Oh my goodness....what a busy week it has been! Teachers came back to school on Monday for a professional development day. We spent our time working on technology. As you can see I have completely revamped my blog layout. I took some things out and added some new widgets. Not completely sure how I like the new layout, but I'm willing to give it a try for a little while anyway. So first thing first....we started out our four day week with student-led conferences. Students come in with there parents and show them around our classroom. It is much like an open house feel. We give the students some activities to do while they are with their parents that showcase some of the great things we are doing in our classroom. Students showed their parents their book boxes. They had to show their parents how they select books using IPICK (from The Sisters). I also have a CAFE board up in my classroom (read CAFE by The Sisters) so the students had to show their parents what reading strategies they are working on. I am blessed to have about 5 laptops in my classroom during my reading workshop time. When the students go to Read to Self some of the groups work on reading books on RAZ-Kids, which is a computer program our school has purchased. Students have assignments and read good-fit books on the laptops....which I have to say all of the kids LOVE doing this. They actually are pretty bummed out when it isn't their day for computers. So I decided this would be a great part of our day to share with all parents. The students took their parents to the computers to show them what we do everyday. Then, the students shared anything else they wished to share with their parents. I always love seeing what parts of the day are the students favorites. I had our calendar time up in Mimio that many of the students showed their parents. I am learning how to integrate the Mimio into my daily instruction. LOVE having the interactive board, but I have to say it is time consuming going through everything that is out there for you to use. My goal is to eventually get to the place where I have an interactive lesson for everything I teach! I intended on taking pictures of our night, but time got away from me. Before I knew it, it was already 8:00 and I hadn't even taken my camera out of its case!
What an AMAZING week we had for spring break!!!!! The weather was perfect. I knew I would need to have some fun and intriguing lessons when the kids returned or else they would be daydreaming about being outside playing and having fun in the sun. I found a great activity on teachers pay teachers called Contraction Surgery. I have to give big props to Christie Berlener over at First Grade Fever for this awesome lesson. We've been working with contractions for a while now, so I thought this would be such fun for the students to become doctors and use their scalpels (scissors) to cut apart the two words and then used band-aids to put the words back together in contraction form. HOW FUN....I KNOW!!! Here are some pictures of our operating room.
This week we also continued with inferencing in reader's workshop. This is a strategy the students are learning about to aide in their comprehension/understanding of the stories they read. We've learned that inferencing is when we use our schema/background knowledge + evidence/clues from the text to figure things out in the text. This week we used the book 'No, David!' by David Shannon to make inferences. I got this great 'No David!' lesson from Cara Carroll over at The First Grade Parade Below is some of our pictures of the fun we had with David...
WEATHER is one of my favorite things to teach! I think I love teaching weather because it is always so interactive and fun. Science experiments are the best!!!!!! I started off our unit with an overview of weather on a Mimio slideshow. Then, we learned about the different types of clouds and what kind of weather they bring. Once again I used some great things that I got off of The First Grade Parade for our cloud work. This week we started our cloud flip books. The students are illustrating the four main types of clouds (with cotton balls) that we learned about in class: cumulus, cumulonimbus, cirrus, and stratus. Next week, we will complete our books by writing descriptions of each of the clouds. I also have several other fun and exciting activities planned for our weather unit for next week.
I hope your week has been as eventful as mine. I definitely came back from spring break energized and ready to go for the rest of the year. I hope I can keep this energy up. Having two little ones at home sometimes can really take away my rest at night. Let's hope the new baby keeps sleeping as well as she has been!!!
