Table of Contents
- Conversation Starters
- Math Rotations
- Name Practice
- Our Alphabet
- Dot Day: Making Our Mark with DOTS
- Dot Day: Math with DOTS
- Dot Day: DOT Games
- A Smile for You
Conversation Starters:
- Your class practiced two rounds during your Reading Workshop this week: Read to Self and Work on Writing. What do you do during the rounds of Reading Workshop? What are the expected behaviors for students and teachers during these times? Which did you enjoy choosing first and why?
- Your class practiced and timed saying the alphabet QUICKLY during your Morning Meeting this week. Since there were only 18 kids in the room when you were
planning to say the alphabet, how did you problem solve as a class to say the alphabet? How fast did your class say the alphabet? - During your library visit this week, Mrs. Davis read your class a book that has been nominated for the Show Me Award, Marilyn’s Monster. Tell me about the book and what happened during the read aloud.
Math Rotations: We practiced having math rotations for the first time this week and it was wonderful. The goal of our rotations were to provide a variety of ways for each student to work on both counting and adding. Mrs. Bearden and I chose to provide six learning opportunities for the kids to become stronger mathematicians. Math rotations are one way to provide kids the chance to work in small groups, while also practicing a skill in numerous ways – such as counting and adding. The rotations took place over 2 days, and each first grader completed 3 rotations each day. Ask your first grader which was his or her favorite rotation an why.
Name Practice: As you know, we have worked a lot on learning one another’s names since the beginning of school. For the MOST part, many of the kids are getting the hang of knowing one another’s names in both Room 112 and Room 111. That means there are 39 other names to learn! While we will continue to work on building community and learning the names of other students, we took some time this week to practice recognizing, making and writing our own names. We did this in four specific ways: using Play-Doh to make our names, using our finger to trace our names on Play-Doh, writing our names with pencil and paper, and making our names on our iPads in Notability. That’s a lot of NAME WORK! We will continue working on our names and making sure we are using our BEST handwriting so others can recognize our names on our incredible work.
Our Alphabet: We read numerous alphabet books this week and decided it was time to create our OWN alphabet to hang in our classroom so we could use it to both read and write our letters correctly. After reading the books and talking about letter sounds, each kiddo had a chance to make one (or more!) of the pictures out of construction paper for our own alphabet. But . . . there was one rule – no scissors! Children were only allowed to tear construction paper with their fingers. As you may know, tearing construction paper into tiny pieces for activities such as this, helps to strengthen the fine motor skills of our first graders. Strong fine motor skills will help with many tasks this year, such as handwriting. While I don’t have a finished picture of our alphabet below (sorry!), you will be able to see some of the AMAZING work that took place in creating our classroom alphabet.
Dot Day: Making Our Mark with DOTS: As you already know from your first grader, we celebrated a VERY important day this past week – Dot Day. For a reminder about this awesome day that encourages children to make a mark on their world, click here. To begin the day, we gathered in Room 111 and listened to a video read aloud from the author, Peter Reynolds, read the book, The Dot, to us. After understanding what the day was all about, we sang a song based on the book by Emily Arrow. Next, we went back to our classroom to create some artwork so we could show how we can make OUR MARK on the world. Check out some of our amazing work below.
Dot Day: Math with DOTS: Ater a morning of making our “mark” with artwork, we NEEDED to do math work with DOTS. So . . . we brought out the Skittles and did some work with sorting and data analysis. It is amazing how much you can learn from candy! It was was definitely an engaging activity for every mathematician in the room! Plus, we got to eat our Skittles after the hard work. 🙂
Dot Day: DOT Games: Our special day of dots ended with a few games – that only had dots, of course. 🙂 Some of the games we chose from were: Connect Four, Twister, and Checkers. What a fun way to end the day by building community with friends and learning how to use kind words and work with one another as we played our dot games. Check out the fun we had in the photos below.
A Smile for You: At the end of the busy week, we had a very special visitor come to our classroom, Mrs. Ford. As you may know, Mrs. Ford was a teacher at Robinson many years back and has been an integral part of the success of Kirkwood School District over the years. We had the privilege to listen to the The Dot for the second time that day because we ALL know that books are treasures that can be enjoyed time and time again. It was so much fun to have Mrs. Ford come and each first grader LOVED having a guest reader in our classroom. Thanks for reading our blog this week!
im 4 students 