As I mentioned in my post, we’ve got guest authors on the blog this weekend! Here’s a post by Evan and Joshua. I know they’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on their work! 🙂
Category Archives: Writing
Guest Authors: Ella Marie and Sara–History Projects!
As I mentioned in my post, we’ve got guest authors on the blog this weekend! Here’s a post by Ella Marie and Sara. I know they’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on their work! 🙂
Rm. 202 Kids Take Over!
Ok, so let me start like this: I always have a plan. I know the things we need to work on, the way I want us to do that (and probably the ways I don’t!), and it’s “penciled in” for everyday. But the great part about that plan is that it is flexible. There is ALWAYS another option if we (the kids or me!) see that we need to go another way. A better way, perhaps. This is just what happened on Friday. I can’t WAIT to tell you about it. 🙂 Friday morning’s recess was great–it was the first time in WEEKS that the temperature had gotten over freezing–and we took full advantage of the sunny playground. I won’t tell you the whole story here, but in short, Millie and Makayla found a collection of things while we were outside that I thought was “blog-worthy” enough to tell you all about. “But why should I tell their story?” I thought to myself, and at that moment decided they could be guest authors on our blog (and that that would become our plan when we came inside from recess). “But shouldn’t everyone have a chance to do that?” I thought next. That’s when the light-bulb moment happened. As soon as we got in from recess we sat down to do something we’ve done many times before: create our chart that we’d use for our Class Meeting later in the day. What they didn’t know (until I told them next), was that we’d be doing something else very cool with it BEFORE our actual class meeting. Here’s what the list looked like after we brainstormed a bit: 
Once I explained the idea, it wasn’t long before kiddos had paired up and chosen their topics. But we weren’t ready yet. The next conversation was about how writing on my blog would be different than writing on their Kid Blogs. The first difference was audience. They figured out that rather than kids being the main readers, parents, principals (including our own beloved Mrs. Sisul!), teachers, authors, librarians and other adults (many that we don’t even know!) are the main readers of this blog. We discussed how that would mean we’d need to “up” our game to make the posts ready for 20somethingkids. Kylie was quick to add in that when I blog I use lots of pictures, and that my posts usually tell the “why” of the story–so that teachers can use our ideas with their own students. We agreed that we should probably use that same kind of thinking in our guest posts. At this point I just had to sit back and appreciate the amazingness of Rm. 202 kiddos. I smile when I listen to their wheels turn and their ideas flow; when I get out of the way, they make some pretty fabulous things happen on their own! Ok, so after our purpose and audience was set, and we had decided on our platform (which would be Notability since they all knew how to use it and I could easily copy it into WordPress), I set them loose. And left them alone. And watched them dig in and work hard and “buzz” with that sound that happens when kids are engaged and learning. They had a real purpose, a global audience of real people to write for, and lots of great learning from the week to share about. I got out of the way and let them be amazing.
Ella Marie and Sara discuss what they will tell blog readers about our history projects from this week.
Emily and Jacob draft their post about our class picture from earlier in the day.
Kylie and Lauren chose to write about the races kids have starting running at our morning recess.
Makayla and Millie (who’s work at recess sparked the whole idea in the first place!) write about a really cool collection of “B” things they found outside on the playground.
Peyton, C.J. and Thomas work hard to explain how we use writing journals in our room every day. They are EXPERTS at putting great ideas in their journals and were perfect for this topic. 🙂
Evan and Joshua chose to tell blog readers about PE and why they like it.
Ava and Amelia wrote about how we use Dreambox to learn as mathematicians every day!
Landen and Nate knew right away they wanted to explain our math warm-ups!
Charlie and Diego worked to tell about our current chapter book The One and Only Ivan (we are LOVING it, by the way!).
I am SO excited to share their work with you! Rm. 202 kiddos–I’m SO PROUD OF YOU!!! 🙂
First Grade Bloggers!: Part 5–Teaching the BIG kids!
Alright….one more time…here are the links to the first four parts of the story. And this one is probably the biggest and best: this part of the story is about how 20 super smart first grade bloggers taught their FIFTH GRADE BUDDIES about how to blog. Yup–you heard me right: the little kids taught the BIG KIDS something. Before I even tell you what happened, I feel like I should start with my some of my kiddos’ words about how it felt. Wait—maybe that will tell the story better than anything else I could say. 🙂
Evan—“It felt spectacular. I felt good teaching a 5th and I’m only a 1st grader. It was hard. He kept on asking me questions and I wasn’t sure how to answer.”
Peyton—”It made me feel happy. It filled up my bucket to be a good teacher to a 5th grader.”
Lauren—“I felt happy because I got to see my buddy and there were words that were popping up that were funny.” (I think this is about the auto-correct feature on their iPads 🙂 ).
Ella Marie—“It felt awesome. I got to make blogs and I like blogs! I saw something new and I told my buddy about it.”
Sara—“I felt happy because we could make a blog together.”
Charlie—“I felt like I was the most important teacher in the world! I like that my buddies are funny!”
Diego—“I felt so happy because usually big kids but usually little kids were the teachers!” (Doesn’t this one just say it all?!)
Kylie—“I felt good because we got to experience new things that I didn’t know about, then I figured out I did know about it.”
Emily—”It felt good because I felt like a teacher and also it felt good to teach a 5th grader!! Little kids usually get taught by bigger ones.” (Again–what an authentic audience!)
Thomas—“I was really excited because it was my first time writing with a 5th grader. It opened up my grit.”
Amelia—“I felt really happy because I didn’t know how to spell a word, and my LB helped me. It filled up my bucket!”
The assessment we used to tell us we did a SUPER JOB of explaining blogs to our buddies? Their questions to their teacher as they left our room: “Dr. Grayson, can we have our own blogs, too?” What more could we ask for?? 🙂
First Grade Bloggers!: Part 4–GOING LIVE!
Yep, there were three parts before this one that gave more details of this exciting journey into the blogosphere! (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3)
After we had done days and days of prerequisite work (including teaching our friends in Rm. 203 about how to comment on blogs and having them join us for a day of practice), we were ready to give it a try (plus, we had to be ready for when we’d teach our 5th grade buddies all we knew about blogging–more on that later!). Needless to say, the excitement in the room was CRAZY!!
These pics are from our share session with our neighbors, but they really could show what it looked like as we started our blogs, too. I mean, I guess there’s no real way to show the process of writing a new blog except maybe to share the blogs with you! As you read our new Kid Blogs, imagine the big smiles on our faces as we made them! Being a blogger is SERIOUS BUSINESS when you’re 6! Check it out!
First Grade Bloggers!: Part 3
If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 of our blogging journey yet, you can check them out here and here. 🙂
After we had a chance to try out commenting for ourselves on our friends’ paper blogs, it was time to get down to the REAL business of REAL commenting on REAL blogs with REAL people! This was one of those places where I added in some extra lessons to the version of Blogging 101 I have done with 5th graders. I just felt like my little bloggers needed more opportunities to practice before they graduated to their own blogspace.
With many things we are learning and practicing for the first time, turn-and-talk or partner conversations are a good way to work through concepts with a friend. This allows for each to teach and learn (based on what they know), and also to help ensure that everyone is on the same (or at least a similar) page before we move on to doing things independently.
As we gathered for Writers’ Workshop, I had kiddos sit with their elbow partners and explained that I was going to give them a “blog” to read and that they were then supposed to turn-and-talk with their partner about how they would respond to that “post.” I made sure to write examples that they could relate to, and encouraged them to remember to include what they had learned about how to leave a good comment: respond to the writing, say more to give details or reasons, and to ask a question to keep the conversation going. Together with their partners, everyone had a chance to role-play with at least 5 or 6 of these scenarios:
I tried to write posts that seemed real and relevant to first graders (like ones that they might read on others’ blogs and that they would eventually write on their own!), as well as ones that had examples of the parts of a blog post that we would talk about soon after this.
As a check-in to assess how kiddos had been doing, and to give those that might need more support some ideas, we went through each “post” and shared out some examples of responses. Together we “graded” the responses by giving thumbs-up if all of the components were there. Like I said before, this was a new step to my blogging process, but I’m really pleased with how it went and how excited they were about learning it!
The next day I gave them their first go at trying these newly acquired skills on someone else’s blogs. Together with their partner (the same one as the previous day), they read blog posts and commented. This day also add a separated but related lesson of its own: QR codes! Since I knew that this would be a quick and easy way to get websites and other links to my kiddos, but since I also knew they hadn’t heard of them before, I introduced the concept as the way to get to the blogs we would be visiting. Yep, a two-birds-one-stone situation. 🙂 They learned how to use the QR reader, how to find the site they were looking for and then also how to manipulate the interface of KidBlog.org itself (which would soon come into play as they saw their own KidBlog site!).
They had a great time and did a great job practicing their new commenting skills. The downside? The only links I could find to 1st Grade KidBlogs (at the time) were archived ones from classes that were not able to respond to the comments we left. 😦 Oh well, we got to practice on our end anyway, right? 🙂
Valentines’ Day Makerspace
I mentioned last time about how amazed I was by the Makerspace I saw at GCAA during EdCampSTL. Well, as I have done in years’ past (mostly because of the timing), we took advantage of the need to create Valentines’ boxes and did so Makerspace style in Rm. 202!
First I had kiddos plan what they wanted their box (or container, since many where NOT shaped like boxes!) to look like. Then they wrote down a list of materials they’d need (somethings came from home and many were materials we already had in our classroom). We collected items for a couple of days, and then we were busy building!
It was fun, but BOY WAS IT MESSY! But hey, learning is messy, right? Check it out!
After built our creations, we spent some time on Thursday writing about some details about them. Together we decided that our readers would need to know: 1) what is it (and what it’s called if it has a name), 2) how you thought of it, 3) how it works, 4) materials you used to make it, and 5) how you made it. Kiddos used the Notability app on our iPads to work on their paragraphs, and uploaded a picture of their creation to add to their words. We were able to use our chart from our punctuation study, as well as other writing pieces we’ve made together that are hanging around the room, to make sure we’d gotten our punctuation added correctly so our readers could understand our message. Like with other things we do as first grade readers and writers, we used each other (as well as the word wall) as spelling resources, and reread our words often to make sure it sounded right. Once kiddos were finished, they learned how to take a screen shot, then uploaded their paragraph to their blog to share with our blog readers. Such hard, focused work happened in Rm. 202 on Thursday, friends!
We’re not all finished yet, but we’d love to have you visit our blogs to check out our final products! Leave a comment if you can. 🙂 You can find some Valentines’ Day posts here. Thank you!
Punctuation Study–First Grade Version
If you’ve been around here for a while, you have read about the punctuation studies I have done in 4th and 5th grades. And if you’ve read much this year on this blog, then you know that one of my goals (or hopes at least!) for this year was to bring some of the things I did in 5th grade with me and try them in a first grade version. So far, these kiddos are ROCKING it, and really impressing me with how quickly they catch on and then run with things I show them. The punctuation study was another protocol that I brought with me and another one that they took and ran with! Let me tell you more. 🙂
As with other classes, we started with a conversation about how punctuation carries MEANING, and is not just a bunch of rules that you follow (as a reader or writer) because someone tells you to. This was pretty easy for them to start thinking about because they could tell you what the meaning of a period, question mark and exclamation marks are already. Then, as with other years, their job was to find as many other punctuation marks as they could and figure out what they mean. So with a partner and a pile of books, kiddos went to work investigating the work of other authors. They filled in a chart together where they recorded the mark, an example and their thoughts about what it means for a writer to use it (and a reader to read it!).
After a day or two of gathering info and doing some thinking, we started recording our findings together on a class chart:
Our chart started like this when it was empty, similar to the sheets they filled out with their partners.
Now, what happened after that was super cool. No really–check out what the first part of our chart looked like when they started putting their smart first grade punctuation thinking on it:
I was a little surprised that they didn’t start with periods. Instead, they started to tell me about what they knew about exclamation points. But then look, instead of just finding one way to use an exclamation point (like 5th graders usually do), these super smart writers found 5 WAYS to use one. AMAZING!
We kept going, adding quotation marks, an ellipsis (which is always a fun one to learn the name for!) and parentheses (I mean come on–are these really first graders??).
Eventually we did get to talking about periods, but even with that one they were able to find 3 different meanings, including how sometimes people use them exaggerate how a. maz. ing. something is! 🙂 Then they blew my mind again and added a hashtag (do you sense a theme here?). Now I don’t know if it’s just because we’d been talking about Twitter lately, or what the reason was, but my “big” kids never put a hashtag on their charts. First graders love it when you tell them that, too, by the way. 🙂
We had a little big of paper left (although I have a whole new blank one waiting for us to fill up!) and so we started talking about “that little mark that is a line.” Now, what I knew (but they didn’t yet) is that they could have been either talking about a hyphen or a dash, and that those are actually not little marks at all. So we did some more work to dig into the meaning. We started with a hyphen (although at that point they still didn’t have a name for what the mark was).
Since we had just gotten our iPads, instead of writing down our examples, we got to work collecting some examples simply using the camera app. Their directions were to look JUST for that little mark and to take a picture of any examples they find. Then we would reflect those pictures on our ActivBoard to discuss together what they are used for. What we quickly found were many examples of how hyphens are word-connectors. They can be used to put two usually unrelated words together to make new words that describe other things (like full-fledged, top-rate and ex-princesses) or to break up a word when you don’t have enough space to finish the word on the line you’re writing. They also found this part being used in a dedication page, as well as when I was making a list of our hyphenated words (and I did this without even knowing it–they were definitely paying attention!). We aren’t even done yet, but our chart is filled up and now looks like this (SUPER sorry for the hard-to-read, end-of-the-day photo):
The best part of this study is that our minds are now always thinking about (and noticing) who writers are using punctuation. We even found it on our friends’ clothes!!
And just as I sat down to write this blog post, I got an email from Charlie’s mom about how he had found a hyphen in the book he was reading.
Can you spot the hyphen? Do you see the dash, too? 🙂
Apparently he stopped in his tracks, made her take a picture and said, “I’m supposed to send this to my teacher!” I. Love. This. I mean, what more could I ask for? Great job, Rm. 202 kiddos! I’m impressed. 🙂
UPDATE!!: We added more today…they are tickled that they have so many ways to use a comma, AND that they put a caret (which is yet another thing that 5th graders haven’t mentioned before but 1st graders did!)
Sweet Words
I had to be out on Friday with a sick little girl, and so let my kiddos in the able hands of a really great sub. We’ve had her before and I remember that she had them write me a note about their day to leave for me. I hadn’t forgotten about it, though, until I walked in this morning and saw this on the easel:
This note would be super special anyway because it came from my awesome class, it was super duper special because it meant they had an AWESOME day even though I wasn’t there, AND it has a hashtag. We had noticed it last week and added to our punctuation study chart, and Lauren suggested they put one on the letter. That’s amazing. And it’s an awesome hashtag, too, isn’t it?
Way to go, Rm. 202 friends–you are awesome!!
First Grade Bloggers!–Part 2
I started our blogging story yesterday, with how I introduced the whole idea to my first graders. Like I mentioned, they’re pros already!!
After we made our paper blogs, we were ready to talk about comments, and how the whole point of a blog in the first place is the conversation it starts. We talked generally about how to comment, and then studied this document, another great resource I got from @mcteach. It’s called the “Art and Aspirations of a Commenter,” and while I had to paraphrase much of it for 6-7yos, the idea still applies:
We discussed what the parts of a comment were supposed to be, and then tried it on each others’ blogs. Much like we do when we have a gallery walk in math or a writing celebration in writing, everyone laid out their blogs and kids read and wrote: one comment on each post-it, then post-its on paper posts. Check out this amazing video to show how quiet and focused everyone was during this time. Seriously. Believe me. It’s good stuff.
So after that experience, our paper blogs looked like this:
These kids are picking up this whole blogging thing so fast and furiously! Can’t wait to share the next step! 🙂
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 