Pinwheels and Carnivores

We learned all about the big, mean, ferocious, and deadly ALLOSAURUS {and adjectives. Thanks to the kids for coming up with those awesome ones right there}. I figured we needed something pretty intense to spice things up after learning about the stegosaurus and the triceratops last week. The kids are getting pretty good at writing non-fiction texts about the dinosaurs they learn about, and they come up with some great adjectives. Adjectives make reading more interesting!

Just to stay on the topic of dinosaurs, I’m going to jump over to our storytelling centre so you can see what they got to explore this week. 

It’s a dinosaur sensory bin. Sensory bins are wonderful, especially for those kinesthetic learners. There were so many textures to play with in the box, and lots of different sized toys to go with it. I borrowed the sand from the kindergarten room and bought the glass beads, stones, bird/dinosaur nest, and mini dinosaur toys at Michael’s. Much to my surprise, there was literally no sand on the floor. Such responsible kids I have in my class.

In science we learned all about renewable energy with a focus on wind energy! In order to learn what renewable energy is, I turned to “the funny scientist man” {as referred to by the Grade Ones}, Bill Nye!

Then we talked about windmills/wind turbines. They were fascinated, but had no idea how they worked. So I showed them this:

Thank goodness for YouTube…and it’s media literacy ;)

I have this great book called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It’s based on a true story of a boy in Africa who built a windmill to generate energy for his suffering village. The kids were all over that because it made them think of their own buddies in Uganda.

We ended our wind power lessons off with a little craftivity by making pinwheels! They had a blast and a handful of them brought them back to school over the course of the week to play with at recess.

Some other pictures of the classroom this week!

A little addition to the math wall

A great book that explains that big idea in energy: Energy makes things happen!

Reflecting on wind energy. Also learning what “pros and cons” mean

Well that was short and sweet for this week. I am almost done my first draft of report card comments. For those of you who are also working on your report cards, I’ll leave you with this:

Happy 2014 in Grade One!

The two-week holidays came to an end and back to Grade One I went. The weather was less than kind that first day back and it really should have been a snow day. I’m not just saying that because I could have used another day; the roads really were horrendous. I almost got rear ended on the way to work, which would have been a huge inconvenience because I didn’t have time to get hit. My plan to get to school early did not work out and I needed to get there quickly, yet safely. Then the temperature dropped a crazy amount and Tuesday ended up being a snow day. I only had 10 kids so it was hard to really move on with my new unit. 

Which is awesome. Let me tell you about it.

It’s all about…Dinosaurs! Which you would already know if you’ve been following me on here. On Monday I started them off with a KWL-type chart. It actually didn’t have the W section.

 

Then we watched the one and only Billy Nye the Science Guy. I truly believe you can’t teach primary science without visiting our old pal, Bill Nye at least once throughout the year. He is just so awesome.

The video got the kids so excited to learn about dinosaurs.

The next day, I introduced them to some non-fiction texts about the stegosaurus and we made the magazine model for their writing for this unit.

I'm so good at drawing a stegosaurus

On Thursday, we learned all about the triceratops and the kids wrote their first piece all on their own. This is the piece I use for the assessment for learning portion of the unit. What can they do all on their own? What do they each need to work on? What do I need to base my mini lessons on in the next few days? I just finished marking all of them so I will tell them their individual writing goals on Monday.

In math we are continuing with money and also learning about fractions, and deconstructing numbers.

I have been working our dinosaur and science content (more on that in a minute) into our math investigations because when everything ties together, the kids seem to be so much more engaged. Here are some examples of the questions we have been working on in math:

They love questions about Gramms Bear

In science, we started the Energy in our Lives unit. It was this science strand that inspired my decision to study dinosaurs at the same time because the big idea for the students to understand is that the sun is our main source of energy, and without it, we could not survive. We talked a lot about energy, did a few activities, and came up with this poster for our classroom.

We also looked at how our bodies gain and use energy. We watched a 10 minute movie from the Power to Play series. I got this kit at a workshop I attended last year.  

We talked about the four food groups and came up with some healthy meals that would provide lots of energy for our bodies.

  

We ended off the week with an art activity. I decided to push aside my fear of the September paint tornado and bring out the water colours. The kids made dinosaur silhouettes. I think they turned out pretty well!

Just for fun in those transition times, I read them Attack of the Tyrannosaurus from the Dinosaur Cove series. They loved it and we ended up finishing it by Friday afternoon. Luckily, I have another dinosaur chapter book to read to them for the week!

Overall, 2014 in Grade One started off great. I had one parent donate a ton of dinosaur toys and lend me a handful of dinosaur books. The support from the families is fantastic, and it makes me that much more grateful to have such a wonderful class.

Happy New Year!

In a Christmas Coma

The Christmas festivities are finally slowing down and I was feeling a little blue today because of it. I really miss hearing Christmas carols in stores and on the radio. I just know that the time to take down the tree and the decorations is just around the corner. Rob and I hit up the mall to heal our post-holiday blues and found some relief via retail therapy. Boxing week sales-retail therapy to be exact.

I still have my big family Christmas coming up this weekend so that helps things as well. There’s something else that always perks me up and that’s planning and creating stuff for my lovely little learners. I actually don’t think I’ve gone this long before without doing any work; so even though it’s still the Christmas break, I decided to sit down for a few hours today and get some serious work done!

I have done some very engaging units since September and I want to keep that ball rolling. I really wanted to do something that would appeal to my boys and what better unit of study to throw at them than something involving huge, vicious, monstrous creatures? Yep. Our next unit is all on dinosaurs!

I struggled for a little bit with this idea because after all, dinosaurs are not in the Grade One curriculum. This is where I had to figure out how to make this very cross-curricular so that it would relate to other areas that need to be taught. I decided to make it part of my literacy program because there’s a lot of room for creative freedom there. I wanted to focus on non-fiction texts for both reading and writing, so I will expose them to texts all about dinosaurs and have them write magazine articles about the dinosaur we learn about that day.

In science, we will be starting the Energy in our Lives unit, which will tie back nicely to our topic of dinosaurs. After all, many people believe that a meteor and lack of sunlight was the cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction. See how I connected the dinos to something in the curriculum? Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I don’t plan on explicitly making this connection as I teach. My hope is that they will notice it all by themselves.

From other posts, you may know by now that once I get an exciting classroom idea in my head, it’s pretty much all I can think about. I went to Dollarama today for batteries and instead ended up hitting the jackpot on dinosaur items for the classroom. These will be great toys for the kids to play with at the Storytelling Centre. I also have an idea in the works involving the platter, green balls, and Spanish moss. Stay tuned for that in a later post.

I plan on telling the kids that for the month of January, they get to be paleontologists, as those are what the scientists are called when they study dinosaurs. They love when they get an important role, and I’m pretty confident they’ll totally dig the idea.

Ha. I’m hilarious.

On a completely different note, remember I used to do those little “Currently” things from Oh Boy Fourth Grade? Here’s one for December. With one day left, it’s better late than never!

Wishing everyone a fun and safe New Years Eve! I’ll talk to you in 2014…