Halloween

Happy Halloween from your favorite 1st graders! Thank you to those who donated to our Halloween Party with delicious food or crafts. A special thanks to our room mothers for organizing our event and all the parents who helped during the big event. Costumes are on and we're ready for some Trick-or-Treating.

Fuller Meadow really has a one in a "minion" staff!

We'll see your sleepy sugary faces in the morning.

Perfect Plump Pumpkin Alliterations

Our first published piece on the iPads is complete. Students created, wrote and then published an alliteration. Alliterations are sentences that have the same sound repeated at the beginning of many words.

First we used pictionaries to help brainstorm words the start with the beginning sound in our names. We unscrambled funny alliterations on the Smartboard to help us understand that our alliterations must make sense! Students then wrote a sentence to make their own alliterations. After our sentences were complete, students wrote them on sentences strips and made an adorable pumpkin to go along with it.

Wait, we weren't done yet. Next, we used the iPads and illustrated our pictures using one of our favorite apps educreations. Students even independently typed their sentences choosing their color, size and placement. As a class we recorded ourselves reading our sentences. Make sure to watch our final published piece above.

Pen Pal Letters

A very special part of being in our 1st grade classroom is having a penpal!  Ms. Walsh, one of my best teacher friends and I are excited to begin exchanging penpal letters again this year.  This week, students worked hard to complete their introduction letters to their new 1st grade penpal in Chelsea, MA.  Students LOVED this writing project.  1st graders were so engaged in their letters. With a huge smile on one of my 1st grade friends face, he exclaimed, "I'm so into this".

 

Our letters are signed, sealed and delivered!  We're anxiously waiting to hear back.

Go Sox!

Today's lesson plans included a little Red Sox history.  The top poster is from the Red Sox 2004 World Championship and the bottom poster is from their 2007 winning year.  2007 being the year some of these 1st graders were born, which they quickly informed me...yikes.

Check out these old Red Sox faces

Thank you to Mrs. Klipfel and her former 3rd graders for sharing their posters with us. We're starting to add newpaper articles, pictures, and online stories to hopefully make this a trifecta. Be sure to send in your favorite Red Sox articles.

Get those beards ready tonight, Go Sox! 

Word Families

We're like a family...a word family that is.  Word families are groups of words that have the same spelling and sounds at the end of a group of words.  For example: cat, hat, fat and splat are all members of the -at family.  Word families have been helping 1st graders with reading, spelling and phonics. Students worked in groups to brainstorm as many words as they could for different word families.

Students used rhyming dictionaries and pictionaries to add words to their word family lists.  We took our lists and turned them into word family mummies.

Practice hunting and recognizing word families while reading.  Look for those word family chunks!

 

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

  

iHeart iPads

Of course, 1st graders are LOVING the iPads! We have been using the iPads as digital learning tools for so many different learning opportunities.

First, we used it as a white board and practiced writing (with our finger-of course) different letters and numbers we've been learning.

Some other highlights were taking a picture to use as our background and writing our name using multi-colors. We even learned some iPad tricks which take just a little bit of Miss Klipfel magic.

1st graders also learned how to locate and sign into IXL all by themselves.  Now we're ready to explore some more apps!

Skype

We can officially say we have a friend in Texas, well twenty-one friends actually.  As part of the Global Read Aloud project, Klipfel & Kids virtually met another group of 1st graders in Texas.  

We had a wonderful experience skyping together.  First, we got to know about their school and classroom.  Students then shared predictions and asked comprehension questions about our shared story Marty McGuire.  We are all looking forward to another skype date soon.

Klipfel & Kids by the Numbers

Math has been all about numbers. Number bonds, writing numbers, number words, comparing numbers, counting numbers, creating number patterns and number balances have been worked on so far in 1st grade...and it's only October.

Here is a little Klipfel & Kids by the numbers...

One teacher with one magnificent m loving monkey, Mango

Two groups of desks

Three student computers

Five delicious lunch choices

Seven giggly girls

Ten handsome boys

Twelve brownie points to fill a pan

Seventeen silly smiling students

And...

Too many monkeys to count!

We'd love for you to leave a comment with some numbers that represent you.