Can You Create a Wind-Proof Umbrella?

Such was the question during an engineering activity we did in science this past week. 

First we compared beach umbrellas, which sometimes topple over and blow away in the wind, to trees. Trees have trunks that can bend a bit and branches that can sway in the wind. They have roots that extend into and hold onto the ground. They have leaves that move around and let air through the tops. 

After admiring some of these natural parts of trees and some of their functions, we each made a mini beach umbrella, with straws, pipe cleaners, and paper, complete with an umbrella stand of clay in a Dixie cup. Then, we used a big piece of paper to create wind and make them all blow over. After that each student could then decide to make a new, different umbrella or to adapt their first. They were so creative and motivated to try different things and repeatedly go back over to the testing table to make "wind" and see how long their revised design could stand up to it. They came up with some great ideas...and came up with other ideas that they thought would be great but then quickly changed their thinking after testing. It was neat to see this engineering process in action while beginning to think about the parts of a plant.

Boxed Sets

In writing workshop, students have been busy as elves working to publish their series of fiction stories as a beautiful "boxed set."

Each of us has been working to make our set of stories, all about the same main character or characters, the best it can be using the strategies we've learned. We made covers and titles for each book. We fancied up the illustrations with detail and color. We each wrote an "About the Author" page that we attached to the back of our books, modeled on some that we read in the back of some books in our classroom. We painted cereal boxes, and decorated them with tag lines, blurbs, our series titles, and of course names of the authors, inspired by some published boxed sets we looked at.

After break, we plan to visit second grade and each read some of our stories to a second grader or two. Then these will make their way home and you can be another audience for these stories!

First-Grade Mixed Groupings

Parents, 

Mrs. Turunen and I wanted to let you know that beginning this week, we are going to do some mixed groupings between our two first-grade classrooms during our Fundations phonics time four days a week. This is in order to try to differentiate and better meet students' needs. Some students will go to Mrs. Turunen's room for this half hour and some will stay here with me. So your child may mention this and you can ask them how it's going!

We hope to try something similar a few days a week during our afternoon Reading Workshop time after vacation, with the help of our Title 1 teachers in our classrooms. 

If you have any questions at all about this, please let me know! 

 

Cereal Boxes

We could use a few more empty cereal boxes for an upcoming project in writing workshop. (The plan is that each student will transform one into a box to hold a "boxed set" of the fiction series books they have written.) If you could send them in by the middle of next week, that would be great. Thanks in advance!

Reading Stories and Learning Lessons

The unit of reading workshop we are wrapping up has focused on reading fiction-- comprehending stories, paying attention to characters, comparing and contrasting books. 

Over the last week or so we have focused on the lessons that stories can teach us. We've thought hard about how a book ends, and what the character learns in a book, and discussed how that can be a lesson for us, the reader, too, that we can take with us. Often first graders begin with the more literal interpretation of the lesson, as in "Little Red Riding Hood learns wolves are dangerous," or "the boy learns how to ride his bike." This high-level thinking work is largely approximation at this stage. But we are working hard on thinking of the bigger lesson, as well as the literal one, from our own books and from our read aloud stories. Thinking like this is the early stages of talking about theme in later grades and beyond: what is this book really about? Especially in read aloud discussions, students are getting stronger at this. 

Recently, we sorted a stack of books we had previously read aloud into piles based on the lesson the stories teach (all the while noting that books can have more than one lesson). As a wrap-up activity at the end of another day's reading time, students chose a book from their own book bag that they knew and liked and practiced recommending it to others, and they wrote the lesson they felt the book teaches on a strip of paper. Check out our hallway display of these.

 

   

Penguins and Measuring

In math we've learned facts, including height, about a couple of kinds of penguins-- King penguins and Rockhoppers. We've filled in data sheets with some of this information. We practiced measuring skills by using a measuring tape to cut a string to the length of each penguin. Then we got a big kick out of comparing the penguin heights to each other and to ourselves. We also learned through a graphing activity that most students in our class are between 40 and 50 inches tall.