Audio Recordings

We are able to read more and more books, discovering all sorts of fun series lately. Here are some pictures of us immersed in our books.

Here are some of the strategy notes from our reading lessons recently. As you can see we've been working on being sure we truly understand our books, paying attention to the story as we read, noticing and figuring out the meaning of a word we don't know when we encounter it-- because if we don't get it, what is the point of reading?! 

As a culminating activity in our current unit of reading lessons, we are working on doing a fabulous job reading aloud in order to each make an audio recording of a book of our choice. Students hear adults read books aloud every day, and they listen to their reading partners. But we also gave a careful listen to an audio book of Whistle for Willie to think about what an audio book reader does that we might try when we read to sound great; students noticed a lot of things, like change your voice to go with how the character is feeling, and pay attention to things like exclamation points, and notice dialogue tags (like 'John whispered,' or 'shouted Susan' after quotation marks). Here's a couple pictures of some students doing their audio recordings with an iPad. 

Light Activities

We've been doing a few activities lately as part of our study of light in science. The main concepts we work with are that we can only see if there is light available or if an object makes its own light, some objects let light pass through and others block light, and we can use light to communicate. 

We sorted objects around our classroom into groups depending on if they were transparent, translucent, or opaque. (We also used the language see-through, kind of see-through, and not see-through.) 

We made "stained glass" flowers in order to beautify our basement classroom with something that was translucent-- although we noticed that wherever multiple pieces of tissue paper overlapped it was more opaque.

We also thought about if there was a way to communicate, or send a simple message, using only light...any ideas? We learned that this is exactly what a stop light does! 

We made up our own simple color-coded signals with a partner, and then turned out the lights, shined a flashlight through one color at a time, and watched our partner follow the instructions of the message. Students found this so exciting they wanted a blank copy to take home!

Think Ten

We've been practicing a strategy called Think Ten in our Number Corner time. When you are adding to a number that is close to ten (7, 8, or 9 plus something), it can help to think how many more you need to make ten and imagine taking that many from one number. This flexible thinking is called composing and decomposing numbers. Then what you are left with is an Add Ten fact (ten and some more) and that is easier for most of us to solve. For example, instead of counting on to find the sum of 8 + 6, a student could imagine moving 2 from the 6 to make the 8 a 10 and then it would be the same as 10 + 4, or 14.

Here we are using two colors of Unifix cubes to represent the two addends. We put some of the second number on the tens frame to complete the ten and then saw the two quantities differently, as ten and more. We also practiced just imagining this in our heads with tens frames, and doing it with magnetic tiles. We made and read equivalent expressions such as 7 + 4 = 10 + 1.

New Quilts

Earlier in the year we created a sea star quilt to help us practice counting by 5s. Last week, as part of our current geometry unit, each student made a mini quilt. 

First, each student designed four different 2-colored 9-square quilt blocks. 

Next, each chose one design and copied it four times. This involved careful arranging and gluing.

Then each student cut out his/her four copies. Here they are drying.

With our own four copies in front of us, we each tried out several different ways we might arrange them into a four-block mini quilt. We found that some of the quilt block designs were such that no matter how they were turned, the resulting mini quilt was the same! These type of blocks had rotational symmetry. 

Some of us had quilt blocks that, when we experimented with rotating them 90 degrees/a quarter turn or 180 degrees/a half turn, it made for some very different resulting designs. We each chose our favorite way to arrange our own mini quilt and then named them whimsically based on what they looked like. Here is the pretty display in our hallway.

Telling Time

We've been working hard on telling time. In first grade we focus on time to the hour and the half hour.

We learn to read digital and analog clocks, do matching games, and draw hands on a clock to show o'clock and half-past times. We have a number of patterns concerning clocks on our current calendar markers. We first focus on just the short hour hand, checking if it is on the hour, or if it is halfway between two numbers. If the hour hand is halfway between the 8 and 9, we connect it to "half-past eight" or 8:30 and the minute hand will be pointing straight down. We know the minute hand has to take an entire trip around, and the hour hand moves from one number to the next, every hour. This is the language we've been using in our classroom. The students are catching on and I am seeing many aha! moments as they are getting more confident. We've had several fun interruptions in our day involving increased awareness of our classroom clock, such as, "Look! It's 11 o'clock right now!" I am sure some more practice at home would help.