Pumpkins!!!!

I have a student teacher this semester.  She is doing a unit on pumpkins this week.  The students have had a TON of fun. 

I found this great video on youtube that explains how pumpkins grow.  The video was from Morton, Illinois: The Pumpkin Capital of the World.  Morton is not very far from us and the students found that very exciting! 

 



 

Here are some of the activities the students did with pumpkins this week. 

 

We got student copies of these fantastic magazines from our local farm bureau. The magazine is through the National Organization: Agriculture in the Classroom. It was full of a variety of pumpkin information.  Click here for your free copy! On the back of the magazine was a recipe for making Pumpkin Pie in a bag.  The students all got to help measure and mix the ingredients.  I had them try some plain pumkin from the can (Libby's: from the video!).  They thought it tastes like baby food and didn't much care for it.  They were pleasantly surprised how good the pumpkin pie in a bag was that we made. 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, the students voted on how we should carve our pumpkin.  The students decided the jack-o-lantern should have circle eyes, a rectangle nose, and a scary mouth.  They really enjoyed helping scoop the seeds and guts out of the inside of the pumpkin. 

 

Earlier this week, the students decorated a pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern.  The jack-o-lanterns were lined up in the hall.  The students had to measure how many pumpkins tall they were!  It was also a great opportunity to talk about who was the tallest, shortest, how many more, and how many fewer. 

 

The students also did an activity that on the life cycle of the pumpkin.  It went well with the Libby Pumpkin Video. 

 

 

What cool units have you done?

 

 

 

 

 



 

Number Word Chart

 

 

We are almost to 50 days of school!  The students fill out their number of the day paper four times a week.  I have the numbers 1-20 posters up on the wall that they use each day to help them correctly fill out their paper.  They began to struggle when we hit day thirty with how to correctly spell those number words.  I made the above visual for them to refer to for assistance.  The students really do a great job of looking around the room for resources to assist them before they ask me a question.  What type of resources/visuals do you have around your room to help the students gain independence in their learning?

Facebook

Everyone knows Facebook is great for keeping in touch with friends and family, but I have a little secret to tell you.  Facebook is awesome for teachers and parents!  There are SO many facebook teacher pages!  I stumbled upon this realization one day, when I got sucked into "pinning" on Pinterest.  For those of you that don't know, going on Pinterest is like falling into a big, black, endless hole!  Once you start you can't stop.  You see something that looks interesting, so you click on it.  That click leads to a teacher's blog FULL of amazing ideas.  That blog mentions/links to another blog, so you click on it and find another awesome blog and the pattern continues endlessly.  While looking at all these blogs, I noticed that they all had buttons to follow their pins on Pinterest. Yes, please!  There was also a button to follow their blog on Facebook.  The majority of my newsfeed is now teacher blog updates and FREEBIES!  I highly encourage you to follow as many teacher blogs as you can on Facebook.  I have gotten some really creative, free, fun ideas and activities.

Fluency

Fluency is such as complicated concept for some first graders to grasp.  I do a variety of lessons to work on oral reading fluency.  Each week, we work on learning a list of 20 sight words.  By the end of January, the students will have been exposed to and hopefully (fingers crossed) mastered all 220 Dolch sight words.  Each day, we follow a sight word routine from the 95% group.  We go through the words three different times.  The first time, I say the word and they point to the word and repeat after me.  Then, we all say the words together.  Finally, the students say the words by themselves chorally.  At the beginning of the year, we talked about and modelled chorally reading.  Doing the sight word routines together as a class has really helped the students grasp the concept of reading chorally.  This has helped when we read our sight word book of the week together. 

Each week, the students have a mini-sight word story that focuses on several of the words listed on our sight word list for that week.  I absolutely love these books. 

The books are short and sweet.  The books are introductory enough that all students can feel successful.  I LOVE the look on their faces when they read the first book chorally for the first time at the very beginning of the school year.  When the finish the selection, I congratulate them on reading as a class for the first time and they get very excited!!!  They only improve from that day forward.  Each book has several sight words and vocabulary words listed on the front.  We follow the same routine as we do for the sight words.  I read, they read.  We all read together.  They read chorally together.  At the end of each book is a worksheet that takes the sentences from the story and inserts blanks.  The students use the word bank and the story to complete each sentence.  We are almost finished with these little sight word books.  When we are done, we will move onto some other fluency books that are a little more challenging! 

We occasionally have "special vistors" come and read a fluency passage.  The other day, some second graders came and did a reader's theater on the Statue of Liberty.  Our favorite is when fourth grade comes to visit.  The fourth grade teacher takes a fluency passage and turns it into lyrics to fit a popular song.  The kids LOVE it!  I love when other grades come to visit and demonstrate fluency for us because it gives the first graders something to strive for.  We love to get to visit their classrooms in return and demonstrate our fluency!!  What creative ways do you teach fluency?

It's that time of year again....Parent/Teacher Conferences!

I have been very busy this week testing my students.  I like to have a variety of assessment pieces and student work samples to show parents at conference time.  I always enjoy the opportunity to meet with the parents and discuss their student's progress.  It always AMAZES me how much the students have grown and learned in just 9 weeks of school!  How do you prepare for parent/teacher conferences?

Number of the Day



 Pinned from http://funkyfirstgradefun.blogspot.com.

 

I found this number of the day worksheet on pinterest.  It works great for having the students decompose numbers.  They are asked to write the number, number word, even or odd, tally marks to represent the number, and determine the place value of the number.  I shrunk the orginal document down so that four of them fit on one page.  Each day the students do the number of the day that corresponds to the number of days we have been in school.  As a result the students have a better understanding of even and odd numbers, how to make tally marks to represent a number, and place value.  The students have learned to use their resources around the room to correctly spell the number word.  That gets a little trick once we pass day number 10! They turn in their number of the day page for the week on Thursdays.  I grade it on Thursday and we go over each number we did that week on the SMARTboard.  This allows each of the students a chance to interact with the SMARTboard and clear up any confusion with any numbers.  

Tally Mark Chants

Last year, my first graders really struggle with making tally marks and especially groups of five.  I found this cute tally mark chant for 1-10 on pinterest. 


Pinned from http://www.zeekszoo.blogspot.com
 

It made it alot easier for the students to remember how to do their tally marks each day.  Confusion came again when the students tried to do tally marks for numbers past ten.  One day a student commented that we really needed a tally mark chant for numbers past ten.   So, using the "teachable moment"  we came up with a continuing tally mark chant that came produced a repeating pattern.  The students had a great time coming up with additional rhyming words to help them remember.  They were very proud of their new tally chart chant because they were able to come up with it on their own.  My new first graders this year think it's so cool that the second graders made up a tally chant for them!  I would like to share it with you.  Click on the image below to grab your free copy!  How do you teach your students to do tally marks?

 

1st blog entry

I have officially entered the blogging world!  Whew!  What a day today.  It was definitely a Monday!  We were very busy learning many new things in first grade.  The students are coming along in their reading.  We worked on sight words and choral reading today.  It is amazing how much the students have improved since the begining of the school year!  What do you use to teach fluency to your students?