Butterflies And The Start of Our Writing Project

When I arrived at school yesterday, I was greeted by butterflies!!  About half of our 30 chrysalis hatched over the weekend.  By the end of the day, we had 24 or so butterflies and 6 left to hatch.  Currently, we have 3 that we are waiting on.  It is amazing that something the size of an eyelash can grow and change into something as beautiful as a butterfly.  One of my students even saw one of the butterflies hatch!  I will admit, I was jealous of this.  This student waited to tell anyone until after it happened and I was standing right there, we did get to see a newly hatched butterfly.  I was lucky enough to see one hatch while my students were in P.E. I wanted to try and record it or get pictures of it but it was too fast.  Today, one of my students noticed that one of our butterflies has only one antennae.  It is very strange, it does not seem to move very much, it was in the same general area of the habitat all day.  I've tried taking a picture of it but the netting gets in the way.  We have had fun learning and watching our caterpillars transform over the past 3 weeks.  It will be a sad day when we release them later this week, hoping that these rain clouds go away and the temperature gets a little warmer by Friday.

This is what our caterpillars looked like when they first arrived.

This is how big the caterpillars were after only 2 days!

Waiting for our butterflies!

Butterflies!!

We started writing our reports for our big LDC project on Citizenship and how it affects our community.  This has taken a lot of time.  I am trying to get my students not to write sentences using the words "I" or "my".  This has been a challenge.  Most of my students are still working on writing their introduction.  For this, I am trying to have them write a sentence on either good citizenship or bad citizenship and what it does to the community.  Here is a sentence that one of my students wrote "Good citizenship makes the world a better place."  This is a great opening sentence! Sadly we get stuck after this sentence, they want to start using "I' or "my" or they are writing examples.  The next sentence is suppose to have 3 of the citizenship words that we have been learning about.  The last sentence in the paragraph is to get the reader ready for our report.  I have been doing a lot of editing and conferencing with my students.  I want them to do a good job on their report and I feel like I have to give them a lot of time and attention so that they are doing their best work.  I do have a few students that have finished their introduction and are starting to write the rest of their report.  They are currently writing a paragraph, at least 3 sentences, for each of the 3 citizenship words that they included in their introduction.  I'm hoping that tomorrow will be the last day for writing our introduction paragraphs.  I should have some pictures of our reports to share by the end of the week.  This is going to be a long process but will be worth it when we are able to share our end result.  If anyone has ever tried to teach elementary students how to write a report, I would love to hear what you have done.

Amber

The Final Days Of Learning About Citizenship

I'm trying to make a schedule to remind myself to blog, we will see how that goes.  I'm impressed that this is my second blog post for the week!  The past two days we were working on finishing the reading/informational part of our LDC module.  Next week, my students will begin working on their reports.  This is kind of scary to thing about, we have been in school for 29 days and we are going to attempt to write and possibly type a report!  Thinking positive, happy thoughts!!

On Thursday, I had my students complete one more activity for Random Acts of Kindness.  When they arrived at school, I had 2 post-it notes waiting for them on their desks.  They were to write two different random acts of kindness that they could perform.  There were many cute ideas posted to our chart!  We are also going to keep a chart "Our Random Acts of Kindness!" in our classroom.  Each time a student does a random act of kindness, they will get to write their name and what their random act of kindness was and post it on our chart.  We are up to two random acts of kindness, hoping to get a few more each week!

Our word of the day for Thursday was good listener.  This is a citizenship trait that my students selected.  This is something that a handful of my students have a hard time doing.  This year, I have a very chatty bunch of students. We had a long discussion on ways that we can show that we can be a good listener.  It is amazing that they can recite all of things that they are suppose to be doing at school but have difficulty actually doing it!

On Friday, we completed the last two words in our citizenship journal.  I was suppose to start explaining and having my students start the writing process but knew that this was going to be difficult to do on a Friday.  Plus, I didn't want to have to reteach the same writing lesson on Monday, I could already hear them saying "What are we suppose to do?".  Our first word of the day was loyalty.  I have found many amazing citizenship books at the local library, this has made it much easier to explain each word of the day to my students.  The main idea that my students understood about loyalty was that you care for your friends and family when they need you.  Since this was our last day of journal writing, I decided to get all of them in a picture!  

Our final citizenship word was fairness.  To help my students understand about fairness, I gave two of my students tootsie rolls.  One of my students only received 1 tootsie roll, the other student received 5.  I had my students discuss if this was fair or not fair and why.  They all thought that it was not fair and that the student who had 5 tootsie rolls had to give back 4 of them.  We then proceeded to write in our journals for the last time.

I am a little scared about starting such a big writing piece with them next week.  I feel that they will have a great start to writing an excellent report based on the pages that they completed in their journals!  I think that I have finally made up my mind as to how I'm going to have my students write their reports.  I am going to start them out writing about why they think that good citizenship is important to their community.  Then they will have to pick out between 3-5 words and write a paragraph about each word.  I'm thinking that our paragraphs are only going to be 3 sentences, which is something that the majority of my students can do.  Then we will work on our closing paragraph.  This process is going to take a lot of time and effort from both my students and myself.  I cannot wait to share this writing experience and my reflection of this entire module with you!  

Have a great rest of your weekend!
Amber

The Continuation of Our LDC Project

This week has been crazy busy for me but then again every week since we started school has been this way.  I meant to do a post on Tuesday describing the beginning of our week completing our LDC project but something terrible happened and I was too hurt and angry to concentrate on anything.  So on to our LDC project.

On Monday, our word of the day was on respect.  My students did an amazing job writing about respect in their journals.  Today was the day that I described our final project, our report to my students.  I told them that their report is going to have to inform others about why and how good citizenship can affect our community.  We also went on an informational poster walk through the school.  They had so much fun finding all of the informational posters that are all around the school, when they saw something that could be an informational poster they would have to raise their hand.  I even had them take pictures of the posters that we saw!  This will hopefully help them when it comes time to start our report writing and illustration next week.  My plan is to have all of my students type their report and then we will bind them all into a classroom book.  We will see how this plan goes!!

On Tuesday, our word of the day was kindness.  My students are really starting to get the hang of their journal writing!!  They have been taking great pride in their work, especially now that I have figured out how to add amazing graphics to the collages and they all want to get their picture taken with their work now, I only choose the top 3 or 4 for each topic.  We talked about how we feel when others show us kindness.  This lesson worked well and was a great starting point for our talk about Random Acts of Kindness!!

On Wednesday, our word of the day was caring.  This was a word that my students came up with for our journals!  Our writing for today was very similar to our writing from Tuesday because of how similar our words were but at least they know what our word means.  This is also my favorite day of our LDC project so far!  Our entire day was around the them Spreading Random Acts of Kindness!  We found a book SPRAK! on www.readinga-z.com that is an amazing story!  After each "chapter", I had my students tell me the random act of kindness that was featured in it.  I have had many amazing donors to my projects on www.donorschoose.org.  Many of the donations to my projects have been random acts of kindness, I have never met these donors but yet they believe in my projects and want to help my students succeed!  This is an amazing organization, so I had the idea that as a class, we would spread our own random act of kindness to one of the projects on DonorsChoose!  It was so cute to see my students as we tried to pick a project!!  If you have ever done a project on DonorsChoose, it is true that your profile picture and you quick 1 sentence write-up on what your students need is very important.  My students were so quick to say "NO" based on the picture or that write-up.  I guess I'll have to have my students screen my upcoming projects before I submit them.

Next week our project takes a turn and we start to focus on our end result, a report describing how being a good citizen will affect your community.  I've never done a report before with first graders so I know that next week is going to be an adventure!  Also we will get to see our butterflies!

 Tomorrow is Friday!!

Amber

LDC Days 3 & 4

Last week I started my LDC module.  Things are starting to run a little smoother with it.  We were able to complete 4 days last week, we had a assembly for a fundraiser that as during our Science/Social Studies block so now my module has been pushed back a day.

For Day 3, we began our talk on what citizenship mean.  All day, I would remind my students of the choices that they were making.  My students were learning about how their choices can affect others.  We also talked about rules/laws that we have in our communities.  Many of the laws/rules were ones that we are to follow at school.  It is amazing how they have difficulties following some of our rules but they can tell you every rule that they are suppose to be following!

Our Journal Entries from Day 3!

Day 4: This was the day that we talked about being responsible and about consequences.  We talked about what we can do at school to be responsible.  We discussed that we you do your chores or homework, you are responsible.  Consequences was a little harder to talk about.  I had my students talk with a buddy on the carpet about a time that they didn't follow a rule/listen at home and what happened.  We also tried to talk about when they were rewarded for something that they did, most of them talked about a time when they told on a sibling, when they were not doing the right thing.  Oh well, at least we tried!

Journal Entries From Day 4! My students are getting better at their journal writing.

This week should be an exciting week.  Hopefully we will finish learning about citizenship and how we can be better citizens in our communities.  We should also be the proud parents of butterflies in the next week!  Some of our caterpillars were starting to go into their chrysalis on Friday, hopefully the rest did so over the weekend!  They have been so excited watching our tiny caterpillars double and triple in size everyday!

Amber

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

TGIF!

I don't know about you but this week was exhausting and very crazy!  For only have 4 days of school this week, I spent more time at school than I do for a normal 5-day week.  Today, I was at school for 11 hours, the sad thing is I have a ton of things to get done this weekend.

I should have known that this week was going to be rough from the minute I stepped into my room Tuesday morning.  During the long weekend, I have a visitor that decided to spend some time in my awesome room.  My visitor was a small snake!  Yes, I said snake, this was the fourth snake in my hallway during the last week.  Fortunately, my "what stuck" exit ticket poster fell off the wall and the snake was stuck to the tape!  I don't like snakes & didn't feel comfortable in my room all day, everything on the floor would freak me out.

My students have also lost/broke 3 of my hall passes this week.  Last year, I created a really cute hall pass system that are made from clothespins.  I made the switch to clothespins because I no longer have a bathroom in my room and wanted something that wouldn't end up in a toilet.  My students are suppose to clip them to their shirt when they leave and hang them back up when they get back.  I don't know how many times over the past year they have been left in the bathroom.  For some strange reason, my students think that they need to take them off to wash their hands.  I am currently looking for a new system to use and hopefully start next week.

Super cute and easy to make.  If you haven't figured it out yet, I have a major obsession with teal & hot pink!

The best past of the week was when my DonorsChoose project was funded yesterday!  I was amazed as to the amount of people that supported my project and how quickly it was funded.  This project was for stability ball chairs.  I decided to try and get these for my classroom when the class across the hall got them last year.  Some of my students were in her room one day and they were actually doing their work quietly and were focused!  These are the students who need constant redirection and encouragement to get anything done.  To see what my project looked like, here is the link. http://www.donorschoose.org/project/sit-and-bounce/1003063/.  This is an amazing project and can't wait to see what it will do with my very active group of first graders.  They are constantly moving around and can't sit still!  I guess it was a good thing that I did this project.

Time to finish sewing two pillows for my reading center!  I can't wait to show you what I've been working on.

Amber

My Author's Chair

I've been super busy the past two weeks getting ready for school.  Last Monday was our first day of school.  I've been teaching for 9 1/2 years and every year the first week of school does not get any easier.  Just when I think I have everything ready to go, something new happens and throws me for a loop.  This year, we had to start our Reading 3-D testing on the first day of school!  We only have 3 weeks to complete Dibels & TRC on all of our students.  I am also losing 3 days of testing due to a training that I must complete for my school.  This means that I have 6 days to finish my testing!  I can say that I survived the first week of school and it turned out to be a pretty good week!  

The past week, I've been working on my Author's Chair.  A co-worker gave me this chair during our mandatory work week, she has had it for a couple of years and it has been taking up space in her room.  She saw the chairs I've made for my reading center and thought that I could fix it up.  

This is the before picture.  This chair needs a lot of love!

After I finished painting!  But I'm still not done!

Now this is what I call an author's chair!  What first grader (or anyone) wouldn't want to sit on this?!?

Now you are probably wondering how I made something so amazing.  My first step was to paint the chair.  I got my paint from Home Depot.  They sell paint samples for less than $3 for a 7 oz can.  I had more than enough paint for this chair.  Wait til you see what I used my leftover paint on!  Since I used wall paint and was not sure how it would hold up on my chair, I decided to seal it with a sealer.  The sealer gave my chair a nice glossy finish.  Next, I had to sew my pillow/cushion.  It is amazing how many things I can create just by using a simple base stitch.  After I stuffed my pillow, I attached a teal boa, they have tons of colors at Hobby Lobby.  I sewed the boa around the edges of my pillow.  The boa was too long for my pillow, so I had to cut it to size.  I'm glad that I waited until after I finished sewing it on.  The end of the boa started shedding like crazy!  I super glued the cut end to make it stop.  This was a fairly simple project to do, it was just time consuming because I had to wait for the paint to dry, and having to apply multiple coats didn't help.  

I love my author's chair and cannot wait to share it with my class tomorrow!  

Amber