First Graders Take Flight: Fabulous Friday

It has been a busy week in first grade! Since it was the first week of September, we kicked off our monthly home reading programs. Each child was given a reading log to take home to record what they read and how long they read each night. At the end of the month, we will total the number of minutes they read and for every 60 minutes read they will earn either a ticket (Ms. Arbogast's class) or a bead (Ms. Shivers's class). These tickets and beads will be on display in the classroom (see below) and will be a fun way of tracking reading progress throughout the year. Students will also be able to earn tickets or beads for meeting different reading challenges in class, such as moving up a reading level. We got the idea here and adapted it to fit our own classrooms!

Ms. Shivers's board is the one on the left. The beads will be collected on the students' luggage tags. Ms. Arbogast's board is on the right and the students' tickets will be added to their ring of tickets.

We have also continued practicing routines and procedures, and we introduced two new journal routines this week, reading response journals and math journals.

Every Friday we will choose one of the books we have read during the week to respond to in our journals. We got the idea here and are so excited to start this routine in our classes this year. The journals will be a wonderful way to show growth throughout the year and will make a great first grade keepsake! This journal offers the students a great opportunity to practice several writing and reading skills...capitalizing the words in a title, capitalizing the author's name, underlining the title, neat handwriting, finger spaces, etc. It also allows the students to have a chance to make a personal connection to their reading. Today we read Officer Buckle and Gloria. The students always begin by writing the title, author, and date. We modeled this first on the ENO board and then the students copy it into their journals. Then the students chose their favorite safety tip from the book, wrote it on a star cut out and glued it into their journal. Here is a peek into a few of their journals:

From top left, clockwise: " Don't walk in the street.", "Stay away from guns.", "Never sit on a thumbtack.", "Don't smoke cigarettes." There were so many cute ones, it was hard to choose just a few to share! :)

Finally, we also started our math journal routine today. Our math journals are going to be a place where we really extend our thinking. Besides solving the problem, the students will be asked to explain how they solved it and what strategies they used. Today we just started with a simple number story. The students copied the problem, solved it, wrote an answer, and then wrote a sentence telling which strategy they used. In the future, we will probably give the students the problems already typed to glue into their journals to make it easier on everyone! They did great, though, for the first day and it will be exciting to see how these journals help them go deeper in their thinking throughout the year! Here are a few from today (I love the invented spelling in the second one! We will be working on that "dr" blend this year!):