This morning we came back refreshed from a relaxing weekend. It was so nice seeing all of our well rested students this morning. We wrapped up the month of August, but counting all of the days of the month using ordinal numbers (first, second third...). We are excited to start September tomorrow. Together, we ordered numbers from 0-20. Remember when you are working with numbers or practicing counting skills at home to start with 0 and not one. This will assist your child in the future in math. After working with written numbers, we learned about tallies. We discussed why we use tallies (to collect data quickly), and why we cross the 5th tally (to make it easier to read, and add up later). As a class, we tallied our favorite foods, and pets we have at home. Practice tallying things at home, such as outcomes of rock-paper-scissors, or rolling a dice. In Language Arts, we reviewed the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes by watching the alpha blocks. These videos can be found on youtube and are a fun way for your child to interact with phonics. Please see the attached video. Afterwards, we continued to work on reading stamina, we are at 5 minutes now! Following our reading, we learned the 7 high-frequency words that we will master this week: a, you, I, little, find, see, two. Please work on these at home nightly until your child can read them. Try searching for these words in your child's home reading book, or bedtime story. High-frequency words make up the majority of the words a child will read. If your child can recognize these words easily, they will be able to focus less on decoding and more on comprehension. During our UOI time, we read the book, "The Crayon Box that Talked." This book is about differences and diversity. It shows children that life is better with more colors, and when we cooperate we are capable of making a beautiful picture. Students were then instructed to draw the same picture using just one colour, and one using many (where the crayons cooperated). Here is an example of how they turned out. Life is just better with many colours who work together. Once we completed this activity, we made a "friendship web." students were asked to say one thing that they liked (place, games, sport, activity), and then find someone who enjoyed the same thing as them. When they found someone that had a similar interest, they passed them the string. The string continued to get passed along the class into quite the tangled web. This showed us that while we are all different, there are many similarities that connect us in our classroom community. You can see photos of our web of interests below.
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We ended our week wonderfully today with stories, videos, games, and the friendship picnic that we have been anticipating all week. In this mornings math, we practiced counting, and working with the calendar. It is amazing how far along our first graders have come in only 7.5 days of school. We are so proud. The first graders then played a game called 'Top It' against the teachers; they won! After learning how to play, they found a friend to work with, and played in partners. They really enjoyed this game. We recommend you play it at home. It is great for both number recognition and value. After recess we prepared for our 'Making Friends Picnic' by reading the story 'Please Say Please.' This is a story about different animals learning about how to use their manners at a dinner party. After discussing that good friends use manners, and share, we took our games and snacks outside for sharing, on our picnic blankets. Again, I want to thank all of the families for providing wonderful snacks to share from your culture. Everything was delicious, and the students got to learn a lot about differences, and how they should be embraced. (They were particularly happy to embrace foods from different cultures.) All of the students in first grade did a wonderful job sharing, taking turns, and using manners. It was a pleasure. We began this morning telling number stories involving one more and one less (+1/-1). Students took turns telling stories in the middle of the room, while the rest of us worked in pairs to figure out which way to move on the number line. We learned that we move right when adding, and left when taking away. After this, we moved back to our desks to tell more stories in partners. Your children came up with some very creative stories. In Language Arts, we continued to discuss who reads, what good readers look like, why people read, and where we can read texts. We talked about what 'building stamina means' in regards to reading on task. I have attached a picture below of our stamina chart, we are working towards reading independantly for 10 minutes. Once we are able to do this, we will "unlock the next level" of the daily 5. The students are excited about their progress, and we are building stamina each day. As part of our Friendship unit of inquiry, we are learning about being accepting, openminded, and caring. Today we read the story 'The Colors of Us'. It is about a girl who walks around her neighborhood with her artist mother, looking at all the beautiful skin tones that her friends (big and small) have. When the girl goes home, she paints lovely portraits of them all with the many different colours she mixes, that make them unique. We discussed how cultural differences enrich our lives, and how even through we all look different, we can all still be friends. To the left, you can see a picture of the colors of first grade. We concluded this by learning about what adjectives are, and generating a list of adjectives that we think make a good friend. We began our day by practicing how to write our numbers from 1-4 using white boards. We used number rhymes to help us (see youtube video below). When we were finished we practiced writing them in our Math journals. Upon completion of writing our numbers, we got to move around the class to the many different mats and objects to count. We practiced counting the objects, and wrote how many we thought there were on the whiteboard. Here are some pictures of us counting. In Language Arts, we continued talking about reading, and implementing the Daily 5. Students picked places in the room where they could read independently. We reviewed the 3 ways to read a book, and talked about building reading stamina. (Photo at top of page) During our UOI time, we talked about how friends have similar and different interests. Using picture cards, we made Venn diagrams, plotting foods, activities, and toys that just one of us liked, or both of us liked. We learned that even though we like different things, we can still be friends! Today we continued to discuss the 3 ways to read a book, with a focus on reading the words. We read the words in the book that we read the pictures from yesterday. We discussed similarities between the pictures and the words, as well as differences. This activity showed us the importance of reading pictures and words. When reading at home, try reading just the pictures first, then going back through the books to read the words. After reading the words, we had a discussion about 'good fit books'. Using a big shoe, a medium sized shoe, and a small shoe, we talked about what a 'good fit' means. We discussed how picking a good fit book is just like picking a shoe that fits, we want to find something that is comfortable for us. We talked about how what is a good fit for one student may not be a good fit for everyone. Students will be encouraged to pick a good fit book for themselves tomorrow. A good fit book is one where students are comfortable reading almost all of the words on a page. Not one that is too easy, or one that is too hard. In math we continued to work with the numbers on the calendar. We have now been at school for 5 days! We are counting the school days up to 100 to have a 100 days of school party. After working with the calendar we played a game. Each pair of children was given 20 counters. They took turns rolling a dice, and removing that number of counters to their side of the table. They continued to do this until there were no counters left. At the end of the game, each player counted up how many counters they had, to see who had more. The person with the most was the winner. This was a great way to assess 1:1 correspondence skills and subtilizing skills. We did a great job playing nicely with a friend. Here are some photos of us playing this math game. Ask your child to teach you how to play at home for additional support. Last week we spent a great deal of time discussing behaviours, routines, PYP attributes, and getting to know each other. Today we spent beginning our programming. In Language arts, we discussed the 3 ways to read a book; read the pictures, read the words, and retell the story. We began by reading the pictures in the story "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". Please practice this with your child at home during home reading time. We also began working with numbers in math by playing a game where we tried to guess a number within different parameters (I'm thinking of a number between 6 and 14), and were told whether it was greater or less than our guess. We explored the days of the week, months of the year, and days of the month on the calendar as well. Later in the day, we began our first unit of inquiry on friendship and getting along. We read a book called "I need a friend" and discussed different things that good friends do. (Share, say sorry, show respect, listen, help, play nicely, etc.). We learned about the PYP attribute of inquiry by asking questions about friendship, and through researching in books how to be a good friend (pictures above). We took our ideas from the books and did a placemat activity where we recorded using pictures and words what a good friend looks like. We also discussed our 'making friends picnic' that we will be having on Friday. Please discuss what snack and game you will send with your child from your culture to share with a friend.
Today we had our first day of school. It was so nice to meet all of our first graders who were returning to the ASA, and introduce Zara, Jordana and Abdal Wahd to the ASA community. It was amazing to see how welcoming the first graders were to our new students. We began our day by reading the story 'The Kissing Hand'. This story is about a raccoon named Chester who did not want to go to his first day of school. His mother kisses the palm of his hand, and tells him that if he needs a kiss, he can place it on his cheek, and he will be able to feel her love. This helped our class settle in nicely. We also talked about how Moms and Dads miss having us at home too. We explored the campus, learning where we go for music, PE, Art, and of course the bathroom. We discussed safety rules for walking up and down the stairs to our 'tree house classroom'. Dr. Amy even came by to welcome us and talk about safety! We met our French teacher, Miss Danielle, and our ELL teacher Miss Mina. They were so nice. We talked about our summer holidays. Miss Danielle even came back later to teach us Malagasy, where we sang a Malagasy song, and played a game. Before the end of the day, we had PE, where we ran out all of our energy! It was so much fun! We are all excited to come back to school tomorrow! |
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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