Persevering and more

Last week Mrs. Brady shared this clip of a young girl who just learned to ride her bike.  Her dad asked her if she had any advice for others.  Her message is a powerful one.  We used this clip to talk about how to create positive self talk when we approach something hard.  Here is our poster of the positive things we can say to ourselves.  Watch the video with your child and ask them what positive message they will say in their head when trying something new or hard!

 

This week she read us the book Salt in His Shoes.  This true story about Michael Jordan is all about trying hard, practicing, not giving up and having patience.








During You Skills we talked about how we can be Allies and Upstanders.  First Mrs. Nelson showed some photographs showing children in difficult social situations.  We brainstormed solutions.  Then she read us the book Nobody Knew What to Do.  Again, we brainstormed solutions.

Then we signed an Ally Pledge!

In reading we are practicing how to read with a partner.

Domino Games in Math

Dominoes are a great tool for sharing different addition strategies.

How many dots in all?

Mathematicians shared their strategies with us and others revoiced.  

Magic Dominoe Squares-this will be their math homework next week.

Persevering to publish-writers are using checklists to revise and edit their stories as part of our publishing project.

 They LOVE yoga!  They choose to do this on their own whenever there is time to read from the bookshelf!

Sharing this month has been so fun!  Here are some Autumn treasures that have been shared so far.

First Grade News

It has been really exciting to see the effort that the students have been putting into their writing.  We always begin writing with a mini lesson where I introduce a new skill or idea that will help them become better writers.  We have been studying books to learn craft moves that published writers use that we can use too. Here are the craft moves we discovered in Night of the Vegie Monster by George McClements.

Here are examples of student work...

POP out words

Ellipse....

Ellipse and POP out words!

Close up drawing and POP out words

and 2 examples of exact actions.

We also searched for craft moves in the book Rollercoaster by Marla Frazee.  Here is what we found:

Here are 2 examples of students using parenthesis

We will next move on to publishing.  Students will each choose one book to publish,  First they revise it-does it say everything they want it to say?  Does it have all the elements we have discussed, from trying a craft move to bringing the characters emotions out?  They will use a checklist to help them search for these things.  If they are missing something it is their job to add it.  Then partners will listen for these elements in each other's writing.  Again, if something is missing, it is up to the writer to fix it.  Once a story is revised,we then edit-capitalization, punctuation and spelling.  Again they will use a check list to help them correct these errors.  I will not fix things for them but will guide them to find errors on their own.  Published books will represent where each child is at and will not be perfect!  

The stories that they do not choose to publish will be coming home this week.  Encourage your child to read them to you and look for examples of craft moves with them!

We are slowly beginning to establish groups during reading workshop.  Being able to read independently from a bin of books and/or work independently on a reading activity takes time to teach.  Once this is established, I will be able to work with individual groups or children each day. 

"You Skills" with Mrs. Nelson- learning what it means to be Brain In and ready to learn!

 Practicing with a game of Simon Says!

We started a new read loud called Poppy by Avi.  The children are hooked!