Hi room 5 families! What an incredible exhibition we had. I hope you are proud of your first grader and all of the learning and hard work that they put into their project. Below are pictures before the waves of crowds came to celebrate the students. After projects we like to have students reflect on their learning and bring the project full circle. At home parents can ask, "What was your highlight from the project?" "What opinions do you have about chocolate or the rainforest?" "What was challenging about the project?" "What did you enjoy the most about the project?" "What advice would you give future first graders who will do the chocolate project?". Here we are making chocolate with Ms. Schutlz from room 4. We learned about the importance of tempering and how that makes the chocolate shiny and smooth. We launched our math unit on geometry! It is my favorite subject to teach because no matter where a student is at in math shapes and angles speak to them. Ms. Dorrance launched the unit with a lesson on symmetry and related it to the rainforest and butterflies. Parents can ask students, "What does it mean for something to have symmetry?" "How do you know?" Today we toured the school to look at exhibition projects from kindergarten and second grade. Upper grade students also had a chance to come look at our exhibition and ask us questions about our project. Below are some pictures from the tour. We tried chocolate covered insects today and they were a hit! The sour cream and onion crickets were also popular.
0 Comments
Hi room 5 families! We are 3 weeks away from our school wide exhibition on Wednesday, May 22. The students have been working very hard to researching the rainforest and learning about its importance to chocolate. They can't wait to share what they have learned with you. Please read on below to see what we have been working in in room 5 and ways to support your child at home. Room 5 students are very talented! We had 12 students from our class perform in the talent show. Our student performers showed risk taking and shared their passion with the entire school. Our classroom also showed the school what it means to be a good friend and audience member by allowing students to take risks to perform in front of everyone. Below are room 5 performers. Here we are researching about the different layers of the rainforest and the different types of creates and plants that can be found in each layer. We are learning how to read informational text and highlight what we think is important information. After highlighting important information, we then draw a quick sketch that helps us remember or think about the important fact and reconnect back to the highlighted section. This is part of research based literacy strategy called Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) to help students access more complex text. Parents can ask, "From your reading, what are the layers of the rainforest?" "What kinds of animals or plants can you find in each one?" "How do you know if something is an important idea or fact in a text?" Here we are in math playing make 100. We are practicing adding numbers to make groups of 10 and racing to make 100. Parents can ask, "how many ones make up a group of 10?" "How many groups of ten are in 100?" In math we are also learning about telling time and how it is a type of measurement. In first grade students learn to tell and write time in hours and half-hours using analog and digital clocks. Through my own experience in teaching to tell time, any type of physical movement (using arms to mimic hour and minute hand) and labeling analog clocks with minutes and o'clock) really helps students grasp this abstract concept. We launched our math unit by creating our own paper analog clocks to practice on and reading The Grouchy Ladybug, which uses time and clocks as a way to track the story. We are also learning to match digital, analog and written times so that students are connecting the various ways time can be shared. Parents can ask, "What does the short hand tell you?" "What does the long hand tell you?" "How many minutes are there in an our?" "If the hour hand is in between a number which number do you say?" Here we are learning about the process of making chocolate and the collective effort that it takes to create a bar of chocolate. Ms. Dorrance designed a fair trained lesson where students worked in teams that each had a special role in manufacturing chocolate. Each team was paid a certain amount of money for their output. After they were done "working' they students charted how much money each group made and talked about why it was fair or not fair. In Fundations we are learning about r-controlled vowels. When a vowel is followed by an "r" it makes the vowel say a different sound. Below is a picture chart to help students learn the different sounds. Parents can help students think of different words that have r-controlled sounds.
Hi room 5 families! We are in full swing again in room 5 and have fully transitioned back from our spring break adventures. We are also about 4 weeks away from our school wide exhibition on May 22 (time to be determined). Below are some highlights from the past two weeks and ways families can support their child at home. Here we are wrapping up our measurement unit in math. We are learning about comparing lengths in inches. We learned about a friends fishing trip and the different types of fish that they caught and how they knew when they could keep a fish and when they had to throw it back in. Students learned how to use one-inch cubes to precisely measure different types of fish and compare their answers to a guideline about the fish type and length it needs to be in order to keep it. Parents can ask, "Why is important to be precise when measuring?" "How do you know if something is longer or shorter when measuring?" "How do you know if something is the correct measuring tool to use?" Here we are with our high school buddies! They taught us how to make origami hearts. The time we spend with our buddies allows us to practice our social emotional skills with different people. We're practicing turn taking, listening, and how to advocate for ourselves. Here we are with our 5th grade buddies. We are working on reading just right books. Here we are during project time with Ms. Dorrance. We are researching the history of chocolate. We learned about the key events that happened during the discovery of chocolate and created a timeline for the events. We also came up with gestures that match the important details. Parents can ask, "What did people used to do with chocolate?" "Where did chocolate drinks start?" "Who was able to eat chocolate when chocolate was first discovered?" We also have some very special news to share! Ms. Wu is expecting her first baby! Below the students read a special morning message from Ms. Wu. She is due in October. In writers workshop we are learning about opinion writing. We are writing a piece on whether or not we think a cacao tree should be planted in our school garden. Below are some facts that we learned with Ms. Hutchins. We learned that an opinion is an idea that we back up with facts. And that it's okay to have different opinions but that we are still respectful of each other's ideas. Parents can ask, "What is your opinion about the cacao tree in our school garden?" "Why is that?" "What facts do you know that supports your opinion?"
Hi room 5 families! March is almost over and spring break is here! We have been busy exploring measurement, editing our teaching books, learning about the rainforest and practicing our social emotional skills with our 5th grade and high school buddies. Below are some highlights from the past two weeks. In math we are learning about measurement, why and how you measure something and the importance of being precise. Here we are working in pairs to measure a list of things around the classroom. In first grade we begin learning about measurement with non-standard tools (cubes, tiles, hands, feet) and eventually we learn to use standard tools (rulers etc.). The students were so excited to learn how measurement works they wanted to measure the length of the classroom! FYI it is 566 cubes long. We are also exploring the importance of choosing appropriate measuring tools. For example, below students decided which tool would be best to measure an object based on the size of the object. At home parents can support students by exploring lengths of objects at home. Students can measure with nonstandard items such as string or their hands. Follow up questions to ask are, "Which was the longest?" "Which was the shortest?" "How do you know?" "What tool do you think would be best to measure _______? Why?" In math we are continuing our exploration of word problems and finding new ways to solve the problems. He are two students sharing their strategies to the group. We love our high school buddies! Here we are practicing reading just right books with our buddies and then getting a chance to practice turn taking skills outside with our buddies. Last week at our school gathering the 5th graders introduced us to Bathroom Boss. Bathroom Boss likes to keep the school bathrooms clean so that everyone can have a clean and safe time in the bathroom. We can help by washing our hands after using the bathroom, throwing trash in the trash bins and keeping a volume one on the bathroom if we need to give a message. In FUNdations we learned about the glued sounds ang, ong, ing, ung. Glued sounds are letters that make their individual sounds but are stuck together. When students tap out a glued sounds they tap down the same number of finger as there are glued letters for the sound. For example in the word song, s gets one finger tape and the ong gets three finger tap at the same time. Parents at home and point out these sounds when reading and ask, what letters make that sound? In writing parents can encourage their child if they hear and glued sounds that might help them write the word. We learned a poem about the rainforest! The teacher reads the orange part and the students read the purple part. Have fun reading the poem together at home! We had a very special visit from a chocolatier from Nibble Chocolate. We learned about the different tastes that chocolate can have depending on the recipe. We go to see pictures of where this particular chocolatier grows their cacao and we even got to learn about recipes that we are going to try in class. Parents can ask their child, "What is chocolate made from?" "What type of tools does a chocolatier use to make chocolate?" "What is the main ingredient in chocolate?"
Hello room 5 families! Below are some things that we have been exploring in room 5. Ms. Dorrance taught us another tool to help us problem solve with peers. It's called Bugs and Wishes! As a class we came up with a list of things that bug us at school. Then we came up with a wish that we would want to happen when this bug occurred. We also learned to use the sentence stem "It bugs me when___________. I wish people would _________________." This tool helps students advocate for themselves and also think about things they are able to solve on their own and what types of things they need to get a teacher to help them with. Here we are during a math discussion. A student is sharing her strategy while other students are listening to see if they understand what she did, if they can make connections to any of the strategies that were used, and if it makes sense to them. The students who are listening get an opportunity to ask clarifying questions and also ask for more details from the student who is sharing. Our math discussions serve as an opportunity to build critical speaking and listening skills as well as tools to back up our own thinking and reasoning. The role of the teaching during this part of the lesson is to facilitate the conversation and guide the thinking rather then tell students what the answer should be and show one way to solve a problem. At homes parents can support students inquiry process by asking, " How did you know to subtract/add that number?" In writers' workshop we are busy editing our teaching books to add to the classroom library. Each student has selected a teaching book that they were excited to write and are now editing their writing to eventually turn it into a book for others to read in the classroom. Ms. Dorrance has also taught us about using our five senses when writing to really help our readers feel as thought the book is happening right there in front of them in real life. Thank you to all who helped to make our zoo scavenger hung a success! The students have been excited to use all of the things they saw and learned about rain forest animals and plants to their project.
Hi room 5 families! We can't believe how quickly February is going by. Even with all of the rain and freezing temperatures we are moving along in room 5. Read on below to see what we have been up to and ways to support your student at home. We are so excited when we are working on our project. This month we are learning about the rainforest layers and why each layer is unique. Below we are learning about the different insects that you might find in the forest floor of the rainforest. We are also creating pop up informational charts about the rainforest layers. Parents can ask your student, "What are the 4 layers of the rainforest?" "What is important about each layer of the rainforest?" "What type if animals would you find in each layer?" In math we are practicing writing numbers 1 through 100 and recalling number facts. Below we are creating a 100s chart and playing Go Fish 10 and 20. To play Go Fish 10 and 20 students work in pairs with numbered cards. Each student needs to have 5 cards in their hand at all times. The goal is make combinations of 10 or 20 with the cards that you have. You can take turns asking your partner if they have a number you need to make 10 or 20. This can be played with regular deck of cards. We are also learning about fractions. In first grade, fractions focus on halves and fourths and how the parts make up a whole. Parents can help their students think of halves and fourths during everyday activities such as cooking, cutting up food, and origami. Parents can ask, "How many halves make up a whole?" "How many fourths make up a whole?" We have cacao pods! Here we are exploring the pods. We even got to try cacao nibs - the roasted cacao bean that makes the chocolate. You can find them at Trader Joe's! Here we are practicing reading with our high school buddies. We are working on reading just right books. In writers' workshop we are learning to add more details to our teaching books to help our potential readers learn more about our topic. Below Ms. Dorrance is teaching a lesson on what questions writers should be thinking about when writing information such as who, what, where, when and how. Students are also learning about twin sentences - sentences that go together and give more detail.
Hi room 5 families! We have launched our new project, Chocolate! We will be exploring the rainforest ecosystem, creating our own chocolate recipes and discussing the social justice issues that surround chocolate. Below we launched our project by doing a chalk-talk around the question, "What is chocolate?". We then talked about what we think we know about chocolate and then did a simple taste test to see what types of chocolate friends in the classroom enjoy. Project handouts will be sent given out at parent-teacher conferences. Parents can ask their student, "Why are you learning about the rainforest in the chocolate project?" For our read aloud book, we started Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. So far we have met Charlie and his family, Mr. Wonka, the Oompa Loompas, and Agustus Gloop. While many of the characters are the same in the book, the story is quite different! The students are excited to learn how the story unfolds. In math we have been exploring skip counting and grouping numbers when adding. Here are examples of some of the problems we have been working on. Parents can ask their student, "What is the problem asking you to figure out?" "How do you know that?" "How did you count that?" "Do you think this is an addition problem or subtraction problem? Why?" Here we are playing a math game galled Cover Up! We are practicing number recognition. We are using clues from the 100s chart to figure out what number is covered up. Here we are in music with Ms. Amanda. In first grade music is in the piano room. We are learning about moTown music. In March we will start piano lessons. Parents can ask, "Can you sing the Hello Song?" "What is moTown?" Here we are in science with Ms. Hutchins. We are learning about chemical and physical changes. Here we are making flubber and oobleck. Parents can ask, "What is an example of a chemical change?" What is an example of a physical change?" We also learned about recipes and the importance of measuring.
Happy New Year room 5 families! This month we welcomed a new friend into room 5, had our dance performance and learned some new strategies for solving word problems. Read on below to see highlights from the past few weeks. We spent the first few days back remembering class routines and how we can help each other start of the year feeling good. Below Ms. Dorrance is teaching a social emotional lesson on ways we can help each other feel happy and safe at school. Each time something unkind is said or done to Charlie, our fictional paper friend, it adds a crumple to him. We then talked about how we can un-crumple a friend by asking what they need, using kind words and helping them if they need it. The students also noticed that when they did say kind things to un-crumple our paper friend, Charlie, that the wrinkles never completely went away. Parents can support their child's thinking of kindness and the power of their words by asking, "What can you do if you do say something unkind?" "What does it mean that the wrinkles didn't go away even though you said kind things to Charlie?" We made goals for ourselves for the new year. Some of the goals range from trying new foods to creating things with Legos to reading more challenging books. Below we are creating our 2019 goals. Parents can ask, "What is something you want to learn, see or try this year? Why?" We worked really hard on our dance performance with Coach Cribbs. Below are some pictures from our rehearsal as well as from the dance performance on Thursday for the whole school. Thank you to Flynn for taking the pictures! Parents can ask, "What type of dances did you learn? What was your favorite part of the dances? How did it make you feel to perform a dance for the whole school?" We explored roly pollies! The first grade teachers have noticed that the students love to build bug hotels in the garden area so they thought it would be fun to learn more about the creatures. Below we are sketching what we notice about our roly poly. We then did an experiemtn to learn about what types of environments roly polys prefer - dark and wet! Parents can ask, "What do roly polys look like?" "What did you do to find out what type of environment roly polys prefer?" "How did you know?" Below we are meeting with our high school buddies! We missed them so much! We see our high school buddies once a week on Fridays to practice our reading.
Hi room 5 families! We can't believe 2018 is almost over. We spent the last week of school together celebrating our hard work at exhibition and spending time with our high school and 5th grade buddies. Read on to see our week. Here we are decorating cookies! Thank yo to Ms. Wu for making this possible. We spent time with our 5th grade buddies who made us each a book about tools and strategies we can use to help us have grit and be flexible. We also spent some time making a gift for our parents. You'll have to wait to find out what it is! We also thought about what we would do to help Santa if he got stuck in a chimney! Our ideas ranged from buttering up the chimney to getting Santa's cellphone to call for help. We ended the week by making gingerbread houses.
Hi room 5 families! What an incredible exhibition! We are so proud of the hard work that the first graders did to put together their comic con. Below are some pictures of the process that helped us get to our final products. Many thanks to you for coming to support our superheroes! Below are highlights from our project. A special thank you to our 9th grade buddies from High Tech Media High for helping us critique our work and helping us cute out the materials for our superhero symbols. In math we have been working on finding the difference unknown (e.g., 12 + ____ = 32). We're exploring ways to represent numbers using base 10 and using the 100s chart. Below we are sharing our strategies with Ms. Dorrance. In Fundations we have been learning about glued letters (an, am) and how to use these letters when we write to build different words (e.g., ham, fan). We have also be learning about plurals and how sometimes an ending can sound like a /z/ but in English is is an /s/. We also learned about how sometimes some words have a double L, S, or F but that the double letters only make one sound (e.g., puff, miss, hill). These letters are called bonus letters. Next up we will be learning about more glued sounds (ang, ing, ong, ung, ank, ink, onk, and unk). Parents can support their student at home back asking them what type of sounds they hear when reading or writing tricky words (e.g., glued sounds, diagraphs, plurals).
|
AuthorWe are authors, writers, mathematicians, readers, scientists and artists. Mrs. Salamanca will email you to check our class blog when there are new updates. Archives
May 2019
Categories |