We have a SUPER principal who LOVES reading and has a passion for getting kids into books. Several years ago she started offering opportunities for classes to sign-up to hear her read, and we jumped at the chance. We’re still going strong and ready to enjoy year #3!!
Our first PRA of the year was a great one, and I noticed that Mrs. Sisul must have a new focus this year. After seeing all of her book choices and reading experiences so far, see if you can figure out what it is. 🙂
PRA #1
I’ve Got the Rhythm by Connie Schofield-Morrison
PRA #2
If You’re a Monster and You Know It by Rebecca Emberley and Ed Emberley
As we prepared for the next PRA, I had a sneaky request for my teammates: what if we had ALL OF FIRST GRADE in the room when Mrs. Sisul came in?? We were all game and so when she walked in, she was greeted by almost 100 smiling faces who were SUPER EXCITED to hear a fun story! What a sweet surprise and a great way to start the day together!
PRA #3
Do Not Bring Your Dragon to the Library by Julie Gassman
PRA #4
The Truth About My Unbelievable School by Davide Cali
Somehow I have NO pictures and no video for this one. What was I thinking? I really think I was so involved in the story that I was too distracted to record anything. :). This one is a new author to us, and is part of a series. We’re excited to hear more that are like this one. The pictures played a big part in telling the story, and if you didn’t pay close attention to them you missed a lot!
Can’t wait for the next one! Stay tuned to hear more about it! 🙂
Remember in my last update when I mentioned Jonah’s perspective on our display wall? I finally had some time yesterday to flip it upside-down and it makes me wonder why I didn’t do it long ago! What a great example of how seeing things through a kid’s eyes can make so much of a difference. It was an unplanned and unexpected change, but was definitely for the better! Now we can really watch it fill-up (because I guess before it trickled down the wall??)!
It’s a small change but definitely one that will make a difference! I wasn’t at school today so I didn’t see the kids’ response to it–can’t wait to see what they say tomorrow! 🙂
What do you think? If you have a #classroombookaday display, I’d love to see it!
I know you already know I work at the best school in Missouri, and perhaps the world. :). We have such an amazing community of families and teachers, and we make things happen for kids. Last Friday was another example of that amazing community working together to provide priceless experiences for all the kids in our school. Let me tell you about it. 🙂
I am sure at some point on this blog I’ve written about Robinson University (hereafter called RU), but the version that was unveiled on Friday was even better than ever. Until now, first graders have not “officially” been involved, but instead we made up our own rotations for kiddos to do, alongside the “real” ones that bigger kids did. This year it was decided that we could indeed join in with the rest of the school. Yay for that decision!
In short, RU is a program we run on half-days at our school (which are half-days so that teachers can participate in professional development in the afternoons), which are designed to provide unique and different experiences for students–experiences that they may not normally or otherwise have an opportunity to take part in. They are available during school hours so that EVERYONE can participate. We’ve done some version of it for the last 5 or so years, but this was seen as the 2.0; many changes were made with structure and offerings that were an improvement on our original ideas.
Children were given the option of some 30 different classes, and all classes were taught or facilitated by parents, friends and community members of Robinson School. In the past, students had only 2 or 3 classes, as we stretched them out over the entire semester of half-days. Now kiddos choose their 10 favorites and then are assigned 6 of those–one for each half-day, so that they are able to participate in 6 exciting and different experiences throughout the year.
Teachers were assigned as faculty liaisons to work with one of our presenters, and I got to participate in a session about DNA. I got to work with a fabulous mom of a fabulous student I had a couple of years ago, who is a real research scientist and came with real science to teach us about what DNA is and how it works. Cool, right?
I have loads to tell you about that (since I was present in that session), but first I want to share some pictures from the other sessions to give you a little taste of the exciting things our Roadrunners were able to do AT SCHOOL last week! :). Check it out. 🙂
Aikido
Aikido (a different style of martial arts) is “The way of harmonizing energy,” known as the art of peace.
Let’s Make Breakfast!
Come and have fun mixing and making a delicious breakfast of Dollar Pancakes, cheesy scrambled eggs and Island Smoothies. Breakfast always tastes better when you make it yourself!
Creative Writing
Have you ever dreamed of writing and illustrating your very own picture book?If so, this course will teach you all about the creative writing process from a published children’s book author.
Food Science
Let’s make gummy worms! Come explore the Science of food!
Happy, Healthy Kids
You will learn lots about healthy living and how healthy living makes you feel happier and stronger. We’ll also make fruit ice cream (no sugar/no dairy!) and it is YUMMY!
Microbiology–Learning about GERMS!
Let’s test the 5 second rule in this session that investigates microbiology and our germ-filled world! We will explore what germs are, why they matter, where they are and how experiments and can help us learn more about them.
Stop Motion Videos
Come and make your very own stop motion video!
What Does a Veterinarian Do?
We will discuss the skills and tools used in veterinary medicine. We will discuss some fun and interesting cases and work together to learn to think like a veterinarian.
(This one was taught by a very special Rm. 111 parent! Thanks for helping out, Mrs. Hendrickson!!)
Yoga
Explore how yoga, movement and breath can be both fun and relaxing.
I would have LOVED to have had pictures from all the sessions (there were also sessions that including geocaching, swimming, Keynote, School of Rock, World Bird Sanctuary, Jedi training [fencing], cake decorating and so many more I can’t even list them all!!), and unfortunately I didn’t get every smiling Rm. 111 faces on this post, but hopefully by the end of the year of RU I will be able to do so. :). Stay tuned. The next session is on November 2!
Ok…so here’s the details on the session I was in–it was all about What is DNA? It was led by my friend Dr. Ariel, who is a research scientist. She came to teach us about what it is, why it’s important, and we even EXTRACTED some DNA from a strawberry! Emily, a 5th grader who attended the session (and who can be found on this blog from several years ago when she was a first and second grader!) named him Jeff. Unfortunately, Jeff gave his life for science and we were amazed when the little cotton-like strands actually came out of the test tube right before our very eyes! Check it out…
(P.S. I have a GREAT video of the whole DNA extraction process but it it turned the wrong way and I can’t get it to rotate!! Ugh. If you know to do that and want to give me guidance I’ll do it and post it here later!)
This week seemed to be extra busy with reading! We were able to add 17 books to our display, and we’re SO CLOSE to 100!! Hoping to hit it this upcoming week and share the good news with you on the blog next time.
But for now, here’s what our wall looks like:
We added lots of different titles:
I think my favorite story from the week actually comes from a first grader, not a book. It’s a story of perspective, and taught me something about how adults see things differently than 6-7yos. Let me explain…
On Wednesday, I was excitedly adding a big load of pics to the wall, and telling the students around me about how we were almost at 100. Jonah, a friend from Rm. 112, commented on how he didn’t realize we had read that many books, and that he didn’t know how many pictures were actually up there. Incredulously I asked him, “Don’t you ever look at our display? How have you not seen all those books out there??” He looked at me very matter-of-factly and said, “Well I do, but I look at the WALL, not the PICTURES!” At first it seemed a little funny, but then I realized that, yes, indeed, the thing at eye-level for first graders is a big. blank. wall. I know I should look up there at all those pretty book covers, and kiddos do too–if I tell them to, but yep, most kids who look at our display probably just see a wall.
It really made me start thinking about who that display is for, and how I can make it more kid-friendly. While there are LOADS of ways that we interact with it on a daily and weekly basis, and I can point out how the space is filling up and how we’re close to 100, there is probably a better way to do it. Starting with putting the pictures at the BOTTOM of the wall instead of the top. That’s where kiddos are anyway, right? It would probably makes more sense to them that the wall is FILLING up anyway, if they could see it reach up to the top and ACTUALLY FILLING up, rather than coming down the wall.
I know it’s a small tweak, and obviously one I hadn’t thought of, but I was SO GLAD we had had that little conversation, because it got me thinking about how many other things I do that maybe I think are kid-centered, kid-led or kid-friendly, but that are instead geared toward me.
So I’m fixing the wall. I’m flipping it all upside-down and we will indeed watch the wall FILL UP as we go through this year. Can’t wait to share the changes with you next week!!
In the meantime, have you ever had a kiddo tell you something that flipped your thinking upside-down? I’d love to hear about it! 🙂
I started a series a couple of weeks ago to help families (and any other blog readers!) know what happens in Rm. 111 all day. We started by sharing Phonemic Awareness, for which we use Heggerty’s program.
Since my last post, we have done some really important work in regards to what our phonemic awareness time is supposed to look like and sound like. We have watched our videos and reflected on what we are seeing that are “pluses” and “deltas.” After we had recorded and reviewed three different sessions, I gave Rm. 111 friends a challenge to see if they could have a “perfect” session of our Heggerty lesson.
Take 1 and Take 2 of our Heggerty Reflections
As you can see, these two sessions don’t look that much different. I have to admit that part of the problem here was my fault–we recorded with my iPad in selfie mode, so many friends were super distracted by seeing themselves on the screen and could not focus on our learning. Oops. One super easy way we decided to fix it for our third take was to simply turn the iPad around. Sometimes it’s so simple it’s funny. 🙂
Before our next lesson, we reviewed what the expectations were for them as learners (we reviewed both our listening rules as well as both sides of our charts), and got ready to show how amazing we were. Additionally, a friend suggested that we invite Mrs. Wessel to come back to see us in action since we’d worked on our learning behaviors, since she had been there for our first session. It was a great idea, and thankfully she was free! It was also great that she could come, because she also served as our videographer again (which was much less distracting than my iPad on the table LOL).
So…I’m writing this post to show you what our Heggerty lessons look like now–to both highlight our learning but also how smart we are and how we have such growth mindsets! We were determined to get it right, to show what we know, to help everyone learn and to follow all of our listening rules (which are to have eyes watching, ears listening, voice quiet and a still body).
Listening rules (and our Zones of Regulation chart, which I will share about later!)
I’m really proud of my Rm. 111 learners and how they’ve grown! Celebrate this chart and this video with us, please. 🙂
Our third Heggerty reflection chart. Beckett asked to make this chart for us, and made the plus and delta that way because he knew that we’d have LOADS of good things and a small amount of deltas. LOVE IT!
We’d love to hear what you think! Kids LOVE when they know people see their smart work and want to give them a shout out for it! What questions do you have about our phonemic awareness lessons? I KNOW my friends would love to tell you about what we do everyday–and WHY we do it! 🙂
We have been reading ALOT in first grade, and much of it has been reading aloud together. But not all of it. 🙂
We have also been working very hard to learn the habits of good readers, to read both independently and with our partners and also to choose the right books for us. I’ve been so proud with how quickly our Rm. 111 readers have gotten into a groove and begun to build their stamina.
We’ve learned some BAD HABITS to drop and some GOOD HABITS to pick up. Readers thought it was really funny when I acted out the bad habits during our lesson. Ask your reader to show you what those bad habits look and sound like, then to show you what we should do INSTEAD. 🙂
Each week we have a learning partner, with whom we turn-and-talk on the rug, and also partner read. We use these partners in other ways, too, through out the week as they are quick to find. Some of our work time during Readers’ Workshop is read-to-self and some if read-to-someone, so we sit right next to our partners so we can quickly move from one job to the next. Check out some pictures of us being our best reader selves, back-to-back in read-to-self and side-by-side doing read-to-someone. 🙂
Read-to-Self
Lots and lots of read-to-someone! We’ve learned that we need to read ONE book at a time, and also that we can do partner reading in 3 ways: popcorn reading, choral reading or I read, you read. We LOVE this time of day!
We’re moving and grooving with books in first grade! While our wall is not filling up as quickly as last year, it’s still so great to watch the new books appear as our first grade classes read them and they are posted. :). I love to watch the faces and comments as kids walk by (kids from 1st grade and from the rest of the school!) and they make connections with the covers. Reminds me of the many reasons why this is such a great project!
Here’s our wall as of Friday, September 21–we’re up to 72!!
This week we added these books:
We had another great week of books–Dr. Seuss (because we’re working on rhyming!), Peter H. Reynolds (because he’s awesome and also because Dot Day was last week!), and many that are just plain fun!
What suggestions do you have for us to read this week? 🙂
This year we began the 3rd iteration of the #classroombookaday challenge in 1st grade at Robinson! I am ready for this to be the BEST year ever of the challenge! Originally I would have said that it was because we’d read even more books than last year (our final number was 560!), but now I’d say there’s another reason. The first year I participated, my neighbor and friend Ms. Turken did it with me, but hung her own display and read different books than we did in our room. Last year, as we began our official co-teaching journey together, we combined our challenge and our display and read 560 of the same books together (some chosen by her, some chosen by me, some chosen by 1st graders). And since I was a lazy blogger last year and didn’t tell you all about that journey, let me post the pictures of our final wall now. :). It’s pretty great!
As a side note, we got to the end of the school year and were a little uncertain about what we should do with our display. I mean, come on, it was as much an art piece as it was a record of the great books we’d read! My very smart friend, Marcie, suggested that I take it all down and save the pictures to use again this year (which I admit is a VERY smart and practical thing to do but one I had never considered LOL). We didn’t have time to do this before we left for the summer so we did the next best thing: covered it up and crossed our fingers that it would be in tact and ready for us to take apart when we came back in August.
Thankfully it survived the unpredictability of summer cleaning and moving, and we were able to keep most of the books we had hung last year. I guess we even started the year ahead of the game!
So, now we get to this year. This year Ms. Turken and I are again collaborating to choose books for the wall, but we’ve also rallied the rest of our team to join in!! The more the merrier–more teachers and more first grade readers hearing so many great books! It has meant that our pace is a little slower than year’s past (since we have to have more classes read the book before it can be posted), but I’m convinced it’s totally worth it because we are including so many more kiddos in the joy of reading and watching the wall fill up!
As we finished day 17 of school (which is roughly 3 1/2 weeks), we have read and posted 42 books! Many of them are repeats from last year (because some books are TOO GOOD not to read again!), but since we’re including new teachers, we’ve read just as many new ones, too. Win, win, right??
I have to be honest that it feels a little bare, but I have hope because I know what it will quickly become!
And since you can’t see all those little books up there so far away, here’s what we’ve read:
I’m excited to share this journey with you this year. Be sure to stay tuned for what comes next!!
At the beginning of every year, I have the unrealistic lofty goal of documenting everything that happens inside the walls of Rm. 111 ( and often Rm. 112), and then fail miserably, realizing that there is just not time to do that. There’s just TOO much that happens at the beginning of the school year that I want to tell you about! It’s all new and so it all seems important. :).
This time I am resigning my self to the fact that telling you something, even if it’s not everything is better than nothing! So, I’m going to be ok with not telling you about everything that has gone on in the last 16 days, and will roll on, focusing on what is happening now, and maybe finding time to add in some fun from our first days. 🙂
As we’ve been learning through these first few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how many things we seem to pack into one school day! It’s made me want to write a blog series ( that I’m starting with this post!) to highlight what we really do all day. I mean I can share the schedule, or your kiddo could tell you they had Reading Workshop, but unless you’re there, it’s really hard to fully understand what that looks like for a first grader.
That being said, I’m starting by showing something we do every day (usually right after lunch, at 11:45, just to be precise 🙂 ), where we work on listening to sounds and hearing parts of words and using those parts to make new words. Officially we use a program called Phonemic Awareness: The Skills That They Need to Help Them Succeed! By Michael Heggerty. On our schedule, it’s simply called Heggerty, or more often we refer to this time as “the yellow book,” because I usually hold the ginormous yellow book on my lap while we go through the lesson. :). Regardless of what we call it, at least everyone knows what to expect!
In short, phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken word is made up of individual sounds, called phonemes. During our lessons–which are done totally through the auditory mode (no words, text or visuals), we practice isolating sounds, manipulating sounds, blending and segmenting them, as well as deleting sounds to figure out what is left. We talk about letters, analyze rhymes and identify how many words are in a sentence. It’s focused, intentional and quick, and they’ve picked up on the routines of these lessons pretty quickly. There are movements that go along with most parts of our lesson, and kids especially love when we use our “choppers” to break apart words into syllables.
With the help of my instructional coach, Amy, we recorded a lesson to help you see what happens. We went back and forth about which angle to use to help you best see what’s going on (as you can hear the whole lesson either way), but eventually thought it would be best for you to see what the KIDS are doing during a lesson, rather than just what I am doing from my teacher chair. Who wants to see the teacher for 10 minutes when you can see the kids doing super smart work with words? 🙂
So, in answer to that question about what we do all day, one thing is we work on Phonemic Awareness, which will help us as both readers and writers. Here’s a peek into this word work time in our classroom!
In case you missed it, in just those 10 short minutes we increased language awareness, worked on rhyming, identified onsets (beginning sounds), blended syllables, identified final phonemes (ending sounds), segmented words, substituted phonemes, added phonemes, deleted phonemes and worked on letter names and sounds. Whew! Action packed for sure!
After we finished, Sam said, “Let’s watch our video!” Without knowing so, he was reading my mind, and that was my plan for our next steps anyway! I asked him why he thought we should, and he just said he wanted to know how it went (and what kid doesn’t like to see themselves on the big screen?!), but I also wanted to have a discussion about what went well and how we could improve for next time. I prepped them to choose to just focus on themselves, to focus on the whole class, or to even choose to watch what I did and think about what went well (which we call pluses), and what we might change for our next try (which we mark as deltas).
As we talked, we recorded our noticings, being sure to share names when we were highlighting pluses and making sure to just say “I saw someone…” when we were mentioning things we could change. When we were finished, our chart looked like this:
This reflective protocol is something that we do often, and it is very helpful in kids’ recognizing their role in making our classroom a safe, kind place to learn, and to make sure they are putting their best foot forward. I’m excited to see what happens when we review our chart before Heggerty on Monday and focus on changing some of those things we listed on the right side of the chart. Using this reflective protocol over the next weeks and months, in various situations is also an idea that is brewing with my teammates as a way to help grow kiddos’ capacity to reflect on their engagement and ultimately take responsibility for their learning. I’m so excited (and will be sure to share more as it comes!!)!
As you think about phonemic awareness in the first grade classroom, what do you wonder? What do you notice? If you’re a parent, ask your kiddo what they like most about doing Heggerty in our classroom. Ask them to tell you about how this helps them in other parts of our day. Ask them to tell you what they would change about learning about letters and sounds. If you’re a teacher, how to you address phonemic awareness in your classroom? How do you see it affecting your students are readers and writers? What is your go-to resource or what other things do you use to support kiddos in this learning?
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’d love to hear from you! The conversation makes this whole thing even better! 🙂
At Robinson, respect is a big deal, and so is being safe, kind and showing that you are a learner. And one way that we can highlight and encourage friends who do this repeatedly is with a Catch of the Day. They can be earned by a whole class (our class has 2 so far!) or by an individual kid. Any adult in our building can give them, and you can earn many in a single day.
I love the way a kid’s face lights up when you tell them you noticed them doing something super and how happy they are to show off their golden ticket! We have all gotten one so far, and many of us have earned more than that already–and we’ve only been in school for 8 days! Here’s to continued expected behaviors and more and more Catches of the Day for Rm. 111 friends! Celebrate with these friends! 🙂
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 