Rainbow Week

Last week we finished off our color unit with rainbow week. We read a variety of fiction stories involving rainbow colors.

Our reading focus last week was on recognizing features that define fiction books. We made a circle map describing what we already know about the fiction genre, and during the week we dug deeper into the story elements of fiction books.

I found a great story elements poster here, and made one for my classroom at the teacher center over the summer. I love the simplicity of the poster and how easy it is to use over and over with different books. With each book we read last week, we used sticky notes to describe the different elements of the story. Here is an example from the book Purple, Green, and Yellow by Robert Munsch:

Since our school is a Thinking Maps campus, we discovered how we could put this same information into a tree map format to make it easy to read. After reading the book A Color of His Own, we worked on creating a tree map together and students had to fill in the story elements from the book and illustrate each one. The finished products turned out great!

Now that we have Daily 5 up and running each day, we will be doing a lot less of the crafty activities we did the first few weeks of school. Our learning is less project based and rather is built into the daily 5 activities. Because of this, I try to choose one of those fun activities a week and save it for Friday. I call it "Fun Friday" because this is the day we break from our usual schedule and do fun, project based, activities that tie into the weekly learning. This Friday we read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss. In the story, the character talks about the way each color makes him feel. We discussed feeling words and the kids came up with a great list of feelings. Then, they each created a portrait with rainbow colored hair, and on each piece of hair they had to choose what feeling word that color makes them think of. They turned out super cute!

This week we will be continuing our fiction unit and starting up a two week theme of monsters. It's always a fun creative unit so check back to see some of the fun we'll be having!

Colors Continued!

We had another fun week in first grade! How has a month of school already passed? Time sure is flying!

This week we continued working on our color unit. Using simple books that are familar to the kids led to a lot of great connections throughout the week. We also took the opportunity to add some reading strategies to our CAFE wall. When we learn a strategy to help us become better readers we add it to our CAFE wall, which is sort of like a reading menu. This stays on the wall all year so the kids can reference it to help them when they are stuck with something in a book. More on this in a minute ....

On Monday we finished up with the color orange by reading New Socks. This simple, yet fun, book was a hit with the kids. We practiced making connections to the story by creating our own version of New Socks. Each student cut out two orange socks, illustrated the rest of the picture, then wrote about what they could do in their new socks. These turned out super cute! I love all the creative interpretations of the chick in the book.

On Tuesday we moved on to the color green and read Go Away Big Green Monster. This is a GREAT book to practice visualizing! Next year I want to do a lesson similar to Harold and the Purple Crayon and have the kids draw what they see as I read. After we read the book I realized that lesson would have been perfect! Oh well, there is always next year.  We talked about how the author used adjectives to describe the monster, which helps the reader see in their head what the author was thinking. After reading, the kids each made their own big green monsters (so cute!), and during writing we practiced adding adjectives to our sentences to make our writing descriptive and more exciting!

On Wednesday we looked at the color yellow and read School Bus. I took this opportunity to add a bunch of accuracy strategies to our CAFE board. I find we are always talking about comprehension and strategies we can use to better our understanding of stories, but in whole group we rarely touch on accuracy. Usually that is saved for small guided reading groups. This year I wanted the whole class to have the same background knowledge about each strategy before I ever introduce it in small group and this book was perfect to discuss these. The text is short, with only 1 to 4 words on each page so it was a really easy way to introduce strategies for figuring out how to read unknown words. Here you can see what this looks like:

After we finished the book each of the kids made a page for a class book about school busses. I gave each of them a bus printout that they had to color and glue on a page. Then they had to use the rest of the page to draw where their bus was going as well as complete the sentence, "My school bus is going to ______."  I stapled these together and it made our very first class book. I LOVE making class books with the kids each year. It is something fun for them that they helped create which really keeps them engaged in reading.

On Thursday, for the color brown, we read the book Who Took the Farmer's Hat and practiced retelling events in the story. After reading, the kids had to turn their hat into something else, just like in the story. The kids completed the sentence, "My hat is a ______" and illustrated the picture to go with it. We reviewed one of our accuracy strategies from the day before, "Use the picture" and talked about how it is really important to have a good illustration because that is what helps the friends in our class read our page. I am always impressed by how creative the kids can be!

 Hard to see, but it says, "my hat is a home for bugs".

 "my hat is a ice cream cone"

"my hat is a rocket"

One thing I was most excited about this week was getting started with Daily 5. We spent the last 3 weeks learning about each of the five choices: read to self, read to someone, word work, work on writing, and listen to reading. This week we were finally able to put it all together and do 3 rotations a day. I was SO impressed with my firsties this year! They did such a great job rotating and doing their job at each station. It's nice to have some structure to the daily schedule and I'm excited to be able to start pulling small groups for reading in the coming week!

Next week we will finish up our color unit by doing a variety of activities surrounding ALL the colors. I'm looking forward to rainbow week already!