to take some photos and write about what I put in my Daily 5 tubs that I wrote about here (so not that fancy at all!)

You may have read before that I do Write About Reading instead of Work on Writing because I do writing and spelling separately from the Daily 5. When we do the Daily 5, I want my students to really focus on reading. I also wanted to have a set time when they worked on responding to texts we have read as a class and during guided reading. 

Each week, I have some type of response required from each of my 5 guided reading groups. Since I am doing running records this week (a school requirement that we do formal running records each term in order to set individualised reading goals), I am not taking guided reading groups so I have no photos. The responses vary depending on the text, the reading level, our class comprehension focus and the needs of the students in each group. For example, when we worked on retelling as a class focus, my lower groups did a simple BME by drawing pictures, others may do a story board with pictures and sentences and others may do a Story Map to identify the Characters, Setting, Problem and Solution along with the main events.

Most weeks I also have a reading response that I want the whole class to complete. We have been working very hard on our Stereotyping English unit. We've created Character Profiles and compared stereotypical characters to those found in texts such as The Paper Bag Princess and Emily and the Dragon.

So this week, after modelling and shared writing activities, I asked students to compare the dragon or Princess Elizabeth from The Paper Bag Princess to a stereotypical dragon or princess in a Venn diagram. Therefore in the tub this week, I have copies of the text, a Venn diagram sheet and clipboards so students can get comfy around the room (I find it funny that they'll even clip the sheet to the clipboard and go sit at their desk....)

 

They can also use the charts we've created on Prince Ronald from the same text to help them if needed. 

The Character Profile above is based on what we visualise when we think about "Princes".  Below is the same chart (Appearance, Qualities, Thoughts, Actions) for Prince Ronald from the book and the comparison Venn diagram.

 

I also had a question about something I mentioned in a previous post. I said we'd done a Hot Potato Tree Map.  A Hot Potato is just a variant of the Graffiti Wall. Basically I printed out a tree map for each group - one for Dragons, Princes, Princesses, Mum and Dads. The groups had about 2-3 minutes to write anything they could on the tree map. The tree map then rotates around the groups with each group reading through and adding more ideas until they get theirs back (I actually rotated the kids around, but both ways work).

I knew they'd be repeats and spelling mistakes so I collected them up after we went through them and wrote them on coloured paper to put up for future reference (handwriting is not my speciality!). 

I like to use Hot Potato strategy when I introduce a topic to find out what they already know or think (like above) or at the end of the unit to review a topic. You can do it for anything (not just Tree Maps).

Science - Materials and Schema Freebie

Recently, we have been learning about different materials and how they react when left in water over time. 

We made a class journal (thanks to my student teacher for illustrating it) to document our observations of wood, metal, paper,styrofoam and fabric. 

One of the things we have recorded is what we predict will happen to the material once we put it in water. Students journal their observations in their science journal after 1, 3 and 5 days. We are studying each material for 1-2 weeks.

I  stole this idea from somewhere, and have made a chart and schema files for each material as we start to study them. If the chart and schema file is yours, let me know so I can give you credit - I basically copied it! 

Here is an example of one students schema on wood. After learning about wood, each student will fill in another sheet that says 'My learning about wood is....' and add to the file folder below.

Again, this file folder cover and sheet above was 'borrowed' from one I saw on the net (i.e. copied), so if it's yours let me know so I can give you credit. 

I'm hooking up with Tales of Frogs and Cupcakes science and social studies anchor charts (although, mine aren't really science anchor charts....) linky party. Be sure to link up with your fantastic charts!

You can download the 5 file folder covers (left) - one for each material - here. 

If you want the My wood schema is... sheet (in word so you can modify to your needs), download it here.

Remember to vote for me at Circle of Moms. I know it's for the Top 25, but my goal is to make it into the top 30. Please help! You can vote once each day!