Self-Affirmations

We have been talking about how important it is to believe in yourself.

I shared the following quotation with Room 408:

We talked about how positive self-talk is very important, especially when things get tough.  

We made a ring of self-affirmations to keep in our safe zone.  

Each student decorated a self-affirmation card for the ring.

They worked so hard to make sure people would feel good when they looked at them!

Here is a great video about believing in yourself.

Counting By Fives & Backchanneling

An exciting way we share our learning sometimes is by backchanneling.  I use a website called GoSoapBox.

It's a great way to practice reading and writing for a purpose.  Through the GoSoapBox website I can post a question and each student can digitally respond with an answer.  As each student posts their answer, they can read each other's responses.

We finally got to take a look at our sea star quilt and discussed how it could help us count by fives.  We used GoSoapBox to share our answers of patterns that we saw in our sea star quilt.

One of our favorite songs is Count By 5s by Jack Hartmann.

We added the song to our Poetry Notebooks after we ordered all the numbers, counting by fives.

Coalescing our Space Research

We reached the end of our investigation stage, which meant that it was time to look at all our research and try to find some big ideas--coalesce them--so we could get ready to "Go Public."

We read through and organized all our post-its into groups and then circled and labeled our big ideas.

Next, we decided what we wanted to teach and collaborated to decide who was going to teach what.

We're excited to get started on our posters!

Little House in the Big Woods

The class voted on the new chapter book that we will read aloud during snack time.  The winner is....

We started learning about what times were like back in the late 1800s by viewing some images. So far, we have learned about smoking venison in a tree trunk, butchering pigs, and storing food to keep for winter.  Before reading the part about butchering the pig, I showed Room 408 the following picture to pique their curiosity:

We talked about the image with our talking partner.  They discussed possibilities such as it being a spider's egg sac (can you hear the learning from Charlotte's Web coming out in their talk?). When they looked closer they noticed some kind of tied string, the variation of colors, and the dark line going down the side.

We got out our Think Books and recorded our predictions and practiced looking closely and drawing with details.

Here are some of our Think Book entries:

As we read the chapter on butchering the pig, Room 408 started forming an idea of what this strange object might be.  We discussed how back then when they killed an animal they tried not to let any part go to waste.  They were surprised (and a little grossed out) to find out that this was a pig's bladder...and that Pa blew up the bladder so Mary and Laura could play with it like a balloon!

After we learned what it was, we played with a balloon and pretended that it was a pig's bladder.

Tomorrow should be an exciting day...we'll be learning how Laura and Mary helped Ma make butter.  We'll even be collaborating with a partner to make our own butter!

If you want to build up your schema about butter-making, watch this video:

Rainbow Words

We got our Rainbow Word rings!

Our Rainbow Word rings are full of our 1st grade SNAP words--the words we need to know how to read and write in a "snap."

Each color contains a set of 18 words. Once a student can read the red words without hesitation on three different days, s/he earns the orange set of words.  Once s/he can read the orange set of words without hesitation on three different days, s/he earns the yellow set of words, and so on and so forth.

Once a child can read all the sets of words, s/he earns a Rainbow Words t-shirt!  

We love our rainbow words!

December Learning Mural Day!

Since today was our first school day in January, it was time to reflect on all of our learning from December and create our Learning Mural!
Even though we only had 15 days of learning in December (our shortest mural, yet!) we still did a lot of learning!

We found partners and started collaborating right away!

Here is our finished Learning Mural!

Space Party!

On the last day together before our Christmas Break, we had our space party!
The morning started out by getting sucked into the black hole of our classroom.

We celebrated surviving the black hole and earned NASA stickers!

The room was decorated with constellations, planets hanging from the ceiling, and starry lights.

That morning we tried astronaut food!

Thanks to some great parents who sent in astronaut food, we tried applesauce from pouches...

We tried freeze-dried fruit...

The verdict is still out about the fruit--either they loved it or questioned it!

We even tried astronaut ice cream!

Later we went to fun space stations!

We played with space slime...

...made straw rockets...

...made a nebula in a jar...

...made models of the Earth/Moon/Sun orbits....

...played Space Bingo...

...and dressed up our stuffed animals as astronauts!

My mom even stopped by from South Carolina to join in the fun!

Being creative is always messy, though!

Fortunately Room 408 is excellent at cleaning up!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  See you in 2019!