Weather Journals

The kids have been doing an awesome job in their weather journals lately.  We're focusing on indenting the first line of their paragraphs right now.

This anchor chart has helped them a lot.  They know to copy what's written in blue, and that what's written in green changes from day to day.  This has also been a great opportunity for the kids to understand the difference between increased and decreased.  I'll take any chance I can get to teach my kids great vocabulary words!

Phonics Writing Bulletin Board: -ow/-ou Houses

I'm proud of me today!  I changed the students' work on my primary bulletin board this afternoon!  (It had been about 6 weeks since I'd put new work up. I know, it's quite embarrassing.)  As I've written about before, it's very easy for my perfectionist tendencies to keep me from accomplishing tasks, because I always want to wait to do things until I have time to "do it perfectly."  Well, the problem with that kind of thinking is that those times never come.  So I can get behind on a lot of things.  Like changing my bulletin boards.  

But I'm trying reeeeallly hard to let things just be good enough. For example, it has to be okay that the spacing between the first and second rows is larger than the spacing between the second and third rows.  (Don't act like you didn't notice!)  And I'm not going to let myself freak out about the fact that the bottom row is curving upwards slightly towards the middle. With 35 kids this year, I need to let myself just be proud that 1.) they all understood the assignment, 2.) they all (with a few exceptions) completed it, and 3.) for the most part they all did a really good job!  After all, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be about?  I mean, instead of beautiful bulletin boards that look like the Paper Source windows?  (Not that I don't still dream of creating beautiful bulletin boards that look like the Paper Source windows . . .)

Check out some of my students' writing!  I am so proud of this student!  Listen to that incredibly interesting writer's voice!  And this is a student who is in one of my lowest reading groups!  Granted, he misspelled his sight word said, reversed his b in boy, and forgot to capitalize the first letter of most of his sentences, but those are just mechanics! I can EASILY teach him to fix those simple errors. It is  much more difficult teaching students how to choose interesting subjects, and to then create something that people want to read more of. 

And what about this little gem?  Reading things like this makes my heart smile.  

This happy little student not only wrote a wonderful little narrative, complete with characters, setting, and sequence of events, BUT, he capitalized his proper nouns!  (I just need to teach him that the word king in King Cowder is part of the name, and therefore needs to be capitalized as well.)  And, he made up a word (Cowder) using his new spelling pattern!  (Unless he meant to use his spelling word chowder, which is definitely a possibility.  I'll have to ask him to read it to me tomorrow to know for sure.)  And I love that he didn't just write "Once upon a time," he wrote "Once upon a long long time"!  Yay!  This is so exciting!  My firsties are becoming writers!

Making sentences with Magnetic Words

The Dollar Tree really is the best place to find inexpensive teaching resources.  The pack of magnetic words below cost me (duh) a dollar, and so did the cookie sheet underneath it.  My white boards are magnetic, but I love using the cookie sheets so the little monsters lovely children don't scatter the tiny pieces all over the floor.  (And in my classroom, the floor is like a black hole.  Once something leaves the desk, it disappears like a sock in the dryer.)  

Each part of speech is color-coded as well, however I haven't taught them this yet.  Once we've reviewed the parts of speech more, I can start talking about how all sentences need a blue noun, a red verb, and even better sentences have green adjectives, etc.  Until then, students just had fun reading the sight words and helping each other sound out the other words they didn't know.  

Some of the sentences they created were pretty funny . . . My favorite may have been, "She is old."  The little one who wrote this called me over to show me, and I strongly suspect he was talking about me!  (Oh, God, thirty-three isn't old yet, is it??)

First Grade Common Core Writing Rubric

One of the things I've been working on this year is rubrics.  By the end of the summer, I'm hoping to have written rubrics for every Common Core-based assessment or project I plan on assigning next year.  I think this will make parent conferences easier, especially when I get the question, "Why is my child getting the grade Needs Improvement in Language?"  So far, I've written rubrics for narrative writing (CCSS W.1.3) and I'm working on a rubric persuasive/opinion writing (CCSS W.1.1) which should be posted soon!

Narrative Writing Rubric

Irregular Plural Nouns

We've been doing some review work on irregular plural nouns. When I covered this earlier, a few of my kids were still a liittttlle shaky on the whole concept of nouns (compared to verbs and adjectives), so I decided to touch on it again. This is a writing activity we did last month in our writing journals:

This was enough for the majority of the class to "get it," especially after writing sentences that used irregular plural nouns.  But to let my stragglers catch up to the pack, I did this activity:

I had a list of 28 nouns one for each student, with several nouns for each of the following singular-to-plural rules: 

~add -s, 

~add -es, 

~change y to i and add -es, 

~change f to v and add -es, and 

~keep the plural noun the same as the singular. 

I then drew name sticks to assign students to a word, and they had to draw and label the singular noun on one side of the page, and draw and label the plural noun on the other half of the page, using the appropriate rule.  

The best part of this activity came the following morning during reading centers, when the kids had to sort each other's labeled drawings according to the rule they used to make the noun plural.  They recognized each other's work, and loved using their own work to do the sort. I guess there are situations where my beautifully crafted and laminated flash cards aren't the best way for kids to learn!  (While my ego took a slight blow, I realized that it's a lot less work for me if the kids make their own sorting cards for grammar and spelling conventions.)

To really drive the concept of irregular plural nouns home, I assigned this app in one of my iPad centers. In this free app, the kids are given a sentence that uses an irregular plural noun, except they have to decide what form of the noun should be used. For example, "The boy saw three ______ in the forest."  Then the students have to drag either the word deer or the word deers into the blank.