Making Learning Fun

This week was filled with great literature and fun learning activities.  We got a new math series this year and it constantly spirals through all the standards.  This helps ensure that the concepts taught are being seen consistently.  This is much different than the typical, you teach it once in the year and never see it again.  The students are really able to retain their math facts with this series as well.  This week one of the lessons taught was on counting by 5's and using tally marks.  I decided it would be much more fun and hands-on if the students learned how to make tally marks with wiki sticks.  I modeled making tally marks to count the number of students who were eating a school lunch vs. the number of students that brought a lunch from home.  Then, we used the wiki sticks to tally the number of fingers and toes we had and then practiced counting by 5's.  Here is a video of one of the groups.  They loved it.

The students were also introduced to a new word work activity this week...sight word string up.  The activity consists of letters, pipe cleaners, and sight word cards.  The students use the letters to string up their sight words.  Afterwards, I had the students write the word in their word work journals.  Up to 75% of words in children's literature consists of sight words.  Learning these words is the first step to reading fluently and accurately.  We have been working really hard in class to not only learn how to read these words, but to spell them too.  We have a word wall in class that displays the sight words or trick words from our Fundations unit. {Don't forget, the sight words/trick words your child needs to know are sent home each time we begin a new Fundations unit.  The Fundations packets I send home consist of the trick word flash cards.  I hope you all have been cutting them out and keeping them for practice.} Learning to spell these words will help us become a better writer as well.  The students enjoyed the new activity and what a better way to practice the reading and writing of our sight words than to use letter beads and pipe cleaners.

We have also been continuing to work on retelling the stories we read.  Retelling is a comprehension strategy that will help us understand what we read.  This week we read Bear Snores On.  I modeled using the retell rope with this book.  Then, the students were given the character pictures of the story. They colored the pictures and glued them in order on a sentence strip and made a retell hat.  The next day, we reread the story.  This time, after the reading, the students partnered up and used their retell hats to retell the story.  They did a fantastic job!  They are really getting the hang of retelling using the retell rope.

UPDATE:  Here is a picture of the Martin Luther King, Jr. character trait silhouettes we made.  Last week I blogged about these, but I showed an older photograph of what I used to put on the silhouettes (vocabulary words).  This year I opted to having the students review character traits and placing three words that described Martin Luther King, Jr. on the silhouettes.  They did a fabulous job and it was a wonderful review.

Bats, Word Work, and Retell Rope

Students took the primary spelling inventory at the beginning of the year.  This assessment comes from Words Their Way.  This program groups students based on their personal word work needs.  Students in my class have been working on their words in a variety of ways.  Below are some more pictures of our word work study activities.

Students using wiki sticks to spell their patterned words.

Students using the Promethean board to work on rhyme patterns.

Students using magnetic letters and magnetic burner covers to spell their patterned words.

This past week we began our unit on nonfiction features.  During shared reading we learned about bats and then used the materials we used during shared reading to learn not only about bats but nonfiction features found in most nonfiction books.  Below are some pictures of our work with bats.

To begin our unit on bats we took a poll on whether we thought bats were creepy or cute?  This cute little graph came from the very talented Cara Carroll over at The First Grade Parade.  Check her out.

Then, we displayed our data and interpreted it.  This again came from Cara Carroll over at The First Grade Parade.

 We have also done a lot of work in the past few weeks on retelling stories using key details in text.  I've created a retell rope that I use with my class to help clue them in on the things I expect when I ask them to retell a story.  Click on the pictures to grab your own copy.  I used clipart of Godilocks and the Three Bears to clue the students in to each part of retelling. 

Retell Rope

Retell Rope