Celebrating American Symbols

This week we finally finished our unit on American symbols.  We began learning about American symbols around Citizenship Day which is the 17th of September.  We started the unit out by reading We the Kids by David Catrow and listening to the Preamble of the Constitution on School House Rocks.  Afterwards, we learned about the American flag and the meaning of each color and what the flag represents.  The students also learned why we say The Pledge of Allegiance every morning.  In addition, they learned what the pledge means.  Afterwards, we spent a little time on each of the American symbols, reading articles about them in shared reading.  We just had to finish this unit off with a little American celebration.  After learning about some of the American symbols, we made flag cookies out of graham crackers, icing, twizzlers, and sprinkles.  The kids had a blast.  As we made the cookies we discussed the meaning of the flag again.  They did a great job remembering that the stars stood for the 50 states, the stripes stand for the first 13 colonies.  They even remembered that red stands for courage, white stands for making good choices, and blue stands for justice.  Here are some pictures of our celebration.

Our Week in Pictures

As you can see we've been busy learning in a variety of formats this week.  Students learned about the Constitution of the United States, the flag, and the Pledge of Allegiance. They created their own United States flag and are currently working on learning the meaning of the pledge.  They will also create their own Pledge of Allegiance book.  You'll notice I posted a picture of our Daily 5 Literacy Rotation Chart.  The students were introduced to this and began using it during literacy stations this week.  It was also our week for the traveling first grade laptop cart.  We read digital books on it during our literacy stations.  Once we are ready, students will publish written work on the laptops as well.  Our students will gradually be introduced to more uses of the laptop cart as the year progresses.  I plan on introducing only one concept/aspect of the laptops at a time so we can become proficient/accomplished in one task before learning something new.  The students enjoyed the laptops and I know they will look forward to 4 weeks from now when we will have the laptops in our room again.  We finished our living/nonliving unit with an assessment.  The students had to find pictures in magazines of living and nonliving things and create a poster.  We also learned that author's publish their written work.  We began the early stages of editing/fixing up our stories.  On Thursday/Friday we had a share celebration.  Our stories will be placed in our classroom library for students to check out.  We also learned that as readers we often think about the book we are reading.  Sometimes we say to ourselves, "This reminds me of...." or "This makes me think of..."  The students are learning how to pay attention to their connections they make while reading or listening to stories.