Thank you to all of the parents who came out for student-led conferences. It was great to see how our little learners were able to independently show you what they have learned! Speaking of learning, we completed our first MAP test on Wednesday morning. The results that this test rendered confirmed our thoughts on the amazing improvements that our students have made. While we are still waiting for the official data, the original print outs, are something to be proud of. Dr. Amy, Soa and I are so impressed by the improvement rate shown by the data. Thanks for making sure that your child had a good night's sleep, and a big breakfast before this test! Aside from all of this outside excitement, we have been having fun trudging on with our in class learning. In Math, we have been learning about fractions as equal parts of a whole. We have been matching written fractions to pictures, and have been reading, writing and colouring a variety of fractions from 1 whole to eighths. In Language Arts, we have been learning about the 'voice' writing trait. We read the story 'Yesterday I Had the Blues' by Jeron Ashfrod Frame. To a large extent, writing with voice means writing with emotion. A young mother's memoir about having a baby may be joyful. A commuter's editorial about rising gasoline prices may be angry. A soldier's letter from the front lines may be cheerful, but tinged with sadness and even fear. Yesterday I Had the Blues is full of emotion, as described by a young boy who starts out with the blues, but winds up with the "greens" (hopeful). But his daddy has the "grays" (tense), his mama has the "reds" (annoyed), his sister has the "pinks" (cheerful), and so forth. By the end, we realize that what the boy truly has is a real family with real feelings. As a class, we talked about our feelings, and the different colours that they could be represented by. We then asked our students to put their ideas down on paper. It was amazing to see how colourful their voices were! During our UOI time, we have been working on comparing community helpers, discussing ways that they are the same, and ways that they are different. We have also been considering what type of a helper that we want to be when we are older. The photos below display our ambitions. With that said, we did talk about how there are many jobs we don't even know about, and that being happy with our jobs and our lives is very important. read aloud of Yesterday I Had the Blues begins at 15:19
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Sorry for the delayed blog post. It has been a very busy week! We celebrated Malagasy culture, prepared for student let conferences, and had our International Food Fair. Thanks to all of the families who were able to make it to these events! We have also been busy learning. We spent a great deal of time in Math, working on making change, and have begun a week long unit on Fractions. We have been learning about, cutting, and sharing things equally. At home this week, please have your child cut things into pieces, share objects amongst yourselves or their siblings, and discuss everyday objects that are broken into equal shares. (For example, I am looking at my window frame, and television stand currently). Continue to help your child learn about change by giving them small amounts of money and having them buy things from the local shops around. I do, however, understand how difficult this is using Ariary as even small amounts of money are still large denominations. In Language Arts, we have really gotten into the 'voice trait' of writing. We have been discussing the different voices that are used in familiar stories. We have been learning that words and pictures help us convey our voice in our writing. Today we read the story 'Dog Breath'. The voice was silly. We thought of our own silly ideas and each wrote our own way that the children in the story could help the dog, Hally, get rid of her bad breath. Our Unit of Inquiry time continues to be focused on community places, helpers, and their tools/responsibilities. Today we sorted pictures, and descriptions of each different helpers into categories. We will begin to take a closer look at our school helpers later in the week. Tomorrow we are holding student-led conferences. If you have yet to sign up for a slot, I suggest you do so here We have had a wonderful time celebrating culture week. I am proud to announce that the grade 1 culture week flag was the school winner. Our little ones are VERY proud of themselves and their hard team work! They also looked so lovely in their cultural clothes. In Math, we have been working with coins again, this time on making change. We opened our 'school store' and have been taking turns 'buying things' and working as the clerk to provide change. The students are getting much better at this skill, but it requires a great deal of practice. I encourage you to let your child manage some money at local shops, to see why these types of transactions are meaningful. We have also been looking at place value, identifying numbers in the ones, tens, and hundreds place, and using this knowledge to add and subtract two digit numbers, without regrouping. We have been asking students word problems with these numbers, in order for them to better understand how Math is applicable in their everyday lives. In Language Arts, we have been learning about making text-to-world connections. We read the story 'The Great Kapok Tree' and were able to come up with some many great connections using the knowledge we have about the world. During our Unit of Inquiry Lessons, we have moved beyond being good citizens and identifying our communities. We are now talking about the buildings in our communities, the people who work/live there, and the tools they use. We began by identifying helpers and researching their jobs to find out adjectives that describe how they are, verbs that describe what they can do, and nouns that each helper has. We rotated through a variety of helpers on posters, and used post it notes to write down our newly acquired knowledge. We also played a game where cards with helpers, and tools were distributed evenly to students, they had to spin a spinner, and when it landed on a helper that matched their cards, they had to discard them on the building where the helper works. The student to discard all of their cards was the winner. This was a great game-based collaborative learning opportunity. We have been really busy working with time and money in Math. We learned how to use dollar bills and talked about the notes we use in Madagascar. We have also been learning about how the minute hand moves around the clock, counting by 5s on each of the numbers. We were delighted on Friday to have Thierry Ramaroson (Tiago's Father) come in and speak to us about his role in the community. He owns and operates a soap factory, and employs over 700 local employees. He talked about the soap making process, and the importance of buying local in order to support your community. Our little learners were so fascinated by the process, that we are making a plan to visit the factory and see how soap is made. We loved feeling and smelling the different soaps too! In English Language Arts, we continued to look at text-to-text connections. I could tell that all of our little ones are reading and being read to at home. They made some awesome connections to stories I have never heard; many of them in your native languages. During our UOI time, we talked about the differences between our home, school, neighbourhood, city, country and global communities. We watched videos and discussed how we can be a good citizen in all of them. Today we took another look at American coins. While I have discussed with many of you how this skill may not seem important to non-American children, and children living abroad, the skills coins teach are essential. Students use coins to move from counting between 10s, 5s, and 1s, and also understand the fraction of a quarter of 100. In our first grade class, we don't talk about the importance of the people and places on the coins, but rather on their value.
After 'buying' some objects, trading coins, and showing different amounts of money using coins, we returned to work on building mathematical fluency by recalling single digit addition and subtraction facts. The class was broken up into small groups, and played games where they were required to quickly recall facts. After break, we took our edited copies of our 'What If Everybody Did That?' (a book on good citizenship at school, home and in our communities) pages and typed them up in the computer lab. Once we were finished, we illustrated our pages. They will be bound together into a class book, that you child may sign out to take home to you beginning next week. We had a fantastic day today! It began by reviewing the attributes of different 3D figures. Students worked individually or in pairs to build 3D shapes using toothpicks as the edges and playdough as the vertices. This was a great way to really see student understanding. Many of them then created composite shapes by adding two shapes together. This was a lot of fun. In Language Arts, we read two stories today and began to learn what a text-to-text connection is (when one book/story reminds us of another one). We read the stories 'More Than Anything Else' and 'Thank You Mr. Falker.' Both of these stories are about learning how to read, a topic we could all relate to. We began to look for similarities between the two stories. For our unit of inquiry, we had our first community member come to visit; Candice Cipullo (we called her Mrs. C/Kevin's Mom, if that is what you hear at home). Candice is a very talent music teacher. She brought in instruments for all of the students to play different rhythms with, we sang songs, danced, and learned. Our little learners had an AWESOME time! We will definitely be asking her to join us for songs again in the near future. After Mrs. C. left, we re-read the story 'What If Everybody Did That?' and began to write our own class book about why it is important to be good citizens.
We had a wonderful time listening to reading today and making text-to-self connections to the story 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.' As stated in the newsletter, both at home and school, I am hoping that our focus can be on listening to reading by an adult, and working on comprehension, vocabulary building and making connections to reading. In Math, we continued to learn about shapes. Today we searched for pictures of different shapes around the room, identifying if they were 2D or 3D as well as identifying different attributes like faces, sides, vertices, and angles. We continued to talk about citizenship during our UOI period. Tomorrow we are hoping to begin writing a class book based on the story 'If Everyone Did That.' We will have to see if we have enough time though, because we have two very exciting parent guests coming in to talk about their roles in our community. We are very excited! On Friday, we carried on learning about 3D shapes. We focused on the different attributes that 3D shapes have, and counted each shapes faces, edges, and vertices. We learned that faces and edges can be straight or curved. After that, we split up into 3 centres. One centre focused on creating 3D shapes using playdough, one centre focused on naming 3D shapes through a game of slides and ladders, and one centre focused on touching 3D shapes and counting their faces, edges and vertices. This was a lot of fun!
In Language Arts, we finished our activities on the 'ion' suffixes. This was the last set of sounds that we needed to learn for phonics this year. We will be reviewing all sounds through daily guided reading, and our writing. Miss Soa and I are so impressed by the decoding that our little learners can do now that they know all of their sounds and blends. During our UOI block, we discussed and made a list of different ways that we can be super citizens at school, at home, and in our neighbourhood. Please continue to discuss responsible citizenship at home with your child. During our reflection period this week, we began to learn how to successfully complete multiple choice tests, as our MAP testing is coming up at the end of the month. We used the acronym DAB. Determine what the question is asking Ask yourself what can be eliminated choose the Best answer We then went down to the computer lab to do some practice tests, reinforcing many of the language skills that we have learned so far this year. We had a great day full of fun and game based learning activities. We started this morning by reviewing the names of 3D shapes, and went outside for a shape hunt, to find 3D shapes running around to find the different shapes that were called out. We cooled down inside after by practicing some mental subtraction using flash cards. Some of our little learners really know their facts by heart! After completing our Daily 5 activities, we sat together to learn the 'shun' sound the is spelled with 'sion,' 'tion,' and 'cian'. We began rotating through 3 centres. Once centre focuses on how many syllables are in each of these long 'tion' words. Once centre is a vocabulary building, and reading game with Miss Soa, and the last centre is a sorting and writing activity with these words. Each small group worked through one centre today. Tomorrow we will be completing the other two. During our UOI period today, we read the story 'What If Everybody Did That." I have posted a youtube reading of it below. We talked about how good citizens follow rules, and what would happen if we all broke them. We will be doing a re-read of this tomorrow, and thinking of other kinds of chaos that may go on ...if everybody did that. We will also be writing a response about how to be good citizens in our families, at school, and in our neighbourhoods. We enjoyed a great deal of time learning outdoors today, which was nice as the weather is getting cooler. This morning we learned the names of 3D shapes and how to identify them by faces, edges and vertices. We went out to the playground and went on a hunt for different shapes. It was a lot of fun. After Math and Daily 5, we had our most difficult phonics lesson of the year, reading the many different sounds that 'ough' makes. We focused on the long and short 'o' sounds, the 'uff' and the 'ow' sounds. These are the most prominent of the 9 sounds these letters make when together. In order to practice reading different words that have 'ough' in them, we went outside and played a game of 'ough' twister. It was a great way to read, get moving, and have fun! Please enjoy the attached pictures of our little ones contorting themselves in order to reach different words with their hands and feet. Some of the words we were reading were: enough, rough, tough, though, thought, brought, bought, cough, trough, fought, and dough. Practice reading these tricky words at home with your child. When we returned inside after stretching ourselves out, we read a book about communities around the world, and discussed the many different communities that we are a part of; classroom, school, family, clubs, religious, neighbourhood, country and global. After identifying our different communities, we discussed what a citizen is, and came up with a long list of qualities that super citizens have in all communities. We are all striving to be super citizens, at home, school, and in our neighbourhoods. |
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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