Food Drive

Thank you to all who donated!

We graphed the food we collected and here is the graph:

We had 13 cans, one bag, and 7 boxes of food!

Wednesday mornings with Mrs. Brinkler

Every Wednesday morning at 9:30 Mrs. Brinkler delivers a guidance lesson.  One of the favorite parts of the lesson is a "challenge" in which students are challenged to work together to complete a task.  This week students were given small cards depicting an emotion.  Their challenge was to display the emotion with body language and find the one student in our class who had a matching card.  They had to discover the matching student by studying their classmates' body language.  Here are two students who found their matches:

Can you guess what emotion they are displaying with their body language?

Our iPad is on its way!

Thank you very much to everyone for donating to our second DonorsChoose project of the year.  We now have an iPad 3 (with a pink case) on its way. 

  
 

Mo Willems and The Common Core

Maine has joined 47 other states and "signed on" to the Common Core, a set of national standards that are being used by teachers and administrators nationwide to help prepare children for college and careers.  This means that if you should move from Maine to Mississippi, your child's end of year reading goals should look the same in both states.   Today I was at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine, attending a workshop titled "Linking Classroom Planning and the Common Core" with Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan, authors of Assessment:  Finding the Stories of Our Students.

In a nutshell, the heart of the workshop was dedicated to looking deeply at the Common Core's ten anchor standards for reading and aligning them with the planning, instruction, and assessment cycle of teaching.  Because there were two presenters and only eight attendees for this particular session,  I was able to further differentiate by grade level, which means that there was time to ask and receive answers specific to first grade. 

How does this connect with Mo Willems and what we are doing in school today?  The standards address what "the average first grader in the United States" should know about reading.  I was able to plan the linking of what to teach and how to teach it with our current favorite books,  Mo Willems' Knuffle Bunny,  Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus, and We Are In A Book in mind.  The professional development will help immeasurably for all of my future instruction.  

In addition to the training, we were each given copies (to keep!) of all of the childrens' books that we used throughout the conference as text models for teaching the standards.  Brenda Power, the owner of Choice Literacy, a literacy website with 55,000 subscribers, and the conference hostess, gave us each many other gifts to take home (including a free subscription to her website and a $199.00 Demonstration DVD!).

Best.  Workshop.  Ever.  

Starting the Year in Writer's Workshop

There are three genres of writing that we are mandated to study in first grade:  narrative (stories), expository (factual), and persuasive.  We are starting the year by delving deep into story writing.  We are in the process of writing stories with a beginning, middle, ending, problem and resolution.  We are looking at punctuation and deciding which kind to use at the end of a sentence.  Some of us can read our writing and think about how we could change it so it makes better sense.   Others can add detail to our drawings and writing to help make our story more interesting or clearer.  

The book that we are using to help us think of writing ideas is Ralph Tells A Story by Abby Hanlon.  The book was written by a first grade teacher and suggests that there is a story in all of us; we just need to pay attention to find it.