Friday, October 31, 2014

Halloween Surprise Party!

This morning I surprised my students with a pumpkin pancake Halloween Party.  I had help from a pumpkin flipper.
This is the pumpkin flipper.
Here they are. . .and they were delicious!
They were hungry!

Spiderman stopped by. 
So did Pete the Cat!
And a younger sibling who was very helpful.
Cruella Deville was here!
Elsa from Frozen loves to read in the library. 
They worked hard to put this puzzle together. 
A wonderful parent volunteer and her beautiful daughters. 
Heidi and a Ladybug!
This is a huge fan of Bad Kitty!


Sunday, October 26, 2014

Using Stellaluna to Support Reading Comprehension Strategies: Making Connections, Determining Author's Message, Retelling, Compare and Contrast, and Fact or Opinion

I remember the first time I heard Stellaluna by Janell Cannon.  It was 1999 and I was student teaching in a preschool at the lab school connected to the college from which I earned my undergraduate degree in early childhood education.  Stellaluna currently rests at a well-deserved Number 71 on the School Library Journal's list of the 100 top picture books of all time.
Stellaluna is a fruit bat (aka "flying fox") who is separated from her mother after an owl attacks them while they are in search of fruit one night.  Stellaluna survives and befriends three baby birds; she eats insects like them and learns to sleep right side up during the night.  Unbeknownst to Stellaluna, her mother survives the owl attack.  The two types of illustrations in Stellaluna simultaneously depict the story of Stellaluna and her mother.  The pencil drawn miniature illustrations on the top of the left page of the book intricately detail Stellaluna's mom's relentless search for Stellaluna after the owl attack.  The full blown, colored, scientifically correct illustrations on the right depict the story of Stellaluna's journey after the owl attacked. 
Stellaluna fell headfirst into the nest of Pip, Flitter, and Flap, three baby birds. 
Over the past two weeks, I have used Stellaluna in a big book format as a mentor text to teach different comprehension strategies.  During the second reading of the book, students made connections to events in the book.  For example, when Stellaluna cries, "Where are you?" after the owl attacks them, students remembered a time when they needed their mothers.  They wrote their connections on sticky notes and attached the notes to the places in the book where they made their personal connections.  Some were able to make text to text connections from when Stellaluna ate a grasshopper to when the main character ate peas in Night of the Veggie Monster (a mentor text we are using for our narrative unit of study in writer's workshop). 

We watched this 13 minute video of Thomas, an orphaned fruit bat in Australia.  In Australia, fruit bats are often killed while they hang on electrical wires.  Although Thomas's mom was electricuted, he survived and was raised by a trained volunteer.  The video does an outstanding job of changing the viewer's opinion that baby bats are scary and evil to baby bats are sweet and cuddly, just like puppies.  After viewing this, I used a document camera and projector while my students made a list of facts about fruit bats and a list of opinions about fruit bats.  I then typed the list, added an illustration of a fruit bat, and placed copies of the list in students' reading binders.  Re-readings of the list they generated helped to develop their reading fluency, cemented their understanding of the difference between opinion and fact, and increased their understanding of bat facts.  

We listened to and viewed Pam Reed, from the Screen Actor's Guild Foundation reading Stellaluna. Hearing a story read aloud by different people increased my students' awareness of the choices readers make when reading aloud - such as tone of voice, tempo, character voices, and prosody.  

We also made story boards to help us retell the story of Stellaluna. This is the third story board we have made this year; past story boards have been Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me by Eric Carle, and Frederick by Leo Lionni.  I planned the story board activities so that the degree of difficulty in retelling each of the three stories increased.  Story retelling - the process by which a child listens to or reads a story and then summarize, or "retells," the story in his or her own words - is a technique that ties into these learning experiences and is an effective way to improve children's reading comprehension. Studies on story recall have found that extended use of the technique of story retelling leads to large improvements in story comprehension, making inferences, understanding story structure, and language development.  Here are some pictures of students in my class retelling Stellaluna
This is the Stellaluna story board.  There are 3 settings and 7 characters.


For a second shared reading text, I chose Helpful Bats from the extensive library in Reading A-ZHelpful Bats is available in a projectible format; I can project it onto my whiteboard.  The projectible books at Reading A-Z are interactive in real time, which means that my students and I can use a highlighter to highlight words, manipulate text, add illustrations, and a myriad of other manipulations.  At the end of the Stellaluna study, each student will receive a colored, hard copy of Helpful BatsHelpful Bats is a persuasive book. I will refer back to it as a mentor text when we study the persuasive writing genre in writer's workshop. All students will understand that Lisa Harkraker, the author of Helpful Bats, gave multiple reasons why bats are helpful in her book.   
 
The next comprehension skill that I am going to teach is Compare and Contrast. Using Kidspiration (a software program which I will write more about in another post), together we are going to create a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting bats and birds.  (Later, students will independently use Kidspiration to create their own Venn diagrams.) I anticipate that the Venn Diagram will look something like this after it is finished:


Because of the deep immersion I have provided into the story of Stellaluna, my students understand that Janell Cannon's message is to value the sameness and differences in each of us.  At the conclusion of the book, the three birds and Stellaluna wonder how they can be so much alike, and yet so different, and still be friends.  To identify the author's message, students must infer, or "read between the lines."  Determining the author's message is a tricky skill to learn in first grade because developmentally, six year olds are concrete, literal learners.  Repeated readings help support their budding abilities. 

I chose to teach Stellaluna at this time in the school year for lots of reasons.  First, because it's almost Halloween, and learning about bats fits right into my students' wheelhouses.  Second, our next unit of study in writing is non-fiction chapter books. Front loading all of my students with extensive schema on bats will make it easy for me to model bats as the topic of a class created non-fiction chapter book.  My students will be active participants in creating a class bat book because schematically they will have a deep understanding of bats.  In addition,  Stellaluna is a sophisticated story with one main character, six supporting characters, and three settings.  Its plot is complicated and definitely challenges their retell skills.

Finally, Stellaluna is one of my favorite books of all time.   My enjoyment of the book will rub off on them, and another generation of Stellaluna-lovers will be born. 

Thursday, October 16, 2014

What does Frederick do to prepare for winter?

The title of this post is a play on the essential question of the unit of study that we are undertaking in science.  The question is actually, "What do animals do to prepare for winter?"  As part of our study, we read,  Frederick,  by Leo Lionni.  Originally published in 1967,  Frederick is the story of a field mouse who chooses to collect sunshine, colors, and words instead of the usual corn and wheat that other members of his family collect to prepare for winter.  When Frederick's mice family is freezing and without food during the winter, they appeal to Frederick's "supplies" of sunshine, colors, and words to help them make it through the winter.  Frederick delivers in the end - all three of his supplies lift the spirits of his family.

I like this book because in the end, the wayward character, Frederick, does not get chastised for not doing what the other members of his family do to prepare for winter.  Instead, Frederick's family is impressed with his supplies.  Thematically, Leo Lionni's book honors those of us whose heart beats to a different drummer.

This book connected to our science unit by teaching where and what mice do to prepare for winter, and how they survive during the winter.  Its multilevels are a perfect match for our science unit.

One of the activities that we did was to retell the story in pictures and words.  Each child was given a sentence that describes an event from the book.  They illustrated the event and we arranged their illustrations on this bulletin board:
This is the completed bulletin board inside the classroom.


This is one student's illustration of the wayward Frederick

And then winter came. . .
Frederick said his words in the form of a beautiful poem at the end of the story.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

A Gardening Day!

Another beautiful day for a field trip.  We visited the garden at the south end of town and had a wonderful day.  We planted garlic and took a tour of the garden.  We tasted fennel, arugula, green beans, yellow beat greens, and red beat greens.  Each first grader picked at least one decorative corn to bring home.  We also brought corn husks back to Dike Newell to use to decorate. 
These were the garlic seeds.  We planted about 200!
First graders were  a very captive audience.
These are the seeds in the ground.
Here is a beautiful younger sibling and mom of  one of my first graders.
We had to pat the soil once we put the seeds in the ground. 
Then we covered the seeds with hay to keep them warm.
Here is a view of the garden.
The volunteers were so helpful!
Here is one of my extremely dedicated volunteers.

Maine Wilderness Park

Here are some pictures from our field trip to the Maine Wilderness Park on October 6.  The weather could not have been more beautiful.  The parent volunteers that helped my class out were so patient and kind to the children.  It was a wonderful day!

There was a gray fox.
Here is a resting moose.
A bird built its nest right around a light.
They had two baby lynx.
 Here is a cougar that was on the prowl.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Making Ten

In the Common Core edition of the Everyday Mathematics curriculum that the district in which I work uses, there is an emphasis on deeply understanding number combinations to 10.  To help first grade kinesthetic, visual, and oral learners, I created the model for this Making Ten supplemental tool.  Each students used 110 stickers to make their own tool.  First graders use them when asked to verbalize number combinations to 10.  They have been laminated and students store them in their math binders and read them during independent reading to reinforce their understanding.  
Students can read across the first line and understand that 0 and 10 more equals 10.  They can read across the sixth line and see that 5 and 5 equals 10.  Holistically,  they understand that there are exactly 11 ways to make 10.  Using the tool, I can ask them if 7 and 4 make 10 and they resoundingly answer, "No!" because they can reference the tool and see that 7 and 3 equals 10.  Using the tool, many are able to extrapolate that 7 and 4 equals 11. 

The Making Ten tool can also be used in the future when the expectation is that students be skilled in writing number combinations to 10. Because the tool is laminated, they will be using white board markers to write the number sentence that corresponds with each line.

Further, when the curriculum exposes children to "Turnaround Facts," they will be able to compare the first line to the eleventh line. The Making Ten tool will help them understand that 0 plus 10 equals 10 and that 10 plus 0 also equals 10.