15 | September | 2016 | 20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher

We have been working on names in Rm. 202, both as a way to build community as well as to use a resources for our reading and writing. We have read lots of books, built our names with Legos and inch tiles, as well as learned about the stories of our names and painted based on that inspiration.

And then we played games.

I moved our word wall this year, making it more accessible to kiddos and groups, and hopefully allowing us a place to gather to talk about words and how they work. The first thing we learned to do with our word wall is play a guessing game based on our names. A kiddo sat on the stool, and I gave 3 clues to a name, and they had to guess which one it was.

The first one had these three clues:

It’s a short name.
It has double letters.
The last letter doesn’t sound how you’d expect it to sound.

Kiddos guessed that it could be these options:

Pretty good guesses, right? We had a great conversation about how the “ie” in Allie and Robbie work together to make the long e sound, and they agreed that that fit the “doesn’t sound like you’d expect it to sound” clue. Peter’s name was suggested because it has double e in it, so I made sure they understood that the double letters had to be together. That left ELLA as the chosen name, and we found lots of other words that also fit that rule, including the A that sounds like a U. This will be a feature we’ll come back to many times as we read and write together this year.

Our second name had these clues:

It has 5 letters.
The vowel sound is a LONG one.
There is a silent letter.

The guesses this time were:

Pretty great thinking again, huh? Two of those names were ones I hadn’t even considered. Yeah, I know–pay attention, Mrs. Bearden! The one I was thinking of was CHASE, and we talked about silent e and long vowels.

This game was a great first start with our word wall, and it will become a game kiddos play again on their own, during word work in our Daily 5 or even as a part of our word work in guided reading or just for fun at choice time! Great work, Rm. 202 kiddos!

Oh, and I promised in the title I’d share a new book! Mrs. Meihaus has a habit of reading to our class when we come to the library for our checkout each week, and this last week she did not let us down.

She shared : screenshot-2016-09-01-12-46-51

which included several little surprises inside:

Can you see how the pages get smaller and smaller in there? It goes all the way down to a teeny tiny red book and then all the way back out again as you read through to the end. Who had ever seen such an amazing text like that before? WE LOVED IT!

Ok, one more. We heard the sweet, friendly story of:

screenshot-2016-09-01-12-46-11 Heartfelt and wonderful. Must read it again. 🙂

And learn to play the piano. 🙂

I realize this post is a little bit after the true “first days of first grade,” but I’d say it still applies, and the actual learning actually took place then anyway, so that counts, right?

One of the things we do a lot of in the beginning of our time together in first grade is explore. These guided discoveries take on many forms, and have been done with colored pencils, pattern blocks and play-doh before (among other things that are done less formally). In the beginning days of math workshop, guided discoveries of math tools are an important learning activity.

Rotating through 6 stations–dominoes, power polygons, multilink cubes, Geoblocks, square inch tiles and Cuisenaire Rods–students were posed two simple questions to consider while they worked: “What could a mathematician use this tool to learn more about? What are the possibilities?” Then, in small groups, they explored the tools, for only about 7 or 8 minutes each:

Dominoes

Most kids built things to knock over. LOL

Power Polygons

Many kids put these together in piles and looked through them–they’re made of pretty colors. 🙂 (And yes, we’ll talk about more mathematical ways to use them later–right now it’s just work to figure them out and try things!)