Five for Friday!

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though!  My DRAs are complete and our math SGO end of the year assessments are done!  Both are analyzed and my SGO goals have been met. Woohoo!  Yannuzzi-1, Danielson-0.  Now, I’m hoping to just enjoy my firsties and the activities we do together until that last day. June 19th you’re out there, aren’t you?!  Here’s a recap of our week with my favorite linky party, Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love writing workshop.  Whenever we start a new unit, my students literally cheer, whoop, and holler!  It’s too funny.  But, just like me they share a passion for creating stories and sharing them with their peers.

This week we started our last writing unit, Scenes to Series: Writing Realistic Fiction.  My firsties were beyond excited when I told them that they were going to be taking a break from writing about things that they know a lot about, poetry, and writing about themselves to create pretend characters!  The first two days we spent discussing our characters and creating back stories for them.  We drew them, talked about who their friends might be, and created a back story for them.

This little love above created Michelle.  A little girl who’s 5 years old who loves to wear dresses but with NO leggings.  I found this too funny because this little one comes to school EVERY DAY wearing dresses and leggings!  I know there’s a story there!  This just goes to show that first graders are so capable of using moments from their own lives to inspire their writing.

The narrative writing that my first graders have begun to create is just too entertaining not to share!  I can’t wait to see what kind of adventures my first graders create for their characters.  At the end of the unit, we’ll publish all of our pieces and put them in a cut out cereal box to look like a real book series!

My little guy above created a character named Dr. Coloso!  He loves to experiment in his basement but has been getting into LOTS of trouble with his mom and being put into time out!  His first page had so many examples of things we’ve worked on in writing workshop throughout the year.  My favorite is the last line, “He was in the middle of it then what happened…” To be continued.  These firsties know how to keep a reader guessing!

This year I have tried to really take a step back and come up with activities to set the stage for my learners instead of jumping right into a new topic.  This fantastic idea came from none other than Reagan Tunstall from Tunstall’s Teaching Times.  I could spend hours on her blog and use it for professional development.  Her original idea shows her students asking questions and commenting on photographs before beginning an ocean unit study.  Our final first grade project is going to be an animal research report.  Each first grade class has adopted a different habitat.  The students will be researching animals in their habitats using Pebble Go.  When our reports are written we’re going to use Audio Boo to record our reports and turn them into QR codes.  Once this is all done, the first grade classes will decorate the hallways as our habitats and the students will go on a tour around the habitats by scanning the QR codes and learning about all the animals that live there!

I can’t wait for this to happen!  

Before all of this could happen we needed to set the stage for our learning.  I put out butcher paper with real photographs of animals and scenes from the Rain Forest (our class habitat).  We took a gallery walk around the room, in absolute silence, as to not disturb the other museum visitors!  When we came across a photograph we had a question about or comment, we stopped and wrote it down.  We will continue to use these questions to guide our research.

When we’re all done celebrating with our habitat hallway adventure, we’re going to compile our animal reports into a class book!