The Start of Our LDC Project

I don't know where all the time has gone.  Today was our 21st day of school, it definitely doesn't seem like we've been back to school for this long.  A couple of week ago, I had to attend LDC (Literacy Design Collaborative) training for three day.  I have 2 more days of training in October.  During this training, my group of first grade teachers had to create an LDC module.  We decided to do ours on citizenship, our focus is on having them see how they can improve their community by being good citizens.   I am the only one that has to do this LDC before our October meeting, my principal is making us.  Today was day number 2, our module will last for 15 days, 10 days of instruction and 5 days of writing a report.  I know what you are thinking, a report for a first graders?!?  For my students, a report is going to be a couple of sentences and an illustration that focuses on our focus of the module.  If you would like to find out more about LDC here is their website: http://www.literacydesigncollaborative.org/

Each day, my students will be writing in their Citizenship Journal.  We have a word of the day that we will define as a class, then each student will write a sentence using the word of the day, and then they will be able to color a picture to match their sentence.  At the end of each day, we will also be writing about what we learned.

Day 1:  Our word of the day was sharing.  My students did an amazing job with their journal writing for the day.  I had my students highlight the word share in their sentence and they were even sharing their highlighters with others at their table that did not have one!  That was a proud moment, they were using our word of the day.  We also talked about communities.  The idea for today was to have them list the different communities that they were apart of.  This was very difficult, it took a lot of prompting on my part to get them to create our list.  This is something that I will change for next year, I would like for my students to focus on the traits of citizenship first and build in the different communities towards the end of our module.

Day 2: Our word for the day was honesty.  We talked about this a lot today!  Today it seemed like all my students wanted to do was tattle on each other, we had lots of opportunities to talk about honesty.  We also focused on the rules that we have in a couple of our communities: neighborhoods, school, and home.  We completed a circle map of neighborhood rules together.  My students were given a post-it note to write a rule that we have for school and a rule that we have at home.  They did a great job on this activity!

Our Circle Maps from today.  My favorite rule, Home: Don't break anything!

Tomorrow starts day 3, can't wait to share what happens next.

Amber