Remind

Remind is a great tool to help us keep CONNECTED in one more way! I was just telling parents this week at open house that the sticky labels that go home on your child's shirt don't always work for me because I forget to stick them on! Plus, the labels don't always make it home! Remind is a way that I can send you text message reminders about special days, library books, popcorn sales, early outs, etc. It is quick, easy, and safe. To sign up for my text reminders text the message @3c5a6e to 81010. If you have any questions or concerns about Remind, feel free to ask!  After open house, I had 10 families already registered in Remind.  Awesome!  I would love to have everyone on!

Goodness Graphness

The Connected Ones mathematicians have been working extremely hard at organizing, representing, and interpreting data in a graph, an important common core standard. In fact, our entire hallway is covered in different graphs about the class. We have had very rich mathematical discussions about our data all while learning more about each other!

Classroom Rules

 

 

In these first weeks of school, we have been working hard at establishing rules and procedures.  We have discussed at length why it is important to go to school and what we hope to accomplish this year.  The students each made a picture and shared their hopes and dreams for first grade.  The children have great goals for their first grade year like to make new friends, read lots of books, do art, learn more about science, and have fun.

Because we all have important hopes and dreams for the year, we needed some classroom rules to help everyone reach their goals.  So, we established four important classroom rules:

 

1. Show respect and manners.

2. Keep hands, feet, and objects to yourself.

3. Follow directions quickly.

4. Work hard and do your best.

 

Pretty awesome thinking.  Our four rules keep us safe and help us learn.  The students developed actions to go with the rules.  Here is a quick video of the Connected Ones classroom rules:

 

 

We are Special

In social studies, we are starting a unit on making friends.  This week we discussed how being a good friend starts with being kind to ourselves.  In addition to learning the song above, we read the wonderful book Rainbow Fish (click on the title to see a video of the book read aloud).  In Rainbow Fish, the fish has all these sparkly scales, but he is not truly happy until he shares that special part of himself with others.  We talked about the things that makes each of us special, our likes and dislikes, and our similarities and differences.  We even made a glyph to represent some of these things.

Our fish glyphs followed these directions.  The students had to color the fish to represent his/her different characteristics.

The Rainbow Fish activity allowed us to learn lots about each other.  We kept the learning going by playing a game called "Find a Friend Who..."  In this activity, the students had a list of items like "likes to dance" and "lost a tooth."  The students walked around with clipboards.  They had to shake a friends hand and then find a category the friend could sign.  The goal was to find a different friend to sign for every category.  So fun!

Count on Us

The first eight days of school has been getting to know each other, establishing routines, and reviewing some of the foundational skills the students learned in kindergarten.  In math, we began by reviewing counting and understanding the place value concepts behind those tricky teen numbers.

The teen numbers can be very difficult to learn.  We have been doing many activities to not only learn how to read and write the numbers but also to understand the place value behind the tricky teens.  We started by building these cube towers.  Then we ordered them.

The students noticed that each tower had a ten green cubes in it.  They also found that the black cubes increased by one each time.  I introduced them to the "math way" of counting.  Instead of saying eleven, the math way maintains the place value and we would say "one ten, one."  Twelve is "one ten, two."  Saying numbers the math way, also helps students remember to put the one first when writing teen numbers.  Next, I started to move the kids to the symbolic representation of the number with these cards.

Instead of just a one in front, the students see a green ten stack like the cube towers.  Now they can "see" that the number 18 is a ten and an 8.  We ordered and matched these numbers to the cube towers. Of course, a song and video always helps to solidify tricky concepts.



We played several different games where the students had to identify, order, and write the teen numbers.  For example, we made number crowns.  The students wrote the numbers 1-20, then mixed them up and reordered them.  Some classmates even had races to see who could build the number line the fastest.  We also played a card game where students placed numbers on a number line when the numbers were drawn in random order.

See if your child can show you the "math way" of counting.  Ask them to identify, order, and write the numbers 1-20.  Any extra practice you do at home always helps!