Spider Sum Up!

We ended our spider activities with Spider Soup!  The children interactively wrote a recipe for spider soup.  They were creative, silly coming up with the "grossest" ingredients they could.  Ha!  Weren't they surprised when I told them I caught enough spiders to make a whole crock pot of their soup!  All morning long, the children were looking in the pot in disbelief.  "Did she really make our recipe?"

After recess, the soup was ready to be served.  Best comment ever...."It tastes just like chicken!" Love these first graders!

We had such a super spider week.  I couldn't put all the photos in the blog posts so here is a slideshow to show a few more!

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Candy Corn Math

We are continuing to work really hard on building a foundation for addition.  We have moved to concentrating on the larger sums, numbers 10-20.  Further, the children have begun to explore dividing numbers into three and four addends.  This week we used candy corn as our fun and tasty manipulative.  The students had the focus number of candy corn pieces in a Ziplock.  For instance, on Wednesday, we worked on 15 so there were 15 candies in each bag.  Then the children had to come up with as many combinations for 15 as possible.  They recorded their answers on a giant candy corn recording sheet.  They used 2, 3, and even 4 addends to come up with a variety of solutions for 15.  These mathematicians worked so hard!  They were really proud of their thinking.

Going Batty!

Bats are so interesting, although I wouldn't want to run into a roost in a dark cave.  Bats do make for a great topic for first grade research though!  We used the topic to discuss informational text.  As we read different nonfiction books and articles, we recorded our learning on a RAN (Reading and Analyzing Nonfiction) chart.

The chart starts with our background knowledge.  The students brainstormed what they already thought they knew about bats.  As we read, we moved and added post it notes to the other categories.  When our background knowledge was correct we moved the note to "Yes, we were right."  Of course, when we found text evidence of our thinking we were sure to note the source on the the post-it.  Sometimes, as we read we found that our thinking changed.  For instance, some students thought bats were blind.  As we read, we learned that bats can see quite well in low light.  If our thinking changed, our post-it moved to "We don't think this anymore."  There was also a category for new learning and another for wonderings.

Next, we brought our learning about bats into writing.  We made a bat diagram and took some notes on a graphic organizer.  The notes on the graphic organizer became our big ideas.  Then we came up with supporting details for our big ideas.  We made a chart to organize big ideas and details.

When the students put all the learning together the writing was pretty impressive.  The students wrote their three big ideas in yellow.  They had to write supporting details in red.  The color coding really helped the students organize their thoughts for writing. The students' finished informational writing pieces were quite impressive.

Although the informational writing was the focus of our bat study, we also did some other learning activities around the subject of bats.  For instance, in spelling we played a game making real and nonsense words out of the -at chunk.  We did made a bat craft using only circles.  Also, we graphed the class's opinions on whether bats are creepy or cute.  We read and made a nonfiction book of bat facts and then read an awesome fiction book about bats called Stellaluna.  Here are just a few pictures highlighting some of our other activities.  Enjoy!

 

Hooray for A!

We have been working hard building words with short a.  In phonics and spelling, we have done a variety of activities to practice reading and writing short a words.  While we have been spelling many short a words our focus words have been: an, can, man, fan, ran, pan, at, sat, cat, hat, rat, and bat.

In this game, students use the foldable to practice their words.  The students were having so much fun with the actions that I don't think they even realized how much learning they were doing.

For clipboard cruising this week at centers, the students found short a words taped up around the room.  Then, they sorted the words by the shape they make.  Also, in centers the students stamped the short a words.  For the tiny word search, students used a magnifying glass to find their words.

One of my favorite spelling activities this week was a short a word scramble.  The children got a list of the words scrambled then used their ipad to help them unscramble the words.  We used an app called Word Wizard.  Word Wizard is a moveable alphabet that reads the students the words they create.  The students were able to move the letters around and hear the sequence of sounds and determine if they created a correctly spelled short a word.

 

 In addition to Word Wizard, there are some other great apps for building words.  Segmenting is a very important early reading and writing skill.  The Reading Magic (1,2,3,and 4) and Spelling Magic (1, 2, and 3) are some free apps that help practice segmenting and blending words. It is a great series that gets progressively harder with each numbered addition. Good news, they are all FREE!

Fall Y'all!

We had the opportunity to write some fall poetry this week.  First, the students brainstormed a list of adjectives for leaves.  Then, we talked about verbs.  What can leaves do?  Leaves fall, dance, twirl, pile, crumble....the students had wonderful word choice.

When are lists of adjectives and verbs were made, the students went back to their desks to create three poetic sentences about leaves.  Listen to a couple great examples.


Our poetry will look great published in the hall with the paintings we are working on.  We used fall colors to paint around leaves.  We can't wait to see what they look like when they are dry on Monday.  You'll have to come check out our artwork and writing in our hallways.