Caleb's Creative Game

Caleb and his older sister created a board game for us to play at indoor recess.  We have been playing it in teams which we have been doing a lot lately with all the rain!  We have also been playing it during Work Activity Time at the end of the day.

It has been a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing, Caleb!

1st Grade Student Board Report

Each month one of the LEADS classes gives a student report to our charter school governance board members to share what's going on in our classrooms.

This month, 1st graders were in charge of the student board report.  Kaydence and Bennett shared about the process of doing our first learning mural in Room 408.

Great job, Kaydence and Bennett!

We Are Strong!

The first few weeks of school we have been establishing good habits during reading and writing workshop.  We are becoming stronger readers and writers every day.  We can already feel our brains growing!
Our first finished Reading Workshop anchor chart looks like this:

We finished with talking about how as we read, we build the story in our minds, just like when a house is being framed, built, and finished. When we read the title and do a sneak peek of a book, we are just beginning to build the story (just like the skeleton frame of a house).

As we learn more about the characters and story, we learn more and more about the story (like putting up walls, doors, and windows).  

When we finish the book, we have read the whole book and are thinking about big ideas.  That's like when the paint and finishing touches get put on the house.

For fun, we watched a timelapse of a real house being built.

The building analogy will be great for our next unit in Reading Workshop:  Our Reading Toolbox of Strategies.  Stay tuned!

For Writing Workshop, these were our main areas of focus during these first weeks of school.

We have also been reading and discussing powerful personal narratives by Tomie dePaola to help us tell our own powerful stories.

The most powerful was Now One Foot, Now the Other.  It had us laughing, feeling sad, feeling empathetic, feeling relieved, and finally feeling happy again.

We ended our anchor chart by focusing on "seed" stories, or "small moment" stories.
We saw the difference between a "watermelon" story and a "seed" story by reading some Donald Crews books.
Bigmama's is a "watermelon" story, because it is a story about lots of things that he did every summer when he went to his grandma's house. This big "watermelon" topic has so many little seed story ideas inside of it.

In contrast, Shortcut is a "seed" story, because it is about one specific memory of one time during all those summers that he spent at his grandma's house, when they decided to take the shortcut home.

We thought Shortcut was a way more powerful book and we made it a goal to try and write our own "seed" stories.

We are off to a great start to our year with our reading and writing workshops!

Math Stations

Now that we have set up our rules and expectations for working together this year, we moved into math work stations.  We are now thinking deeply as mathematicians, tracking our work in math contracts, and putting our math skills into practice.

We love math stations!

Charlotte's Web

We finished our chapter book read aloud Poppy and loved it!
Now, we're on to our next chapter book read aloud, Charlotte's Web.

We learn so much about friendship and spiders when we read this book!

Here are a few pictures and spider videos that we watched to be able to visualize different parts of the book.





 
We haven't gotten to this part of the book, yet, but we'll watch it when we read the last chapter!

Marathon Readers

We have been working on building our reading stamina.  We read the book Marathon Mouse by Amy Dixon.

Preston was a mouse who wanted to run the New York City marathon but no one thought he could do it.  We googled the NYC marathon so we could see how challenging it would be for a mouse.

Would you like to be a mouse running amid a sea of sneakers?

He worked hard, practiced, and got stronger as a runner.  He finally completed his marathon!

We run laps in gym, and we wondered how many laps in the gym was a mile so we could figure out how many laps a marathon would be.

After talking to our gym teachers, we found out it takes 14 laps to make a mile in the gym...if a marathon is 26.2 miles, that means we would have to run almost 367 gym laps!!!

Room 408 talked about how we can build our reading stamina just like Preston built his running stamina.  We set goals for ourselves and stacked our books on one side of our folder, and as we finished a book we placed it on the other side and became marathon readers!

We read for almost 30 minutes straight!

Happy reading!

Our First Learning Mural!

On the first school day of each new month this year, we will reflect on our learning from the previous month.
Our brains are growing more than we realize!

First, when we do a learning mural, we brainstorm all the ways that our brains grew in the last month.  In this case, this is our brainstorm list of all the ways our brains grew in September:

We were amazed to see how much learning we have already done in just 19 days!!!

Next, we chose a topic to create, and invited someone to collaborate with us.

Then we work on that one topic and collaborate to create a representation of that learning, using the materials in our classroom.

We are going to watch a few short ant videos--even ants collaborate to get work done!

 Here is our first completed Learning Mural!

What has been your favorite part of learning so far this year?