For the next few weeks we'll be working with AR and OR chunks. The students will came up with the word list again. We'll do beginning introduction to the sounds, use of the words, show many examples in text and then move onto hands on application. They'll be looking for the words in our room, sorting, writing sentences using the words as well as working with each other to practice their words!
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After a lot of practice checking sentences of both our own writing and others, we are going to continue to take this lesson with us in our joint reading and writing learning. We have been collecting facts in reading from our reading Ocean informational texts. This was done in a whole group setting. Now, we are going to break off into small groups and learn and read about informational texts we are interested in. The groups will be responsible for reading informational text and recording various facts they learned or already knew and found interesting. All of this collecting of information, will bring us into writing an informational book. Again, they will do this with a group so they will have support. We will use their writing to sentence check, talk about writing facts in our own words and just exploring/beginning stages of informational text reading and writing. We will do this until spring break. So our reading and writing will tend to bounce off of each other and run together (which is should)! I'm hoping that they'll start getting interested in more informational texts when they hit up the library or just at home with the newspaper, etc. So please encourage this on your journey to get new books! And get ready to hear some facts spouted off! This week we will look at maps and pictures of distinct characteristics places have. We will focus on forests, hills, mountains, lakes, rivers. I have lots of fun pictures from my travels to show them real life examples and be able to discuss and compare them to each other to identify what makes them what. We will also look at how they are represented on maps. We will also use pictures of farms, towns, city life and life around us to compare how different people live in these environments. Thanks my sister we will have lots of fun, real life pictures of city life. We will show parks, playgrounds and other signs and symbols in pictures as well as representation on maps. Writing is hard...seriously! Especially when you are learning so many conventions (capitals, periods, upper and lower case), language (nouns, verbs, adjectives), etc!! We have been working hard but are going to try to put all the pieces together (capitals after punctuation, placing punctuation etc). We will use this hand to help guide us in good sentence structure. After a mini lesson on Monday, each student will place this sheet in the front of their writing folder as a reference. We will practice both writing and looking (reading) other students and example sentences to see if they have all the elements (kind of like a rubric). The students will do a lot of work with this (writing, grading and working with one another with the smart board etc). We are going to work hard on making sure that our stories, letters and eventually nonfiction research follow this structure so that our readers (who we write for!!) can read our stories! Nonfiction is full of new information, new words and new facts! That's why it's fun to read and a large part of our life! (think back to your high school and college days-that's all we read is nonfiction!) Informational text is a large part of our language arts study with the new common core (makes sense right?!) As I said last week, we are diving in slowly to our nonfiction study (which will entail reading and writing). We are going to start with books about the ocean. We will study all sorts of new facts, learn new words. The common core strand we are working on is learning how to -Ask and answer questions about key details in a text. -Identify the main topic and retell key details of a text. We will start as a whole group and create a chart of our main topic and add details. The students will eventually get post it notes and as we read, they will add new facts or details to our chart. We will also create a chart of questions we have and see if we can answer them as we read. Eventually they will get post it notes and record as we read any questions, answers or key details in the text! We assessed Topic 11 on Friday (subtracting double digits) and will move onto measurement Topic 12. In first grade, we will focus on non standard measurements (using cubes, paper clips) to measure objects and estimate the length of objects. We will also compare and order length using longest and shortest. This will be a quick topic (little over a week). They will get an idea of what one inch is using tiles and cubes/paper clips. It should be a fun unit to move through! We are ready for mapping! Next week we will kick things off with looking at maps online of Ohio, the United States and the world! It should be fun to locate various countries of interest to them, as well as some fun spots they may have visited. I will also show Google Maps and introduce directions. We are going to pretend that we need directions to Chicago to visit my sister. I will talk about personal experiences (getting lost-finally after 11 years knowing how to get there with my eyes closed..:) For a few days we will dig into directions, talking about the words we use (directional words like left, right, forward, backward). Then we will use those words to help us with new directional words like North, South, East, West (compass rose). We will give directions orally to partners and try to get around the school/room. Then we will start to write down our directions. Thursday, they will get with a partner and see if they can come up with the correct route to UDF. We will pull together whole group and come up with a class set of directions. And the fun part...we will use those directions on Friday to walk to UDF!! If they are super good, I'll buy them some prepackaged ice cream! |
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