Chatterpix

We have been doing such a great job at school these past few weeks!  Room 612 got a special treat today--we learned how to use the Chatterpix app. 

If we learn virtually from home, this is a great app to share a story or to share some learning in a fun way.

I shared one I created, then we created one together and explored the app.

Here we are working on crafting our Chatterpix buddies!  

Tomorrow we'll learn how to upload our Chatterpix buddies into Class Dojo!

 

Personal Word Walls

Each child in Room 408 has a Personal Word Wall filled with words we need to know in a "snap."

Words that each child can spell in a "snap" are highlighted on their Personal Word Wall.

Each week the student chooses a word to work on that is not highlighted.  S/he makes the word in a variety of ways in hopes of learning the word so s/he can access it in a "snap" when s/he is reading or writing.

Then we take pictures of our hard work to document our work.

We are even learning to post our learning on Kidblog.  Stay tuned to see our Kidblogs!

Getting Excited...

It's that time of year!

We only have a few days before school starts, and I'm here alone in my classroom thinking about and planning some of the great things we will do together this year.  I can't do too much planning until you all get here and we get to know each other and our hopes and dreams!

Everything is so fresh and new at the beginning of the year and full of possibilities.

I'm always a little nervous on the first day of school.

I sit here and wonder what each one of you will be like and I get excited about the ways we will get smarter this year in first grade.  

Feel free to leave your first comment on Room 408's first blog post by answering this question:

What do you hope you will learn about or do in first grade?

You can do this by clicking on the link to the right of where it says, "Posted by Elizabeth Henning".  Depending if anyone left any comments the comment link might say, "No comments" or something like, "3 comments." A box will open and you can choose or create a profile/username (I would suggest the username be "Name's mom" or something like that.  Please don't forget--no last names!)

I do have to approve each comment so it may be a little while before you can view your own comment.

I hope you're all as excited as I am about our year together.

See you on Tuesday!

Fondly,

Mrs. Henning

Presidents' Day

We did a mini-inquiry to answer the question of why we missed school on Monday.  Before we began our inquiry, we discussed sources we could go to in order to get answers.  This is what we came up with:

Then we used sources to learn more information about presidents and Presidents' Day.

Here are all the details:

We made posts to our Kidblogs to share what we learned.

Research Clubs

This week we worked in our small collaborative groups investigating more focused space topics, which we call our Research Clubs.  We will stay in these groups and eventually teach others about our space topic.  We're adding lots of new learning to our Research Club charts!

We have also been posting some of our space learning from Research Clubs on Kidblog.

What are you learning about in your Research Club?

Kid Bloggers!

Today we started experimenting with KidBlog, a safe classroom blogging site where kids can post their own learning and ideas and respond to their classmates' posts. They have all loved seeing and using our classroom blog and were so excited to post to their very own blog!

We will be sharing our blogs with family once we become more comfortable with it.  

It's a great way to provide an authentic audience....kids become creators of information, instead of just consumers!  

http://kidblog.org/why-kidblog/