Star Fruit!

We have a wonderful fresh fruit program at school. We receive a basket of fresh fruits or vegetables a few times a week that students can enjoy as supplementary snacks. This week we got star fruit for the first time. Some first graders were brave enough to try it! No rave reviews, unfortunately. Students thought it tasted like apples, sour grapes, and my favorite-- peas.

How many feet does it take?

Students estimated the length of our classroom rug in my feet, heel to toe. You see that initial estimates encompassed quite a range. Then after I measured a few of my feet, we paused and eliminated some estimates that we knew were not reasonable. After finding out the actual length in teacher feet, students got a chance to estimate and measure the rug in their own feet, factoring in whether their feet were longer or shorter than the students who had already measured.

Current Workplaces

Here we are this week at some of our current workplaces. Workplaces are math stations that students get to do a few times a week after our regular math lesson. They are engaging activities, often in the form of a "game," to practice math skills. Here we are working at Which Coin Will Win?, Estimating and Measuring with Unifix Cubes, and Ten and More.

Small Moments Narratives

We are nearing the end of our first unit in writing workshop as well. We have been writing stories about small moments from our lives-- small moments meaning the time I fell off my bike, or the time I went on the big slide at the fair, rather than tales about an entire day or a whole vacation. We've learned how to write a story: make a plan, make a quick sketch across the pages, write, then revise, rereading your work.

We've worked to make our stories better and stronger-- having them come alive so our readers can really picture it like a movie in their heads by doing things like having characters talk, telling exactly what happened in small steps, telling how we felt or what we were thinking in the moment.

In the final part of our unit, we studied a mentor text called Night of the Veggie Monster. It's a favorite picture book in our classroom right now and is a nice example of a small moment-- a boy not wanting to eat his peas at dinner-- told as a really entertaining story (I've read it over twelve times (it's short) and students still find it delightful!). We noticed some things that the author, George McClements, did that we loved that really made the story special, like ellipses(...) to make exciting parts more suspenseful, writing exact actions to give good detail ("My fingers became all wiggly"), and writing some words big and/or bold to show they are important and make the reader read them in a STRONG voice. We've tried out some of these features in our own stories. The point is not that any one of these features is necessary, but that any one of them may suit our story and improve our writing. And, studying an author helps writers see books from a writer's perspective, and realize that this is something writers do-- getting ideas from other writers.

We also took a stab at gleaning some ideas from another mentor author, Kevin Henkes. We have read a lot of Kevin Henkes books this fall in read aloud. In pairs this week, students reread one book and marked parts where they noticed Kevin Henkes did something they might want to try in their own writing. We marked the parts we liked with post-it notes to be able to share them. (First graders love post-it notes!)

This week each student chose a favorite story from his/her folder, one that showed off how much they've each grown as writers, and revised it by adding something it didn't already have, such as dialogue or pop-out words or feelings. Then we edited it for spaces, capitals, ending punctuation, and spelling of certain high-frequency "trick words" that are on our word wall. We'll be fancying it up even more in order to "publish" it with a title and cover and are due to celebrate by sharing them with one another soon!

Tackling Tricky Words

In addition to every day practicing and improving our habits for independent reading and partner reading during reading workshop, 

we have been learning in our mini lessons some strategies for tackling tricky words:

We get lots of chances to try these out in our books when we all read. I love seeing a student look up from their book and silently inspect this chart for help as they read. I am hearing a lot less of "what does this say?" and seeing a lot more persistence and confidence in reading. I thought some of these tips might be handy for you to reference when you read with your child and they make a mistake or get "stuck." We all know some words can be sounded out-- or "tapped out" as we say in our Fundations word work-- but not all words can be sounded out, and for lots of situations it's simply not an efficient strategy. Students are seeming more empowered with a growing repertoire of strategies. And, all of these strategies are useful no matter what level of books your child is reading currently!

Things to try when you get to a word you don't know:

Check the picture: there is a reason beginning books have pictures-- to support young readers. It's a smart habit to check the picture, scanning each new page before reading it, as well as when encountering an unknown word, for clues. This won't always be enough, though...

Look at all the parts of a word: try breaking words into parts and then crashing those parts together. We've practiced this with some big, hard words in our books and we can do it. (Ex: st/omp/ing...stomping!) Also, this strategy reminds us to look through the whole word, not just the beginning. We can check endings we know like s, ed, and ing to be sure we are reading the whole word correctly: plays vs. playing vs. played.

Get a running start: sometimes with a tricky word, try just saying the first sound or sounds, like "al" for alligator, or "/h/" for have, then read the whole sentence smoothly up to that point, saying the first sound when you get to it, and thinking "what would start that way and make sense here?" ("The cow was in the f- ...field! The cow was in the field!") This one often works and is a favorite of many students. It particularly works for words that aren't clearly aided by the picture.

Double check: great readers can't just check the picture and guess, nor should they "karate chop" tricky words, saying each individual sound and forgetting what has been said and not knowing how to put it together. They need to think what might make sense in the sentence and the story, and make sure it looks right by checking the word. For example, a first, good guess might be "bunny" but upon double checking the word, first graders might realize it instead says "rabbit."

Try it 2 ways: We still have lots to learn about letter sounds and patterns and word parts in our spelling and word work lessons, but already first graders are aware that vowels can make more than one sound, both long and short, like the a sound in "apple" vs. the a sound in "acorn." This is one more strategy they can try when stumped on a word-- try a different vowel sound for the vowel(s) and see if that makes sense. Just being aware of this can help, especially if other strategies fail.

Students might be really good at some of these, and have as a goal to use others of these strategies more. 

Soon we'll be moving on to a reading workshop unit focused on skills for reading nonfiction texts, and we'll all be reading lots of nonfiction books on all sorts of topics at our own levels. But, we'll keep the "Solving Tricky Words" poster up for a while, as this will always be part of our work during reading time. :)

Measuring with Popsicle Sticks

We had our first experiences with estimating yesterday in math. Estimating is hard but important! We estimated how long one of our classmates was in popsicle sticks. First graders need experience with accurate measuring in whole units (not in standard units like inches yet; we'll also be measuring things in Unifix cubes soon). First we each made an estimate, ranging from 9 popsicle sticks to 90 popsicle sticks. We began to measure the student and saw how far 5 popsicle sticks took us (5 was our benchmark to think about the remaining length we had to go), then many students revised their estimates. It turned out this student was 11 popsicle sticks long!

Then, in pairs students did a great job using this knowledge that a classmate was 11 sticks long to make good estimates of various objects in the room and then measure them-- the tables, chairs, rug, bookshelf, and each other. Here are some pictures of us focused on that work.  

 

Family Game Night!

Reminder: tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 12) is Game Night at School, 6:30 - 8 P.M.