Today students started learning about how to make inferences. Inferences can be a tricky topic for our emerging readers as they are required to look for clues in a text, consider their own schema or experiences about that clue and THEN make an inference.
Making inferences based on previous experiences is an important skill for our first grade readers. It will also become increasingly useful as they read more sophisticated texts. We had a really fun introductory lesson that was inspired by the work of other first grade teachers. Students closed their eyes and chose an item from my personal bag. They looked at these items like clues, considered their previous experiences with these items and ten made inferences about what those items meant about teacher Gaja! Check out our group work and their independent work with this topic! Hello Families, Today we learned about life in the countryside of France! We also watched this youtube video about castles in France. Hello Families, Recently your first graders have been investigating number sentences and number stories with missing addends. For example, they must solve problems like the following: There were 10 apples on the tree. Some fell off and rolled away. Now there are 7 apples left on the tree. How many apples fell off? Though the numbers appear small, students are challenged with understanding the structure of the number sentence! They have to visualize what happened first, next and last. They have to decide whether numbers need to be compared, put together or taken apart. This week we are exploring this type of thinking with missing addend number sentences. 10 - ____=7 We are learning different games to help with this process. Today's and tomorrow's game is called "What's under my cup?" The poster below illustrates all of the strategies that students suggested during our math discussion! This is a complex process and we want students to use whatever strategy makes sense to them AS WELL AS to challenge students to think of all of the different available strategies they can use to solve this problem
I am really excited about this game I found on a BBC website. It is called the Little Animals Activity Center. The game has three different options addition - subtraction - addition and subtraction and students can move through three levels (using dots, single digit numbers, two digit numbers). http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/laac/numbers/chi.shtml My computer asked me to download a plug in of some sort, but it was free! Totally worth it. Students will play this game as well in school on Thursday. ENJOY! Hello Families,
Today during math we continued working with story problems that have missing information. These types of math problems - unknown starts or unknown changes - really challenge students. They really have to think about the sequence of events to help them solve the problem. Tomorrow we will be comparing numbers and finding their differences. Knowing how to compare and order numbers is a prerequisite skill for solving story problems. Students spent part of their math time today playing a comparing number game on abcya.com. They also LOVED that it was a second grade. I heard "This is the best game EVER!" from a lot of students. I credit this love to the fact that there is a brief racing game between levels! :) http://www.abcya.com/comparing_number_values.htm Directions for accessing: 1. www.abcya.com 2. Click on the grade 2 bubble. 3. Scroll down to "Numbers" 4. Find Comparing Number Values 5. Select level 1 Part of our France studies include learning numbers! We talked about the similarities and differences in how numbers in Spanish and French are pronounced. Consider showing this before your student continues working on their French-English numbers packet tonight. Today we talked about sensory poems or five sense poems. We talked about how many poets describe what things look, sound, feel, smell and taste like. What better way to practice this than with food! First I showed them an example with popcorn. Then, we each tasted (smelled, look at, felt, listened) a couple of carrots to write our class poem. Big thanks to ICS for forming a partnership with Whole Foods Market. As you may have read in our weekly newsletters, Whole Foods provides students with optional fruit and veggie snacks every week.
Tomorrow students will write sensory poems with their groups during centers! The weather may be preventing us from going to school tomorrow but that doesn't mean our students' learning has to take a snow day!
Using the resources posted to this website, please continue with home work and spelling practice as usual. I have included the following on our class website: 1. Weekly newsletter (Announcements) 2. Power point of High Frequency words of the week (Spelling and High-Frequency Words) 3. Our home learning packet for the week (Home Learning Packets) Tomorrow I will ALSO include a write up of another internet based resource that students can use to supplement their learning. Please feel free to email with questions or comments. I am really hoping for school on Tuesday! Happy Snow Day, Teacher Gaja |
Teacher GajaFirst grade teacher at ICS bringing important weekly updates and resources to your computer screen! Archives
April 2014
Categories |