During Reading Workshop, students listened to reading by accessing Raz Kids on their classroom iPads. Students use a reading tracker to choose how they want to read daily in a variety of ways. They choose from reading to self, reading to someone, listen to reading, word work and work on writing assignments. After they choose an activity, they update their tracker and then choose another reading activity during workshop time. Students learned to reflect on their reading by making connections with the text (story). They were able to identify connections to themselves, another text and the world around us. First, students were able to hear a story that I made a connection to. Then, after reading a book, students placed a post-it note on a page they made a connection with. Next, we gathered as a class to share the post-it note page and the connection story. Making connections is a comprehension strategy that helps readers personally relate to a text. This also helps readers to understand the main events of a story better. Using the Lucy Calkins reading unit, we talked about how readers have good habits we do without thinking, just like how we brush our teeth every morning. One good habit readers should have is to take a sneak peek of their good fit book they are going to read. Students learned to take a sneak peek by reading the title, looking at the illustration on the cover, and reading just a few pages. Taking a sneak peek helps readers to begin thinking about what they think will happen in the story. Students then learned to make predictions. They talked with a partner about their predictions and even wrote down their predictions on paper. Then, after reading the whole book, students were able to check their sneak peek and see if their prediction was confirmed.
MATH
Students are building a stronger number sense as they practice identifying, writing, and building numbers to 100. Students participated in math workshop by engaging in various math activities, such as writing numbers in groups of 10 up to 100 on streamers and playing with a partner to add a number to 100 using a dice. They continued to record in their number journals the number of school days and the different ways to represent the numbers (tally marks, coins, base ten blocks, and number words). Students also continued to use iPads to practice math on ST Math.
WRITING
After visiting the Miramar Airshow during fieldwork, students turned and talked with a partner brainstorming how they think planes fly. Turning and talking with partner gives all students an opportunity to speak and helps them feel comfortable to share their thoughts freely to someone aloud. This also gets them ready to write their ideas on paper. Then students wrote down their ideas about how they think aircrafts fly and illustrated their writing with a diagram picture. Students have learned to not only illustrate what they write but to create a diagram to teach the readers about what they have learned just like the diagrams they see in nonfiction books. Students have conducted experiments on flight using a paper airplane that they made. Then our first grade scientists recorded by writing down their observations on the experiment tests using complete sentences. They wrote down how the paper airplane went up and how it went down. They were asked to use project related words in their sentences that we recorded together on our word wall. We continue to update our word wall with project words weekly. Students also learned about the four forces of flight and then added pictures to an airfoil image to illustrate how air/wind travels around a curved wings to create flight. They then wrote a sentence about their illustration teaching the readers about how a curved wings helps objects fly. Students also began observing similarities of how a helicopter and hummingbird fly. They learned that they both hover and wrote sentences on each. First graders are busy bees, writing daily!