28Cultivate: January 2014

Monday, January 27, 2014

Snow Days in Week 17!

It was a short but sweet week! In between snow days we learned about MLK and the dream he had for our world. We also introduced our new unit on Matter, Rocks & Soil. This unit is extra spcial because it incorporates informative writing! With quarter three comes a deeper dive into comprehension. Every Friday your child will demonstrate their understanding of one of the books they read all week through a mini-book report! Unfortunately, there are no videos from this week but please enjoy a few of the highlights.

Snow day snuggles!

Lola loved her time in the snow and the extra snuggles she got with Mr. Kime & I.

Our Good Citizen!

This was a perfect week to incorporate more technology! We now have two daily technology plus collaboration centers in both ELA and Math workshop! I can barely get them to switch centers when the timer goes off! They love it!

Our Good Citizen shared her guinea pig for show and tell! We love having living things in our classroom!

What time is it? We are learning to tell time to the hour and half hour! Practice at home using digital and analog clocks. They are feeling very empowered by their new knowledge!

Friday, January 17, 2014

Looking Green in Week Sixteen

We made it through a crazy week of TESTING! The lessons we swim in daily have proven us pretty green! Here is a little look into our busy last week of the second quarter.

Our Good Citizen!

Just a bit of excitement with contraction splat!

Here we are putting our opinion writing into practice. These authors are reading new books to form their opinion on them.

After they read, they began planning out their opinion and supporting reasons.

After a lot of rediting and revising I am proud to share the finished published prodcut! You can see these works of beauty hanging in the hallway!

Hoping to have a little fun, we took a sneak peak at informative writing. The students watched this video, and had to decide for themselves what a Manah-Manah was. They were required to be as silly as possible. Their silly ideas were to be written as fact! You can see the finished products hanging in our hallway.

Then, we read our silly informative paragraphs to the class so everyone could have a laugh.

The finished published product!

New family groups!

On a hunt for o_e words!

Journaling

We started the most wonderful part of the third quarter early! Everyone, just about, is all over our journaling time! Nothing like having a calm moment to reflect. The kids have the option to write to me in their journals and I write them back! But best of all, they can write about ANYTHING. I love this because every voice, idea, and question can be heard and acknowledged.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

We're Back! Week 15

Prepare for a wacky entry!

I am going to do my best to get you caught up on all of the adventures we had these past few weeks. The Ipad is back at it, fully functional, and in use now more than ever (for those of you that missed it, I dropped the I pad on a sea of pavement and watched the screen crack in slow motion).

Two Weeks of Good Citizens!

Precious moments of last week

The Writer's Circle

Good Citizens Read

Another Discovery

Discovery Center

We won the Golden Dustpan!! Miracles do happen!
The kids worked extremely hard for this one!

More Collaboration!!

Last week we introduced greater than and less than. You better believe these mathematicians were working together as pros to make numbers and solve them as greater than, less than, or equal to.

We had a bit of fun too!

The Water Cycle

We watched a silly video to introduce the water cycle. Then we used our imagination to take a journey through each phase! Words like precipitation, collection, evaporation, and condensation or NO BIG DEAL for these first graders!

We dove right back into opinion writing but this time with the help of something sweet! Ask your child what OREO means to them.

1. State your OPINION

2. Give your REASONS

3. Give some EXAMPLES

4. Re-state your OPINION

Yes, they all got Oreos to enjoy once they mastered the true meaning of OREO.

Click here to see Opinion Writing With OREO's lesson

We put OREO into practice. After we read Hey, Little Ant, your authors had to decide weather or not they would squish an ant or save it! They used OREO to write their opinion.

More hands on practice with greater than and less than! We designed our own sleek alligator mouths and then maneuvered them however needed to show which number was greater than or less than.