Smokey The Bear & Science Experiments

This afternoon was crazy.  We had a visit from Smokey the Bear.  Only my class would ask Smokey if he had any kids.  They also asked constantly if he was fake.  At the end of the presentation, my class took a group picture with Smokey the Bear!

This week, we have been studying about Forces & Motion.  Well, at least that is what they were suppose to be covering with the substitute teacher.  Today, we began our experiment.  I wrote a grant on DonorsChoose, requesting a Forces & Motion Activity Kit and some nonfiction books.  We started an experiment using the ramp and objects that could roll down the ramps.  Today we watched as a toy car and a marble rolled down the ramps.  My students the wrote about their findings.  Tomorrow, we are going to continue our experiment using bouncy balls and whatever else I can find tonight that will roll down a ramp.  

Tomorrow is Friday!!  Our plans for tomorrow include spelling tests, hoping to get a few more students finished writing their citizenship reports (fingers crossed), math review on equal equations, addition/subtraction and word problems), and more science fun.  Time to start planning for next week, lots and lots of pumpkins!!

Amber

Writing, Typing, and Sub Plans

Today and tomorrow I will be sitting through more LDC training, trying to perfect our module on citizenship.  We made some changes to the order that our module should be taught.  It was a relief to find out that the majority of our students all struggled with knowing what a community is.  One more day of training and then it will be time to get everything ready to present to the staff at my school.

Yesterday, technology was not my friend.  My flash drive that I have been saving my students' citizenship reports on vanished!  It was difficult to tell some of my students that they were going to have to start over with their writing but we will make it work!  This morning I find out that the SmartNotebook files I made for my sub did not save on the flash drive that I left for my sub.  Nothing like finding out as you are about to leave.  I made a new one for tomorrow and emailed it to a co-worker.  This file is not going to be lost!!

My students are still working on typing their reports for our LDC module.  I now have only 2 or 3 students that still need to work on their rough draft!  I decided to have the 2 students of mine that are finished to help 2 students with their writing.  One, of them was writing what a student wrote on her paper but I couldn't figure out what in the world she wrote.  All I saw was a lot of letters and no spaces!  My other student was to help bounce ideas off of a student who wasn't doing much writing, I can tell that he doesn't like to write and appears to be putting off writing his report.  

Hoping for no technology issues tomorrow!!  I almost forgot, I finally found time to fix the mistake in the citizenship journal I made for my students.  You can pick up this freebie here!  http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/My-Citizenship-Journal-927515

Amber

Our Week in Review

I wanted to blog sooner about our week but I have not been feeling well.  It is a combination of bad allergies and the flu.  Needless to say, I spent the majority of my weekend in bed.

This week, we have been working a lot on our LDC reports.  I now have 2 students that are finished!!  The majority of my students are typing/waiting for a computer.  It is sad that I cannot have access to enough computers for my class of 17.  I only have about 5 that are still writing.  I'm hoping that my students will finish their reports this week so that we can have an author's celebration on Friday.  This week, I have two more days of LDC training.  I am in the process of fixing changing some things on my LDC so that I can share it with you.  I also have two minor changes before I can share the journal that I created for our project.  I'm thinking that this will be a freebie in my teacherspayteachers store.

Two of our finished reports!  I promise that all I did was fix the spelling.

Last week in Math, we were working on shapes.  My students were busy composing and decomposing shapes.  We also spent some time comparing shapes.  Trying to get my first graders to use the words angles, edges, and vertice instead of corners and sides was a challenge.  At least they are not saying points and lines anymore.  Yes, there is a teacher that considers points & lines math terms.

What better way to compose shapes that by using pattern blocks.

The local fire station came to our school on Friday.  My students had fun looking at all of the things that they brought with.  Yes, my students were allowed to work the fire hose.

This week, we will be learning about Columbus, spiders, balancing equations, and forces of motion.  Time to finish writing my sub plans for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Amber

Writing Our Reports!

We have spent the entire week writing our LDC Citizenship Reports.  Some of my students will be finished tomorrow, I was hoping that almost all of my students would be finished but this is not going to happen.  I currently have 4 students that are typing their reports.  One of my students actually finished typing his report today.  I read his report to him and we fixed some spelling errors.  The only things that I am fixing for them are spelling errors and making sure that each sentence starts with a capital letter, it is a little hard for them to remember how to make a capital letter when they type.  I don't want to fix everything because I want their reports to look like they wrote them.  Tomorrow, I will be meeting with small groups of students during literacy centers to help them with their writing.  I've noticed that I'm going to have to write for some students as they dictate to me their report.  It looks like I am going to be having some students finishing writing/typing their reports next week during our literacy centers.

Tomorrow, we will be releasing our butterflies.  I am proud to announce that all of our caterpillars transformed into beautiful butterflies!!  

This weekend is going to be crazy, I have to get everything fixed from my LDC module and get my examples ready to bring to my training on October 15th & 16th.  I'm a little bit nervous about sharing what I did with my class.  I guess I shouldn't be since I've been sharing my module here!!  I also have to get a presentation ready for November 4th.  I have to present my LDC module during our staff meeting, I am the only one that has to share that day.  I guess I more nervous about that meeting since the other teachers that have been going through the training get to go on other days and not the only one.  Time to start planning for next week.  Next week, we will be working on spiders, forces & motion, and math review (balancing equations, fact families, & place value).  I'm hoping to blog again over the weekend about the materials that I will be using next week.

Amber

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