We have been so busy that I haven't had a second to catch my breath and let you in on all of our learning over the past couple days. In Math, we did our first and second MAP tests. These tests give the school and teachers some pretty amazing data about where students are at academically and how to push them further. We also continued to reinforce the skill of composing and segmenting numbers to 10. Today we played a game with 10 pennies (although you could use anything at home if you are going to reinforce this skill). We worked in pairs where one partner would put some of the pennies under the plate, and some on top. The other student had to work out how many pennies were hidden under the plate by using either addition or subtraction skills. Pictures provided below. In Language Arts, we are working on constructing a sentence with nouns and verbs. Yesterday, we cut different nouns out that were people, places, things, and animals, and sorted them (pictures below). Today we came up with a list of creatures and created sentences about them. Some were quite happy, and some were rather scary. We also learned about using adjectives to spruce up our sentences, we learned how we can use them to describe size, shape, smell, personality, appearance, taste, etc. We will continue to work on this skill throughout the year. Please make sure that your child is using adjectives when they write in our class journals. Today we began our Life Cycles Unit of Inquiry. The strategy we used to begin the unit is called "Picture Priorities". It asks students to rank, sequence and/or make sense of a series of pictures as a way of helping them to consider what they already know and/or how they feel about a topic. I think this strategy is fantastic because it gets kids thinking! It's a great way to assess their prior knowledge. We gave the students the pictures along with a large piece of paper on which to order the pictures and record their thoughts. I didn't tell them anything about the content of the pictures; I wanted to leave it totally to their interpretations. My directions were, "I'm giving your group a set of pictures, Your job is to figure out how they go together in a meaningful way. Share your thinking and then you must agree on how to arrange them on the paper." This got our little ones thinking! We walked around the room to monitor and make sure that all group members were contributing their ideas. Once groups came to a consensus about the order of their pictures, I asked them to write one of their thoughts, anything really, about 1 or all of the pictures. Many of them chose to break this task up by having each person in the group write a sentence about one of the pictures. I got the groups to share their posters with the class and debrief the strategy they picked. When we debriefed, I asked "How did your thinking change while you were arranging the pictures?" Some students shared that they recognized that the pictures were all part of a cycle, whereas some students did not have any prior knowledge and they really had to think about it. We drew the arrows together to make it part of the cycle. After this, we discussed what things are living and what are not. We decided that living things grow, eat drink, breath and reproduce. We went for a walk around campus and took a look for 4 living things, and 4 non-living things that we could see. I have attached some photos of our discovery.
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ASA First GradersWe are caring, balanced , reflective, openminded, risk-taking, knowledgeable, principled, thinkers, communicators, inquirers, explorers and learners. Mr. Mason McCormickI am: a husband, teacher, friend, researcher, grad student, mulitliteracies specialist, designer, social media fanatic, lover of all things tech, creative, and progressive. I am an energetic, life-loving, no-nonsense person; passionate about respectful, rigorous, and relevant teaching and learning in the 21st century.
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