We began our fiction unit during Reader's Workshop last week. The firsties have been reading traditional tales, fantasy and realistic fiction books. We began the unit by looking at the characteristics of both fiction and nonfiction books. We compared the two using a "hoola hoop" Venn Diagram. Each student took a turn reading a saying and placing it in our diagram!
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As we continue our "Collecting and Examining Life" unit in Science, we have been having lots of visitors in class. We began our unit discovering that Brine Shrimp are living! Then last week we had some crickets come to class. We carefully studied and examined our crickets with a scientist's eye! We noticed lots of things about our crickets. They have "spiky hairs" on their legs, they have paired body parts and they have two pointy things coming off the back of their body. We drew pictures and wrote scientist notes about our observations! We can't wait until our fish arrive!
The first graders also watched the "Austin's Butterfly" video to help them to see how important and valuable peer feedback can be. They watched the video and talked about what they saw and how we could use this in our classroom. We are currently working on looking at our friends writing and giving them specific feedback for improvements. They are all doing a great job! We have been spending a great deal of time reflecting on our work lately. We have talked about always giving our best and making sure that we have good details and colors in our pictures and words. We used a basic 4 star rubric to begin to look at our own work critically. The students took one of their writing pieces and compared it to the provided examples in order to determine how they would rate their work. They really enjoyed this process and it helped them to see and reflect upon how they could make their pieces even better! We have the 1-4 star examples posted in our room for students to reference. Encourage your firstie to do 4 star work at home too!
We learned basic programming skills while helping Beebots robots move from place to place on a programming board. The kids had a great time working together while learning a new skill.
We started our first Science Unit, Collecting and Examining Life this past week. We talked about what scientists do and then we put those skills to use! We looked at two different substances to try to determine which one was living. We then placed our two substances in salt water and waited to see what would happen. On Friday, we looked back at our substances and discovered little "things" moving around in the water. After using our "proscope" microscope we discovered that this living thing looked like it had a tail, moved fast through the water and was very tiny. After recording our findings in our science notebooks, we discovered that these living things were brine shrimp! We can't wait for our crickets to arrive soon so we can put our new skills to use again.
Room 112 first graders spent some time thinking about reading goals this week. We each picked a "goal" book that we would like to be able to read. We then had a discussion about what we need to go to reach that goal. For example, read for 15 minutes at home and 15 minutes at school, or read every day. We also talked about using our reading workshop "independent" reading time wisely. Our class has talked a great deal about "real" reading and what it looks like as compared to "fake" reading. We are getting much better at using this time wisely! To help us understand more about setting realistic goals, we talked about a runner who may decide that he/she wants to run a marathon. We discussed setting realistic goals along the way just as a runner might...starting with a mile, then a 5K, then a 10K, etc. This helped when we picked books that were too big of a jump from our current reading abilities. Ask your child about his/her goal!
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