We had a terrific St. Patrick's Day in first grade! Our day started
with a surprise. Some naughty leprechauns had visited! They made a
mess with school supplies, left green footprints on the tables, and
turned the toilet water green. Tricky! We enjoyed our day. We did
some "Lucky" writing, read some wonderful Irish tales, made a St.
Patrick's graph, and studied a rainbow water experiement. We also checked out
the Chromebooks for some St. Patrick's Day learning games.
Here is a wee bit of computer fun for your St. Patrick's Day!
Our Royal Read~A~Thon was a huge success no matter what the final numbers turn out to be. These students accomplished so many great reading goals in the last ten days. Today we celebrated with our royal robes and crowns. We even had a mini parade to see all the reading crowns. Our first graders have the royal wave down!
Throughout the Read~A~Thon, students tracked participation with jewels. The children earned jewels for every sponsor, every reading club attendance, and every thirty minutes of reading. The children loved to pick out their new jewels. It is a good thing the read-a-thon only lasted ten days because some of the crowns are getting heavy!
Every day of the read-a-thon, our librarian Mrs. Jensen has hosted reading club. The attendance was spectacular. Each day we had 90-110 children in the library READING! Amazing! The library was packed. It was so fun to see students running to the library to get every minute in.
In addition to making sure reading club was available to all our students, Mrs. Jensen also greatly enhanced our kingdom of reading by introducing our students to different book genres. Mrs. Jensen put together baskets of books for six different reading genres: informational text, mystery, traditional literature, fantasy, biography, and poetry. Each day, one of the 1st or 2nd grade classrooms got their genre basket and spent the day exploring the books. We always did something called a book pass. Students got a minute to page through the book and then pass it to the next student. The genre basket was available to the students all day if they wanted to dive deeper into one of the books they saw in the book pass. Then, the next day, we would get a different genre collection. Several students wrote down books that they would like to check out of the library later. It was so great to hear the children talking about genres that interest them and see the children so excited about books. Thank you, Mrs. Jensen!
"Did
you ever have the feeling there's a WASKET in your BASKET? ...Or a
NUREAU in you BUREAU? ...Or a WOSET in you CLOSET? Sometimes I feel
quite CERTAIN there's a JERTAIN in the CURTAIN."
Our Seuss activities continued into Thursday and Friday. We read There's a Wocket in My Pocket. We made a tally chart of all
our pockets, then counted by 5's to discover that our class wore 46
pockets that day! Each Seuss book this week gave us so many learning opportunities. And, come to think of it, we had so many snacking opportunities as well! Ha!
After reading and discussing the rhymes in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Hop on Pop, and Wocket in My Pocket....we made our own rhyming hats with our third grade buddies. The students worked very hard on their rhymes. I love how they used
their tools. Many students used word family sliders from around our
classroom. They also used the app Word Wizard.
Word Wizard is a moveable alphabet for $2.99. The app says the words
as the students build them. It also lets them know if words are
spelled correctly. So students could build and try words with the word
family and check their spelling. Awesome. Many students found their
hats were getting too big for their desks and had to move to the floor.
The children also loved making the guided drawings of the Cat in the Hat. They did a great job listening to directions and being patient with themselves. I love that the drawings all turned out different but still look "right."
One of my favorite activities we did this week was writing book recommendations for our favorite Seuss stories. So much thinking, writing, speaking, and tech-ing went into this project. First, the students had to formulate their opinions and write a book report.
After writing down their thinking, the students made videos of their opinions. One of our district's technology integration specialists, Mrs. Piltz, came in to help with making the videos. Each student recorded the video in front of a green screen. Then we used the app Do Ink to add the pages in the background. The students are so proud of their creations. Thank you so much, Mrs. Piltz! Here are just a few examples. It was so hard to pick.
Wednesday we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday by participating in a school
wide read in. The first half hour of school all the students lined the
hallways and just read. Even the teachers and our principal dropped
everything to read. The Connected Ones wore their red and white stripes and smiles to
school Wednesday to celebrate Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat. Our Scholastic News was all about Dr. Seuss. We learned many interesting facts about the famous author. For example, Dr. Seuss collected silly hats because he thought wearing silly hats gave him funny ideas to write about! It must have worked because he published over 40 books in his lifetime. We had special birthday cupcakes in celebration of Dr. Seuss.
Later in the day, after reading both The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, we did our daily graph. Click here to hear the book rapped in 6 minutes. At the end of The Cat in the Hat,
Dr. Seuss asks if you would tell your mom about the adventure if it
happened to you. The kids answered the question in a graph; however,
they didn't use their names....in case moms were going to see it!
Instead we used our "Thing" numbers! Good news, most kids would tell
mom! We made fun "Thing" hats and played a math addition game called Thing 1 and 2 BUMP.
Dr. Seuss has so many crazy ideas and characters. We have had sometime this week to explore a website called Seussville. The website is packed full of games, activities, videos, and printables. The children love it!
