Tag Archives: thinking

Blowing Up Our Word Wall!

Yesterday I was sitting with my friend, Ms. Turken, as we worked on a geometry assessment, figuring out a new schedule and just musing about some first grade topics in general.  I had some ideas to throw at her related to my class library, my classroom layout and most importantly the way our Word Wall is being used–or really NOT being used.

We talked about the purpose of a word wall as we understood it, which is to be words that kiddos are accountable to know how to spell.  Yeah–it’s full of words that most kids know how to spell and read already.  It’s not words that most kids need support with so its use is minimal.  That’s where we were in Rm. 202.

I sat down with my class today (in front of the Word Wall, naturally), and asked them what they were thinking. I asked what a Word Wall is for, and I got two decidedly different answers (which was not very surprising, actually).  I had one friend tell me it was for sight words that we know, and someone else said, no, it’s for words that we need help with.  We talked about how we needed to be clear–and agree upon–what we wanted the wall to be for us.  I asked many kiddos if they personally ever use the wall to help them spell.  Nope. No. Not really.  Yes, but only for names.  We agreed that having words like it, is, it, get, and, am, etc., is not helpful.   I talked with them about what other kinds of things they might want to have on there, and also went to my word wall word stash to make a few suggestions if they needed help.  The word BECAUSE came up (as it has several times in multiple conversations of the last week) as a word that most of us need to reference, and so we agreed it would go up there.  Someone suggested color words, then we also talked about number words and other categories.  This led to the idea that we could organize the words by type, rather than by alphabet.

I gave them a few minutes to work with a friend (or on their own) to suggest categories or specific words that we might want to put up on our wall.  While they worked, I started to take down the letters.

Kids had great ideas for categories of words, like colors, numbers, names (which were already on our Word Wall but that are now in a square together instead of by first letter separately), school words, seasonal words (like Halloween, fall, parade, etc.), and just sight words or other “regular” words that might be tricky.

After school I was able to make a start at putting it back together.  It already looks great, and I am SUPER excited with how the kiddos like it and how they begin to use it differently.  After all, it is THEIR word wall and should be organized and created in a way that makes sense to THEM.  Otherwise it’s just letters that no one pays any attention to.

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A fresh start…

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Color words and the beginning of “school” words

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Number words (yes, I know there’s no eighteen. Somehow I lost it. I’ll fix that. 🙂

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Names. I will add girl once it gets printed.

Can’t wait to share more soon!  Please tell us what you think! 🙂

 

Outdoor Adventures: PLTW Design Challenge!

Hopefully you’ve read about how we’re learning about light and sound and how great PLTW is going in our classroom.  (If not, feel free to check it out before you go on with this post–LOL).  On Friday we got to the point where we were ready for the design challenge.

We had learned about the design process earlier on in the unit, and also were then reminded of the problem from the story about Angelina, Mylo and Suzi.

Since we had learned and explored about light and sound already, we were ready to answer that question from the end of our book:

If you were Angelina, Mylo and Suzi, how would you help them communicate over a distance to get help?

Luckily for us, we have a fabulous woods and Naturescape in our backyard in which to actually try out this challenge!  We will do that on Monday, but first we had to figure out how to answer the question.  We got into groups and had a limited list of supplies (which we happened to be carrying in our backpack):

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Kiddos had time to design and build their devices and then will test their creations in the woods on Monday.

Callahan and Lucas figured out how to make their device reach higher and shared their thinking:

We also had an unexpected problem-solving situation come up after I talked with my first grade teacher-friend, Ms. Turken.  I asked her how the challenge went with her class, and she told me they had these issues:

  • It was day time, and bright outside, so the light part of the devices didn’t really work
  • It was during recess and so the “outside sounds” made it hard to hear the sound coming from the lost kiddos and their devices.  Also, since our woods are right next to a neighborhood, lawnmowers also made it hard to hear.
  • There were too many groups–her class had 7 groups to “lose” and then “find”
  • Only 2 adults were available during the time of their challenge

We decided to take on this problem and see if we could figure out how to use this knowledge (and their struggles!) to make the challenge work the best for us when we took our turn to try it out.  We headed out to the woods to have a chat, because I figured it might be easier to think about it in the actual setting.

We gathered on the stage (built by the amazing Riggs Construction!) and talked about our options.  I was excited to hear how kiddos were thinking through the problems I presented, thinking about how we could address them with what we know.  We had many great suggestions:

  • Allie thought that we should be sure to focus on the sound part of our devices instead of just the light parts.  She said their group had made sure to put both light and sound on their device. 🙂
  • Many kiddos took the number of groups problem, and thought of ways we could fix it–split our class in half, send one group then another then another to find the “lost” ones, and so one.
  • We noticed that the time of day we were outside (which was later than when Ms. Turken’s class was outside) was not so loud.  There were no kids at recess, no one was mowing and all we heard was the wind in the trees.
  • Aadish suggested that everyone’s groups all go out into the woods to get “lost” at the same time.  We could then try to use our devices to communicate with others, and as we saw each other, groups would join together to look for others.  He suggested that the person who knew the woods the best could be the leader of each group.
  • Keira asked, “But what if everyone wants to be the leader?”
  • Aadish and the class agreed that maybe we could do the challenge more than once, giving more than one kiddo a turn to be in charge.
  • We even thought that we could do our evaluation and redesign right there in the woods before our next try to see if we could make our devices communicate even better.

WHEW!  WOW!  I was tired after all that smart thinking and was super impressed with how they were considering ways to make our experience the best it could be.  I know we’re ALL excited to see how it goes when we’re actually in the woods tomorrow!  Stay tuned and we’ll tell you all about it!

Global Read Aloud 2016

Last year I learned about the Global Read Aloud from a Twitter friend of mine named Tam Scharf who lives in Australia.  She is a great collaborator and friend to me, despite the fact that we have never really met, have only spoken in person once (well really it was over Skype), and don’t even live on the same continent or teach the same grade (anymore at least–we both taught 5th grade we first “met” in 2011).  I love that that story actually describes many teachers who are important parts of my professional learning network.

But anyway….the Global Read Aloud 2016 started this week and we are off to a running start already!  We began with a short introduction to what it is,

who we would be studying and what they could look forward to doing over the next 6 weeks. We watched a video and checked out the website of Lauren Castillo, the author and illustrator we’d be studying.  Very shortly they were hooked and SUPER excited to join the almost 900,000 kids who would be studying the same books!

This week’s book (as you can see in the video) is Nana in the City, and is all about bravery.  After we read and discussed the story, we got busy answering this question:

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We got busy thinking and drawing and I was really impressed (and a little surprised) with what they came up with.  Check out our work!

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We are excited to read more and write more and share our thinking!  There are some other friends in our school who are also participating and we’re hoping to share our thinking with them, as well.  Tomorrow we plan on joining a Twitter chat about Lauren Castillo’s books, too, so we can talk about what we like, what we think and who we are.  We may also build cityscapes to teach others about where we live.  The opportunities are endless!  I’m excited to share more and we go along!! 🙂

Our First MYSTERY NUMBER SKYPE!!

I was so excited to get my kiddo started on some “techy” type things and so today was a great day–we did our first MYSTERY NUMBER SKYPE!  What’s a Mystery Skype you ask?  What’s a Mystery Number Skype? (Check those out so you can get the big idea–believe me, they are one of the coolest things we do in Rm. 202!

Well today was the day!  I hadn’t really made a big deal about it, which was fine because they didn’t know what it was anyway, but boy did they pick it up quickly!  I explained the general idea (we have a number and the other class has a number and we use a 20-Question type game to figure out each others’ numbers), and then we practiced with the number 18.  We talked about words we might use (like greater than/less than, tens place/ones place), and ways we could cross off the most numbers at once (we kept track together on a hundreds chart) and then matched up with a partner to plan for what we would ask.

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At 9:30 we were ready, and our Skype phone rang!

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We answered and got right to work.  Our first point of business (after we said hello, of course!) was to figure out who would ask the first question.  We did so with rock/paper/scissors!

We won (rock over scissors!) and asked the first question.  Eventually we will have jobs for each kiddo, and will keep track of our questions for future reference, but for now we were lucky to have Mrs. Sisul tweet for us! Here’s an example (and you can check out the rest of the session on our class feed at @jbeardensclass) of what happened!

Rm. 202 kiddos did such a great job and were SUPER excited when in just about 5 or 6 questions we got to the point where we could guess their mystery number!

What a great start to our Mystery Skyping journey! We are ready to go and excited for our next call!  Who’s in?  If you’re interested, please leave us a comment so we can get in touch with you!

Working on Working Together

This week we had a class meeting and identified some tricky parts our class was having.  I HATE to admit that the list was really long.  Like 4 post-it notes long.  Big post-it notes. 😦

Well, because we have growth mindsets at our school (and in our room!), and because our tricky parts are things we can TOTALLY fix, we started spending some specific time on Friday working on figuring out what to do.

First we took all of our trouble spots and put them into categories.  We quickly realized we had many things that were similar and fit into four categories.  Then we saw that in some way these were all related to not following directions. (And I feel like I must say, when I first saw our list I had a bit of trouble with it because it felt a little like our classroom was always in chaos.  I promise these things happen in bits and pieces, not all at once, all the time.  And honestly, some of them are just what happens when you put lots of 6YOs together in a classroom.  But they are indeed things we need to work on, and for which we can find a solution!)

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As we continued through the day (and we will continue on Monday–well and probably beyond that, too!) with the focus on both following directions as well as thinking of others.  This second focus came because we had had a heart-to-heart about how so many of us of just thinking of ourselves, and so that’s why we’re not following directions in the first place.  For example, we are interrupting because we think our ideas are more important than our friends’, we’re leaving messes because we don’t care about our room and our friends, we are making noises during learning times because we are thinking more about ourselves (and what we want to do) than about our friends and their learning environment.  You get the idea.

We added that last bubble after we had had a chance to check out a couple of Class Dojo videos to get our minds thinking about how we might fix up our troubles.  We even tagged the day “Fix-it-Up Friday.”  Here’s one about making mistakes:

And another about having a growth mindset:

Another important part of our day was when Mrs. Cohen came back to our room to teach a lesson.  Because she and I had already chatted, we agreed that her lesson about following directions fit in PERFECTLY with what we were already working on.

First she talked with us a little bit about the work we had already done, and we explained our mistakes web to her.   She talked a little bit about why following directions is so important, and kiddos shared really smart ideas like how doing so keeps us safe and helps us learn.  Next, she gave us a challenge.  Everyone got a piece of paper and a crayon and set to listen to her directions.  They had to both HEAR and SEE in order to make this happen.  I only got part of the activity on video, but you’ll get the idea.  And what it showed us when we were finished was that we can, indeed, follow directions!  Pay attention to how well friends are listening, looking and quietly working!

Pretty great, right?  Look at al those cat pictures!

Well since they proved they could do that amazingness, she gave them another challenge.  Only this one wasn’t individual–we would all have to follow directions together to make it work!

They did it!  It wasn’t silent, and it wasn’t perfect, but they did a pretty good job, right?  We will definitely build on this learning (and progress) as we come back together on Monday.  We have work to do, but we know we can do it!

Book Shopping 101 in Rm. 202: Author Love

I’ve shared a couple of versions of the Recipe for a Good Book lesson I’ve taught in the past.  As far as I can remember, I hadn’t yet taught this whole deal with first graders.  I’m thinking it’s because the focus for so long has been on the definition of “just-right” books being focused on the level of the book (and less on the reader, I’d say).  I do agree that being in a book that you can read is important, but I would propose that being in a book at all–and a book that you LOVE–sets the stage as importantly as kiddos start their reading journey.

So this year, I’ve decided that the first lesson I taught would NOT be on “just-right” books in terms of knowing the words and understanding the story (but again, don’t hear me saying those things aren’t important, just not first), but would instead be on understanding and identifying what we like as readers.  And since we’re 105 books into #classroombookaday and have shared so many great texts together, I thought it would be a great place to start to zoom in on authors.

I started our conversation telling my kiddos about my past recipe lessons (and about recipes in general so they had a context), and then about my librarian pal Ms. Cobb who even dressed up as a chef to teach it to her 4th and 5th graders!  They were impressed, and I think a little sad that I didn’t have a costume. LOL

Then I asked a question: Why is it important to know an author’s name?  They had some great ideas and already came with a lot of knowledge of writers from kindergarten.  They were able to name some great ones (from this year’s books, from books previous teachers had read, and also some from their at-home reading) like Jeff Kinney, Dav Pilkey, our favorite right now Mo Willems, and Ame Dyckman (another new favorite!).  I added in another important reason, too, related to just respecting the writer for the hard work it is to write a book!

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After our initial talk, I got kids thinking about the kinds of books they like to read and told them an unbelievable story about someone I know who went to the library and didn’t have any idea what they were looking for, and about someone else who didn’t know the author’s name and asked the library for “a green book with a dog on the front that’s about this big.”  Crazy, right?  Well, yes, of course, some first graders (and much older students, too!) book shop like that, and I think it my duty to help change that (both for their “now” reading lives and their future selves).

Next step was to create a visual that they could use to remind themselves once they were in a shopping situation (in our classroom library, our school library, and heck, even Barnes and Noble!) of what they were looking for, rather than just roam around aimlessly or worse yet, get themselves into trouble because they didn’t know what to do.

I used the format of the Recipe for a Good Book as I had with previous classes, but instead of making it into a bookmark (which works best for kiddos that are primarily shopping for and reading chapter books), we made ours with pictures and words on full sheets of paper.

Kiddos could write or draw anything they knew they liked about books, including authors, titles, genres (if they knew this info) and even topics.  And since we had already read over 100 great titles together, kiddos were able to use our display to help them with their visuals.  I’m amazed every day about what a great idea that door display of our reading continues to be.  We keep finding different ways to use it!

Kids were very engaged, excited about what they put on their lists and spent the whole time talking about books!  We’re excited to take our new recipes to the library with us to help us with our choices tomorrow.  I am sure we’ll be glad we have them there! 🙂

Name Game (and a Couple of New Books!)

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:

img_3720img_3721img_3722 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. 🙂

What’s in a Name?–Continued

We started talking about names last week and are continuing the conversation as we build our community together.

We’ve continued reading great books together,

and discussing the importance of our names and how they tell something about us as people.  They are the first words we learn, they are letters we know, and they connect us to people in our families and our pasts.  They are OURS!!

We worked on name building challenges as well, with inch tiles and with Legos (thanks for that idea, Ms. Lewis!), and we were able to document our work with our iPads (thanks Kirkwood School District!).  We are learning more about how to show what we know, use GRIT when things are hard, share our ideas and questions with our friends, ask someone else before the teacher, and how to send that documentation (pictures, notes, etc.) to Mrs. Bearden in eBackpack.  Seems simple, but it’s hard work in Rm. 202!

Inch Tiles Name Challenge

Kiddos were to build their name with inch tiles.  They were challenged to try their last name if they got their first name quickly.  It was fun and interesting to watch how each kiddo came at this challenge differently, which tiles they used and if they used capital or lowercase letters.  They took pictures of their work when they were finished.

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Lego Name Building Challenge

This time learners were challenged to build their name with Legos (one, two or all three–or four–of their names!).  Then they were to have a friend take their picture with their creation.  We’re still learning to take photos, so some of them are a little blurry. 🙂  The most interesting thing to me about this challenge was how many kiddos build their names in 2D, just putting the Legos flat on the table or floor, rather than 3D, putting them together and building their names UP instead of out (but yes, you will see in the pictures that a few friends tried it that way!).  There were no specifications related to this, but I will probably add that parameter for everyone next time. 🙂

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I have to take a minute and highlight a strategy that we discovered during our Lego building.  I went over to Kaiden at one point and saw this:

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If you can tell, he had only built the LAST four letters of his name.  I asked him to tell me about his thinking and he told me:

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We had to stop the rest of the class and have him share his thinking–this was a great example of what to do when you’re stuck, when you want to quit or you don’t know where to start: do the part you DO know how to do and keep thinking about the part you DON’T YET know how to do.  Often you’ll figure it out while you’re working.  GREAT JOB OF USING GRIT, KAIDEN!!

 

 

Second Grade Writing Warm-Ups: Week of April 25-29, 2016

I think I mentioned last week (and probably the week before when we started them), but I am SO happy with how these warm-ups are really giving us a bang for our buck, and helping me get the thinking started BEFORE we sit down for our Writer’s Workshop mini-lesson.  It seems like they have more time for writing and I talk less!–or maybe it’s just at a different time, but still…:)

Here are last week’s warm-ups, a little late:

Monday

We are working on publishing now.  Can you tell?
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Tuesday

I know, this is totally lame, and didn’t really require them to do much thinking, it was just a quick check-in since they were supposed to be finished publishing their stories and I wanted to see how it was going.  Guess I figured that if they had a title, they probably had a story….yeah, not so much.  It was also just a great enticement for them to finish because we heard many intriguing titles and want to read them!!

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Wednesday

We are just between two writing units and this was a preview of the next one.  It was not the first time I’d asked this question, but it was great to see the additional things they could tell me, and even the domain-specific words they could use to talk about it!

Thursday

Ok, so this is not technically a writing warm-up, but it was timely for us and was something we needed to discuss.  You know, sometimes you change the plan. 🙂 And I should mention, they had some great answers and thoughts on what to do next time!

Friday

We have a FABULOUS thing at our school on half-days called Robinson University, which means that my kiddos are not in my room for much of the morning, and so didn’t have time to talk about a writing warm-up.  We just did a math warm-up instead. 🙂

 

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of April 18-21, 2016

This was a 4-day week at school, but since we’ve moved our MWU to the afternoon (instead of first thing in the morning), it has seemed it’s been easier to make them happen every day.  Maybe it’s just because of the unit we’re in, too, but our conversations about them have been SUPER POWERFUL lately.  Can’t imagine teaching without this part of our day!

Monday

I definitely should have taken a before and after picture of this one.  The circles were all filled up with post-its when we sat down to talk, but we had to work through them and decide which ones sounded like things mathematicians would say about these polygons.  Many of them were vague or didn’t use mathematical terms.  They said things like “they’re different” or “they’re the same.”  We talked through the definition of polygon (hence the words over there) as well as what some mathematical terms were that we should listen for as we narrowed down the choices.  This idea of comparing is something that students are expected to know how to do independently with two different polygons by the end of the unit, so trying some together along the way was crucial.

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Tuesday

This one matches up with both some work on shapes we had done earlier (names and attributes), as well as a replay of the question from the day before to see how they’d do in the same situation with different shapes.  The number of specific, mathematical responses was much greater this time and we had less work to do to make our Venn Diagram make sense.

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Wednesday

This question has a great story to tell (which is SO long and involved I’ll be nice and put it in a different post!), and really gave us lots of math to chew on.  And I thought I would be an easy one.  Those are always the problems that surprise me.

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Do you see the marks on the word HALF up there? Here’s a close-up:

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We’re applying our knowledge of lines, angles and polygons everywhere we look!  This wasn’t even part of the question, but of course was a great part of the discussion!

Thursday

After all our hard work (which I hope you’ll pop over and read about), I wanted to see if they could remember and apply it to a similar but new situation.  Most could see how the knowledge we had gained the day before about halves applied to thirds (and therefore to fourths, fifths, sixths, etc.).

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What did you work on as a mathematician this week?  What warm-ups would you suggest to us that include angles, polygons or fractions?  We’d love to try some more! 🙂