We are Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving from all your 1st grade friends. There are so many wonderful people and things we are thankful for each and everyday.

I am thankful for my lovable first grade family. Happy Turkey Day!

Best Part of Me

1st graders should be SO proud of their Best Part of Me project! As a class, we read the book The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald. This book is written by real students and served as inspiration to us in Writer's Workshop. 1st graders wrote about their favorite part of themselves, then worked on adding descriptive words to their writing. After our pieces were published, we recorded ourselves reading our very own writing. We had a special screening today and students were so excited to see their published work. Enjoy!

Common Core Standard 4. Describe people, places, things, and events with relevant details, expressing ideas and feelings clearly.
Writing 1.3: Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure
Production and Distribution of Writing 1.6: With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

Storytime

Klipfel and Kids along with Mrs. Thomson's 1st graders had a magical opportunity to skype with Mrs. P today. Mrs. P's Magic Library came to life at Fuller Meadow. You may recognize Mrs. P as actress Kathy Kinney. When she isn't sitting in her library, wearing her fancy clothes and glasses you may have seen her on the TV. Mrs. P provides a wonderful opportunity for teachers from all over to connect with her on Skype in the Classroom.

 Before our visit her elves even sent us fancy bookmarks that look like a movie pass.

Mrs. P began by telling us a secret, "If you can tell a story, then you can write a story." After asking Molly and Sophia about their pets (3 dogs together) , Mrs. P used her imagination to tell an entertaining story with them (and their dogs) in it. "Once in a land that was always orange...".

Mrs. P taught us not to let our imagination get "flabby". She even helped us give it a stretch. Students also had the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about story telling and writing. We look forward to continuing to use our imagination to write stories, poems and songs.

Shapes

1st graders have been busy exploring 2D plane shapes and 3D solid shapes.  Students worked on distinguishing shapes by defining and non defining attributes.  As part of our Math in Focus program we explored, identified and described plane and solid shapes. Students took plane and solid shapes to compose pictures.  Partners worked on using good math vocabulary to discuss how many sides, vertices, edges and faces these shapes have.

Students then took cut outs of plane shapes to compose pictures in their math journals. Students counted the different number of triangles, circle, squares and rectangles in their creative pictures.

You can even make a monkey out of shapes!

Our shape creating fun led us into a great discussion about the 2D and 3D shapes we see at school, at home and all over the world.  Our easy button is really a cylinder but has a face of a circle.  The orange tissue box is a rectangle prism with 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices!

What shapes do you see around you?

Global Read Aloud

For our final Global Read Aloud project, 1st graders illustrated their favorite part from our beloved book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  As a class we began by retelling Edward's journey using our transition words.  Students then used the iPads as a digital tool to create their detailed illustrations. Once illustrations were complete, students typed a sentence describing their favorite part.  We put our illustrations together based on when the events occurred in the story.  Check out our final project created in animoto.

After our animoto video was complete, we tweeted it out to all the other global read aloud participants.  Even though we have finished reading the book, Edward's journey not only changed him but changed us as readers too. As Edward learned to love throughout the story our hearts grew. As Kate DiCamillo wrote and Edward needed to learn, "Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart."

Common Core State Standard RL 1.2 Retells stories including key details and demonstrates understanding of their central message or lesson.  RL 1.7: Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.

Personal Narratives

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.

Part of making our writing even better is including sensory words in our stories.  We visited the leaf covered courtyard 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.

Edward Tulane

As part of the Global Read Aloud Project we have continued to practice our reading comprehension strategies while reading our shared book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  Students have loved traveling with Edward from the bottom of the ocean, to a fisherman's house, into the trash and even on the road with a man and his dog.  We took all our character trait knowledge to write letters from Edward to different characters from the story.  Students did an excellent job putting themselves in Edward's shoes and writing about how he was feeling and thinking.

We have continued to connect with our friends in Texas to share our thinking with one another. We make predictions, ask questions and even make some very strong inferences. Our comprehension skills are improving daily.  We're looking forward to our next Friday skype date!

Common Core Standard R.L 1.9: Compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in stories.   R.L 1.6: Identify who is telling the story at various points in a text.

Reader's Theater

1st graders have been working hard on their reading fluency this month with a delightful Pumpkin Patch Reader's Theater.  We practiced, performed, and then recorded our work.  We even got a little fancy and used a green screen while recording to add a real pumpkin patch to our movie.  Check it out below.

Make sure to be on the look out for these future Hollywood actor and actress.