Global Read Aloud

As we continue to read 'My Father's Dragon'...(Global Read Aloud)...we have been busy predicting, visualizing, retelling and sequencing chapters in the book.  Students have recorded their thinking daily using a variety of apps...Doodle Buddy, Educreations, 30 Hands and Kidblog.  I've also been sharing student work on Twitter so classes who are participating in the GRA can read, compare and discuss similarities and differences in posted responses.  
Thank you TL Kaegi for the wonderful map showing the location of classes participating and Mrs. DeGroot for organizing the GRA.

Real World Math Problems

Solving 'real world' math problems are always exciting!  Tomorrow we will be going on a field trip to the museum.  I challenged them to figure out how many buses would be needed for our trip.  Even though each group was given the same information,  I loved how their approach to solving it was very different!

Earth Day

We started our morning with traditional lessons about Earth Day...stories, word building, craft etc.  Then in the afternoon I changed things up a bit.  Students used Haiku Deck to create slides explaining ways we can help save energy at school.  Once slides were finished students uploaded them to the app 30 Hands and then added it to their blog. 

Mo Willems

We love Mo Willems!  All this week we have been working on tons of comprehension activities using his books.  We recorded how characters changed from the beginning/middle/end of a story.  We revisited cause and effect,  defined vocabulary words and located text evidence.  We also discussed text features including speech bubbles and illustrations.  After a full week of comprehension skills we ended the week with Readers Theater using his books!  Wow, an author study, practice comprehension skills and working on fluency (math graphing too)....what a great week!

Symmetry and Fractions

Today I read the story, Equal Shmequal.  This story is great for reviewing math concepts of balance, symmetry and introducing fractions.  After reading the story, students balanced a hard boiled egg.  First they made their predictions then checked their answers.  Students also participated in a whole group lesson on symmetry (Thanks Ms.VandenBerge) followed by an individual activity using the app Geoboard.

My Father's Dragon

This week we started our 2nd Global Read Aloud of the year.  Our class along with 18 other first grade classes across the United States and Canada will be reading 'My Father's Dragon'.  Each day we read a chapter, and record our thinking on our blog.  I also post daily 'tweets' to our class Twitter account where we share our thinking/predictions about the story.  Our class LOVES it when other classes respond to our tweets or when they compare other class tweets to ours.  Please ask your child to summarize the chapters we have read so far and check their blog.  My goal is to Skype with one of the classes prior to us finishing the book. 

Additional 3D Practice

As we continue to learn attributes of 3D shapes students loved watching, building and labeling 3D ballerinas.