Pumpkin Adjectives

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

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

Precious 1st graders were even coming up to our adjective wall to use them in their writing pieces.

They couldn't be making their happy teacher prouder!

Writing Process

It looked like a squiggle but it wasn't a squiggle...

We read the story, It Looked Like Split Milk to get ideas for our own writing pieces. Students were given a squiggle line and created a picture around that squiggle. It is always fun to see what the boys' and girls' creative minds come up with. Students' drawings were unique and interesting. Once we completed our pictures, we wrote a sentence to go with our work. Then, we took our sentences through the whole writing process!   We especially focused on revising our writing to make them even better.  Using green pens we revised to add descriptive words and phrases so our work was more interesting.  We used purple pens to edit our capitals, punctuation and spelling.  The pictionaries really helped us to make sure our spelling was fixed.  1st graders are really turning into true authors.

When our writing was published we recorded our draft sentence and then recorded our revised sentence.  Click on our recordings above and make sure to pay close attention to how student's second sentences are much BETTER than their first . What do you see in the squiggle?

Global Read Aloud

We can officially say we have a friend in Texas, well nineteen friends actually. As part of the Global Read Aloud project, Klipfel & Kids virtually met another group of 1st graders in Texas.  The Global Read Aloud mission is for one book to connect the world. Over the next few weeks we will be reading, doing activities, and working on comprehension skills while reading The Year of Billy Miller by Kevin Henkes. 296,000 students, 5,600 different teachers in more than 60 different countries are already signed up to take part in this global project.

Friday afternoon we had our first skype visit to introduce ourselves and talk about the first few chapters of our shared story, The Year of Billy Miller.  Our Texas friends were surprised to hear about our changing fall leaves and we couldn't believe that is was 90 degrees there on Friday!  

To kick off the project, 1st graders used clues from the title, pictures, and cover to make predictions. Now we're ready to take part in Billy's year and are all looking forward to another skype date soon.