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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Differentiated Phonics

Just made this pack and plan to try it out when we get back.  I just feel my kids need more practice internalizing the spelling patterns... hope this works.  We've played the game with other spelling patterns, and they LOVE it!  It's great to get them up, moving around and talking (about words!).  I differentiated the pack so it'll be good for all levels in my class! See below if interested:)
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Oi-and-Oy-Word-Work-Differentiated-1178301

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Close Reading Informational Text- American symbols, heroes, landmarks







We had a blast with this unit.  It had a little bit of everything.  We spent less time on the symbols in this unit because we had done an informational writing unit on them just before this.  This was the first time that I spent a long time on what the President does and The White House.  The kids LOVED it!  They made little books that included general information on the presidency and also information about Washington and Lincoln. I had always taught about President Lincoln and President Washington, but it was super fun to get into the role of the President and especially The White House.  Kids are going to do more research when we get back from break!













http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Common-Core-Close-Reading-Being-An-American-1176650

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Close Reading- Narrative Text





close reading for first grade
This has been one of my favorite lessons of the year (too bad it  happened a half hour AFTER my superintendent walked through our school haha:)!  After months of modeling, collaborative work, and lots of questions I let my awesome students loose to prove to me that they could look closely at a text, make an assertion, and prove it with textual based evidence.  And...they did!  They were awesome.  We were working on our If You Give A Pig A Pancake unit (see link below if interested).  Students needed to decide who the main character was (surprisingly kids were split between the pig and the girl), come up with a character descriptor with evidence, discuss and revoice with a partner, and then share in a class discussion.

Here a student works independently to prove the assertion that the girl was handy...
active listening in first gradeStudents recorded thinking on this page and it was the conversation guide for them while working in partners.

close reading if you give a pig a pancakeAfter independent work and partner discussion, we came together as a group to debrief and record our work.  

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/If-You-Give-A-Pig-A-Pancake-Common-Core-Unit-1117165

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Mentor Text Writing

writing using Knuffle Bunny Too
Mentor Texts to write narratives
I have been working a lot with mentor text writing this year to raise the sophistication of my student's writing.  I wanted to get away from the basic first, next, then, finally and teach the students to write with voice and flair.  One night when I was reading the book,  Knuffle Bunny Too, to my son I noticed how great the opening, transitions, and closing were in the story.  I've always loved Mo Willems' quirky style and his books have been a favorite in my house and classroom.  As I thought about it I decided to plan a narrative writing unit around this book.  It was a HUGE success.  The kids loved it, and the writing improvement I saw was amazing.  I organized it as a sentence by sentence unit so we could really focus on editing.  I loved how this unit worked, and it was perfect for first grade. Check out how I used the mentor sentence approach and gradual release to teach narrative writing:

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Spring word problems!



I just finished creating this for my class.  I wanted to make sure to get enough practice in each of the common core word problem types:  result/total unknown, change unknown, start unknown, and comparison problems.  I also differentiated these for my students who need help attacking problem solving with scaffolds to help them think it through so that they can use these independently and access the learning at their level.  Check it out at TPT!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Spring-Common-Core-Word-Problems-First-Grade-1140965

Close Reading and Annotating Text in First Grade

We've been close reading all year.  We've started with  text feature annotations and "think alouds" on the text (where the teacher orally shares thinking, reactions, questions, thoughts about what they are reading). Truly the "think aloud" is an example of the internal dialogue that good readers go through in their own minds.  Just recently I've started releasing the kids to do their own annotations, and I was so happy with the results.  We read an article on Presidents, discussed it,  and pulled some information out. Then I gave them simple annotation symbols to follow.  After, we shared a sentence that we annotated that surprised us, was important to us, one that had we had a question about (or wanted more information about), and one that we agreed with. I was so impressed with what they came up with!  Can't wait to do more!