Pumpkin Adjectives

1st graders practiced their knowledge of adjectives or words that describe nouns, by making adorable Adjective Pumpkins.  Students chose an adjective from the back table and then created a pumpkin that matched that describing word.

Students really grasped the concept of an adjective with this activity...thank you Halloween!

 1st graders were even coming up to our adjective wall to use them in their writing pieces.  They couldn't be making their teacher more proud!

Tweet Tweet

Klipfel & Kids has entered the twitter world and boy did we start with a home run.  On Friday, we tweeted out our Red Sox beard picture and look what happened...

The official Boston Red Sox and 1st baseman, Mike Napoli, retweeted our picture!  We're taking this retweet as an official nomination by the Red Sox Organization as the Best Red Sox Nation Teacher and Class.

Not only will Klipfel & Kids be learning the twitter lingo but we will be using twitter as a way to tweet globally with authors, illustrators, other classrooms and maybe the occasional Boston sports team.  Please feel free to check us out on twitter: @missklipfel.

In other exciting news, Kate Messner, author of Marty McGuire posted a video answering questions from Global Read Aloud readers.  After skyping with our friends in Texas on Friday, we checked out Kate's videos and were shocked to hear her answer our question.

Check out Kate's Video here, our school name and class is mentioned in the first few minutes.  1st graders loved hearing Kate talk about revising and editing her work.  We revise and edit too, just like real authors!

Writer's Workshop

Personal Narratives are stories we write about ourselves. Rather than writing large watermelon narratives we have been focusing our ideas into "seed" stories.  1st graders thought of one small moment in their long 6 or 7 years old lives to write a seed story about. We shared these seeds on a sticky note and added them to our class watermelon.

Students took their idea and wrote a detailed story using transition words to show the sequence of events. Like all good writers, we began with detailed pictures. Next, we added sentences and used a green pen to revise and edit our work.  All circled words are ones we need to look up in a pictionary. We also checked for capitals, periods and ways to make our writing better.

Our first drafts always have lots of edits and revisions.

Part of making our writing even better is including sensory words in our stories. Yesterday, we visited the leaf covered courtyard, with Mrs. Higgin's class, so students could record what they were seeing, hearing, feeling, and touching. Each student had a flipbook to fill in words or pictures about the senses they were experiencing on that brisk fall morning.

From all of us 1st grade writers in Room 116, 

GO SOX!

Playoff beards are growing