Five for Friday {First Week Back}

Hi Friends! How are ya? Did you have a great first week back at school? My kiddos and I had a busy week of review and catch up! We were all a hot.sick.mess during the weeks leading up to Christmas…..so we had to use our first week back to review.review.review and CATCH UP! And by golly, I think we’ve done it!

I’m linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share our faves from this past week.

We skip counted through the week in math! Notice the typo on the 5’s chart? Ugh! Not sure what we were thinking…thank goodness for my eagle-eyed team mate! It’s all fixed scribbled over to say in instead of is now. When you teach syllabication in the morning, and skip counting in the afternoon…..BEWARE….you may end up with big words on your math anchor chart! =)

Simply [rote] skip counting is of days past. Now, our standards call for skip counting sets of objects….the day we worked on counting by 5’s we each traced our hands and lined them up across the carpet to count sets of 5 little fingers! Kiddos loved how long the line was and were utterly amazed when they discovered how many fingers there are in our classroom! After we counted them, 3 students worked together to label each of the hands in order beginning with 5 before I hung them up to use as a reference.

This week, Smart Art began on Thursday. What we were going to do, would take some time….so it just couldn’t wait all the way until Friday.

I absolutely LOVE using the book The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall to teach how the changing seasons effect plants. After reading it and discussing what happened to the apple pie tree during each season, we worked to illustrate what we had learned. As much as I love sharing an awesome book, I love tying in art even more…

On Thursday we worked to cut, glue, and draw details to illustrate winter and spring. On Friday, we flipped our little foldable over to illustrate summer and autumn.

The wonkiness of kids’ work adds character. No patterns were provided. I like seeing their personalities shine through their work. Each kiddo started with a blank sheet of paper and a model projected on the whiteboard as a guide to get started. Though we were all illustrating the seasons, each and every tree, leaf, and apple are unique because they were given creative control of the work they’d produce. Lots of happy smiles were seen among the mess of clips and snips of paper all over the room!

Wanna peek inside? After giving summer and autumn a little time to dry, we opened them up to prep for next week. One of our performance assessments is to observe and record the weather over the course of a week. Last week….seasons. Next week….weather. We’ll use our little foldable to record the weather and relative temperature each morning. On Thursday, during our normal science lesson, we’ll read Gail Gibbons’ Weather Words and illustrate the vocabulary. Lastly, students will illustrate their favorite type of weather!

Creating a display type foldable added a little novelty to our work. Foldables shouldn’t have to always be flat! I love using them, BUT I don’t want my kiddos to get bored with them by continuously using the same kind all the time. They watched me prep this one for them and absolutely couldn’t wait to get their hands on it!

Will your little meteorologists be making observations about the weather soon? Click HERE to grab the mini-pages we’ll be using. Check out some of the books and resources we’ll be using below!




Happy weather watching!

Five for Friday~Routines, Routines... & Making 10

Hi, Friends! How are ya?! Another Five for Friday has rolled around….and we’ve officially survived the first two weeks!!  Whooo hooo! Sit back and stay awhile….check out these 5 happenings from our TODAY!



Routines are taking shape! My little crew of firsties and I are getting to know one another and meeting expectations has become the name of the game!



1 of our classroom expectations is knowing how to use an appropriate voice level. Sometimes you also just need a little space for yourself to get your work completed. With the switch to {round} tables this year, there’s no space for big, rectangular privacy folders. To gain a little privacy students learned to divide their tables into 4 individual spaces by placing their book boxes on the table extending out from the supply caddy set in the middle.



After taking time to learn procedures for showing what we know….students earned their first crack at smart art! Smart art is our weekly reward activity for meeting expectations during Daily 5 throughout the week. Our story this week was about pals, so students worked in pairs and used verbs to tell things that friends or pals do! Turn & talk, reading response and art all rolled into one….=)



Having a classroom library that students are allowed to access for good-fit book choices requires organization. Last weekend, I had my [personal] kids return all of the books back to the library bins because….let’s face it….I was just too exhausted to have the class do it for themselves! This week….however…I knew that it was important to teach this routine and hovered just a bit to ensure each student neatly returned their “good-fit” books back to the correct library bin by matching the sticker or letter on the bin. They did a great job!



I posted this picture earlier today onto the FB page and it’s gotten A LOT of attention! {Thank YOU to all!} We started this lesson by viewing a quick video clip about different ways to make 10 on DiscoveryEducation.com. The title of it was The Making of 10 (Math Monsters). We discussed what the little monsters were doing to create groups of 10 as we watched and then used this little activity to review the week by showing the pattern found in creating the same number different ways.

We worked on 2 or 3 of the little rectangles together and then…..I asked the class to stand and pretended that I couldn’t remember the next combination that would come in the pattern, sent them to talk about it in small groups and to build it using their own set of cubes {for each group}. They were charged with the task of holding up cubes that would be an example of the next combination needed…FIRST….THE FASTEST….and it involved a “clip up” action for getting it done! Engagement, movement, good behavior….all in one!

A little friendly competition makes things fun and interesting too! =)

After working to create the needed combination, the class was called back to the carpet and we completed additional squares together. Students making wise choices were chosen to record the numbers for each part to be joined to create a group of 10. Oh, how wonderfully a firstie will sit in order to get their hands on one of the teacher’s FAVORITE markers!

It took a couple of times to go back and forth before completing the chart and our room was a little rowdy, BUT the kids really enjoyed the lesson and it was a great wrap up to subitizing, spatial patterns, counting in easy ways and counting in hard ways, etc… It was so much fun to watch them challenge each other!

ANNNNNd guess what?! All I did was put the chart together and facilitate the discussion…the kids did EVERYTHING else! Score! ANNNNNNND, little did they know…..as soon as they were off on their way home, the chart was laminated and placed in a bin for math stations next week! No excuses about not knowing what to do because… guess what?! They created it! Extended practice……deepening of understanding…..here we come! You can see the blank poster that was set into stations by visiting the FB page.



Before ending the day, we settled down and settled in to routines for writer’s workshop. Today, we completed the assembly of our folders and began to write across 3 pages for the first time. Because it was our first time, I simply stapled 3 blank pages together. No copies. No wasted ink. 3 blank pages of printer paper. Students used their pencils to draw a line across the page from the middle staple to divide their paper in half. Illustrations went above the line. Words/writing went below the line. We use that same routine in our morning work journals. It saves pages. =)

Reference resources are kept on the prongs that run down the middle. So far, we’ve added our heart maps and a mini-poster to practice the path of motion for forming our letters. Each student also has a personal word wall that is kept in the folder. The pocket on the left houses writings that are still a work in progress. The pocket on the right houses writing that is complete.

I searched all over and couldn’t find green and red coding dots….soooooo, instead we incorporated color coding plain white labels as part of our discussion about the use of our folders! Glad I never found them….

Well, friends…..that was our Friday. There’s been so much happening on the homefront since school started that I’d loved to share! One day that I don’t come home and collapse…we’ll play catch up! Until then, keep visiting…more fun stuff to come! Click the pic below to grab a little freebie for Making 10. Next week….beginning addition!



My favorite thing that has happened so far this year? One of my shy guys walked over and quietly asked…. “Is it ok if I put your name on my heart map?”….{heart melted}. It’s been just 9 days, but……..I think they like me!!!!!

Five for Friday~Measurement Fun

 

Hi, Friends! Did we make it? Is it REALLY Friday? I think this may have been one of the longest weeks in history!  While enduring the changes that come along with securing the campus for testing, we managed to make a little noise and shake things up with some hands-on fun in math. Wanna see what we did?


I couldn’t be one bit prouder of the way my kids rock morning work. Using this time as a quick review and for problem solving has been really helpful in making sure they have a good understanding of skills we’ve learned this year. As promised, with each passing month a gradual release of support has been had in order to foster independence and thinking. We’re beginning to turn into quite the little story tellers {even, in math}!



Early this week, we reviewed what it really means to be an equal sign. We rocked it with hands on learning. No paper on the first day, just our Mimio and unifix cubes and LOTS of chit chatting. Students were split into pairs to work to solve one problem at a time after we had a quick discussion at the carpet. The left and right hands were drawn to help guide students. After presenting a set of numbers on each side of the equals sign, students had to solve in order to prove if the statement was true or false.

The student sitting closest to the green left handprint on the desk tags was responsible for building the number on the left side of the equals sign. The student sitting closest to the red right handprint was responsible for building the number on the right side of the equals sign. After each partner built their tower, they placed them standing next to each other in order to answer ‘true’ or ‘false’. The tower served as their proof! It was a little confusing at first, but after a couple of tries it all clicked and we were off and running. 5 + 5 = 10 was obvious, but they got progressively harder to include problems with 3 addends on one side of the equals sign.



After we got the hang of it, we moved to recording our work by taking a 12 x 18 sheet of construction paper and folding it into fourths. We stapled it twice along the left side and trimmed the top folded edge to form a blank book. Students then worked in pairs to prove statements as either true or false that were listed on the board as I walked around to check for understanding. Build. Illustrate. True or False? That was the gist.

Our standards are changing in math. This is one of the newer concepts that we’re going to be responsible for. It’s been fun doing something new, going a little deeper. Now that we’re working with numbers more, building them, taking them apart, talking about them, justifying our positions and having to provide proof, students are gaining a greater understanding of math symbols and what they truly represent. LOVE!



By Wednesday, we were ready to introduce our skill for the last six weeks of school:  measurement. I try to work in listening and following directions as much as possible. I’m kind of sneaky because it usually takes on the look of directed drawings. To get our little booklets ready for our introduction to measurement, students were each given a booklet that I cut quickly from a folded 12X18 size sheet of construction paper with 4 sheets of printer paper in between. 3 booklets were cut from each stapled set of pages.  Students listened and followed directions to decorate their booklet to look like a pencil and then….



….pulled one {real} pencil from their desk to use both as a measurement tool and writing instrument. They were to walk around the room to find two items that were shorter than their pencil and two items that were longer than their pencil.  We practiced double-checking to make sure our items were lined up correctly, illustrated them and wrote a sentence to describe the length of the item in comparison to the pencil.  Walk around the room, you say? Find items to measure, you say? Yep! They had fun with that!

Here’s a little freebie, if you’d like to do a little pencil measuring of your own! Next week….we’ll be using Jack and the Beanstalk to really get crackin’ at non-standard measurement! Stop by next week to see what we’ll be up to!