Week 3

Another exciting week in first grade down!

While learning about God, what He gives us, and why He is good, we read The Our Father and talked about what all of those fancy, old words meant :)

We also did another fun math project together! The day before the project, we started to learn the concept of "getting rid of extra information" in a math word problem. The book had us circling in red, crossing out in blue, underlining in orange... Ahhhh it was too much! So we decided to try again the next day and work together to figure it out! Students were each given a sentence of a word problem. They had to find their group (by color) and put their sentences in order. They then had to read the problem together and take away the extra information! Once they did, they reread the problem and solved it! We traded sentences and were able to do 3 problems in small groups before discussing all together! It made so much more sense today!

Another day this week, we reviewed "number order"! The students were each given a number card that showed 3 representations of the number. They had to walk around, talk to one another, and find their sequence of numbers! After they found their correct bunch, they had to put themselves in order with the rest of the numbers, lowest to highest! Great work and great teamwork!!!

Week 2

What another great week it's been! 
We have been super busy in math lately - here are some things we have been reviewing!

We completed a project together that took so many steps! We wanted to know how we could make the longest, 2 color pattern possible with all of the unifix cubes we have. We decided that the first thing we should do is divide them up into different groups by color!

Then, we decided we better count them to see which groups had the most!

Then, we reported our findings!

We narrowed it down to the 2 biggest numbers so we could make the longest pattern possible! We then worked all together to build it, and counted 124 blocks in our red/black pattern! (Go Dawgs!?! Totally not on purpose even!)

We've added a new activity to our phonics instruction as well: the sand trays!!! This activity is a great way to hit the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles to help different learners AND to reinforce what we learn to our brain in so many different ways!

Week 1

These first 8 days flew by!!! We got started learning the "ways" of Miss Napoli ;) our classroom and school. While I was busy giving the students 1,000,000 assessments, they worked hard all week!

We did a lot to get ready for our phonics instruction! Check out our vowel tents! We use these to practice identifying vowel sounds in real and made-up words just about every day!

We also made up a set of classroom rules based on respect! We brainstormed people and things we should respect at our school in a main idea web (also the target strategy for our reading that week). This is what we came up with:

Pretty awesome, huh!? They had some great ideas!
Next we narrowed it down to the most important ones, and made them fit with R-E-S-P-E-C-T in an acrostic set of rules :) These are posted at the front of our room so we are reminded throughout the day!

We started working on building our stamina for our Daily 5 Rotations this week also! They worked so hard to improve their concentration time every day! (See chart below)! We mastered the first D5 - Read to Self with ease! Check out what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and what we should look like reading to ourselves below: