Week 10

Daily 5 is in full swing folks!!! I have been so excited to get through all roll-outs of each component and become familiar with the steps/expectations so that we can get to gaining independence! Since we now know it all, the students have begun to pick their OWN order for the day!!! If they're working on some writing they're excited about, they can choose it first! If they just can't wait to Read with Someone, hey! Choose it first! 
We made cards that correspond with each component.

They are color coded so that we are sure we don't have too many people working on one project at a time (i.e. 10 people choose Listen to Reading and there just aren't enough devices for them). 

Each morning, they will choose their order! When we begin D5, they dismiss and get started all on their own! At the sound of the gong, they clean up, switch their card to the back of the pile, and get started right away on what's next! I am so, so impressed with the amount of quality literacy time they spend each day! These kids are thriving being in charge of what they do :)
Check out the picture below of them all working on different projects at the same time!

We also added a new concept to our phonics instruction this week - compound words! In addition to fingertapping and spelling them, we have been doing tons of Word Work with them, including writing them on our own, making them up, and creating broken up words for our friends to put back together :)

Week 9

We have launched our 5th and final component of The Daily 5 this week - Listen to Reading!!!

See our expectations, goals and behaviors below! The students can choose to listen on computers or read and follow along with a book at a tape station! (Yes, cassette tapes) ;) They have really enjoyed it! This week, since our story was a fable, we listened to fables online and there are some Halloween-y books at the tape station!

Below are a some pictures of us working on "Read With Someone" with our new readers that Mrs. Bortle ordered for us!!! Thank you Mrs. Bortle!!! These allow students to read books together at different levels and practice, practice, practice :)

Week 8

Parents!
I'm so sorry I've gotten behind on this blog! First grade is a busy place :)

Ok so Week 8 was great!!!

We started working on addition in math! We did a partner project with unifix cubes to show related addition facts. The students picked an addition sentence and had to build it together.

They wrote it down and then switched the addends and built it again! 

The point was to illustrate that it does not matter which order the addends are in for addition, you will get the same sum both ways. It also taught us that these are called "related addition facts." We shared our findings after we did our partner work!

Wednesday was an exciting and busy day for us! We had our pictures taken in the morning and then had a special visitor from ACC Water Conservation - Ms. Laurie Loftin!
Laurie came to remind us about how special water is and what a gift it is to us (going along with our Religion lessons about God's gift's)!

She had some really great lessons about keeping water safe, respecting it, using it wisely and a wonderful (DELICIOUS) demonstration about how we use water every day and sometimes don't even think about it! She brought in uncooked pasta, jello powder, grapes, and hot chocolate mix. She presented it to the kids and asked who would like to eat it! (A few brave souls DID try a raw noodle) :)

The kids had to figure out what they needed to make all of these yummy things they eat taste better - WATER!!! When we returned from pictures, Ms. Laurie had a delicious snack all ready for us, and all because of water :)

At the end of the day, we got to go to the Fall Festival T-shirt reveal announcement! Not only did we enjoy it, we found out that we guessed the correct color! WOOOOOO!