Literacy

Week 36:

This week we read the story The Fisherman and the Sea. We talked about the overarching theme of greed, and how unhealthy it can be to keep wishing for more and more. We also talked about how important it is to first be happy with what you have before you wish for more. 

Here are some fantastic illustrations from the story. 

Week 34 &35:

Our conversation about saving the planet has continued through to literacy. Students pretended they were superheroes and wrote about what they would do to make the earth a better place. We also read a class favorite, Fancy Nancy Every Day is Earth Day. Fancy Nancy taught us that it's important to be informed about all the ways to save the planet, but it's also important not to be bossy when we try and help out. 

Week 33:

This week we worked on surprise thank you notes for all the UNF students who have been coming to our school on Monday to do art projects with the students. I know they will be missed. 

Week 31:

Mrs. Pierce has been working with the students for Reading Group and our class wrote the most fantastic stories about a chrysalis. We talked about what would happen if something other than a butterfly appeared from the chrysalis. We had everything from a malevolent hamburger, to a friendly cheetah appear from the chrysalis. 

Week 30:

Literacy this week was all about reading groups and play practice. We spoke about projecting our voices and listening respectfully to our friends while they were preforming. 

Week 29:

This week we reviewed Nouns and Verbs- the students are doing fantastic with this. Here, I told a story to the class about a magical mermaid who was chased by a Shark. The students had to write the story, and illustrate the story. When they finished they highlighted the verbs and nouns. 

Week 28: 

This week we got to read our "how to" directions to the kindergarteners. We also created stories about bird habitats. 

Week 26-27:

Writing "how to" directions has been our focus these past two weeks. We are eager to go to kindergarten and share our advice for them for when they go to the play. 

Week 25:

This week we sent out our final draft to our pen pals in India, worked with the UNF students to prepare for our play, and some students finished reading the story, The Mitten. 

Week 24:

We finally got to preform our puppet show. This was practice for our big performance coming up (A Midsummer Night's Dream). It was important for the different groups to work together and learn how to take turns expressing their ideas. The focus of this activity was to talk about a play having a clear beginning, middle (problem), and a resolution/ending.

Week 23:

We read the Japanese story The Rice Cake that Got Away this week, learned about the present and present continuous tense and reviewed TION words. I placed TION words around the classroom and had students find them.

Week 22: 

If this magical butterfly release doesn't inspire young minds, I don't know what would. After our release I had the class write about where they thought the butterfly was going to travel. Then I had the students pretend they were a butterfly. They talked about their travels. Some butterflies went to magical fairy lands and played with mermaids and unicorns while others escaped spider webs, Swallows, and even shark attacks. 

Week 21:

We have finished our final drafts for our pen pals, and are eager to get those in the mail. We also talked about traveling to the future...

Corresponding to all this talk about the future we also talked about making New Year's Resolutions. The individual goals the students set are simply priceless. Some of the things on the Resolution List included: building Lizard carriers, not eating chicken, picking up litter, not eating cookies every night, more park time with friends, and making 5 paintings.

Week 17:

As exciting as it was traveling to the future to learn about the "future simple tense," and as engaged as the students were when they heard the story of Hansel and Gretel, I'd still say our letters arriving from India really stole the show. The students were so incredibly excited to open up their own letter addressed to them! 

I thought the contrast in depictions of Hansel and Gretel was pretty interesting and hilarious. In the first image a student illustrates Hansel and Gretel approaching the house of candy in the forest, while another child goes for the more gruesome part of the story: Gretel shoving the witch in the oven and getting ready to save her brother. Note the smile on Gretel's face.

Week 16:

My apologies, I did not get any pictures of English work this week, although we did come up with some incredible verb lists. I explained that verbs are like the super hero of a sentence, they are the part of the sentence that does all the work, and without the verb the sentence cannot exist. 

Week 14:

We learned about conjunctions- and a particularly big hit was the School House Rock song Conjunction Juction- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODGA7ssL-6g

I explained to the students that conjunctions act like glue that help connect the sentences together.

Later in the week we made accordion book stories.

Week 13:

We have been working on poems in class on Thursday. This week the class wrote this poem, and I thought it was pretty spectacular. We were talking about Fall, and all the things we look forward to. 

In case you can't read it, 

Good Morning Fall

The leaves are falling it's getting cool

It's early morning and time for school

Leaves are changing yellow and red

While I'm sleeping in my bed

Week 12:

I am very fortunate to have a friend who works directly with Veterans. Our class wrote letters to thank the Veterans for their work, and my friend distributed the letters to the Veterans. I first asked the students if they had any friends or family members who were Veterans, and I gave them the option to send the letters to their friends and family. Here is what the class wanted to write. 

Our phonics point this week was R Controlled vowels, or as we called them, Pirate Vowels. In this case the Pirate R steals the sound of the vowel. 

Week 11:

We were very lucky to have a visit from Ms. Sanders. She is a Ph.D student at UNF, and among her many talents she has been a literacy coach and school principal for many years. She has been an incredible resource for me, and this week she came into school to introduce us to her friend "Pal". Pal helps Ms. S with spelling and she showed the class how to practice sounding out the words. The students wrote a class story about our trip to the farm. 

We have been doing a lot of review on our phonics, and also have been doing a lot of writing. Your child will be doing "inventive spelling" throughout first grade. It is very important you do not try to correct their phonetic spelling: I suggest guiding them, and having them revisit the way a word should sound. Right now we want the children to have a love for writing more than anything else. 

Week 10:
This week we listened to the story of Tom Thumb. The students were very interested by the story and have some fantastic illustrations to share. We've also been working a lot on writing this week. Students have had a lot of time to write their own stories based on different concepts. It's really amazing to see the progress the class is making here!


Week 9:
This week we read the modern "Western" version of Cindarella. It was a funny and interesting twist. We made a venn diagram comparing and contrasting the two versions of the same story, learned some new vowel sounds and also practiced writing poems!

Week 8: Oct 7

This week was mostly a review of our vowel sounds. We read the story Cindarella and created some very lovely drawings for it. I've been working on specific sight words that each student needs to practice. We'll talk more in depth about that at student teacher conferences. 

Cindarella getting showered in her gold and silver gown under the Hazelnut Tree

The Prince and Cindarella dancing at the ball

The turtle doves coming to clean up the lentils

Week 7:
We've moved over from consonant sounds, now we are focusing on vowel sounds and putting words together. This week we talked about silent e words and smile vowels, and we received our first pen pal letter from India!

Here the students are acting out the word "home". Without the "silent e" the word spells "hom" when the silent e approaches it saves the vowel and changes the sound of the /o/.

A friend of mine teaches at the American Embassy School in New Delhi. We received our first letter from them this week. I was literally in the middle of a lesson when the package arrived. The students literally screamed with excitement. We had no choice but to open the package. We learned a lot about the students, we even learned that they sometimes have to cancel recess because the monkeys are out and they take over the playground. Can you imagine?

We got our reply in the mail this Friday. Here the students are drawing pictures of the school.

Here is what we wrote. I love how the last paragraph is nothing but questions:

Dear Ms. Dumm’s class,

Hello, we are excited to make friends in India. We are super duper excited about you, and to be your pen pals. Thank you for your lovely letter. Thank you for your pictures, they are beautiful. Thank you for your very kind letter.

We have a wonderful school and we live in Florida. We think Florida is the nicest place in the world. We live near the beach. There are dolphins at our beach. We are Seaside Community Charter School. We find shark teeth at the beach. We find lots of things at the beach, like seashells and crabs, and starfish. We love to go to the beach.

We have a pet Guinea Pig named Coby in our classroom. We learn about letters and plants in our school.

Do you paint a lot? What kind of paintbrushes do you have? What type of creatures do you have, big or little? Do you have rolly pollies? Do you have palm trees? Do you have a garden? Do you have a tire swing?  Do your monkeys go on the tire swing? Do your monkeys make a home on the playground? What type of monkeys are they? Do you live near water? Do you live near the beach? Do you have dolphins, sharks or crabs on your beach? What language do you speak? What do you eat?  What do you drink?  What are your names? Do you have a class pet? Is your pet small or big? What does your school look like? Is it cold or hot where you live?

Can you send a class picture to us? What type of animals live where you live?

Nice to meet you, 

Mrs Baiata's Class

Week 6:
In addition to the retelling of Snow White and Seven Dwarves, we are also reading The Shoemaker and the Elves as a read aloud story. I asked the class to retell Snow White scene by scene, and was quite impressed with the detail they remembered. Our phonics letters this week were Wind Sounds w, h and wh as well as Tongue Lifters L, R. We made block sculptures that represented the phonics letters as well beautiful drawings in our English Journals.

rocket ship

Lime, lemon and race car

A retelling of Snow White

The Queen presents Snow White with an Apple

The Queen combs Snow White's hair with a poisoned brush

A Prince discovers the lovely Snow White

Handwork:

Many thanks to the second graders for teaching us how to knit!

A combination of inspiration from the Second Grade Performance and a rainy day and we turned our class into a mini theater. Students split up into groups and created their own plays.

Week 5:

This week in Literacy was truly action packed. Our phonics point this week were the Nose Sounds, M,N, and NG. We also talked about short vowels and practiced writing words with the nose sounds, short vowels and a consonant. 

Also, this was the first week we went into our reading groups. During this time students have various activities/ stations to work at, and I work with small reading groups independently. 

In handwork we started rolling our yarn balls. May I add, this was a HUGE success. If you are looking for an activity to keep your child engaged for a long time, I would suggest getting yarn and having them make yarn balls at home! I am so excited to start knitting. 

Week 3:

The consonant brothers this week were the "Th" twins. We practiced writing the letters as well as writing words with the Th brothers. 

Here we practiced writing words with the vowel /i/, /a/, and /u/

Students who finished early worked on a writing a Th story!

The story we read this week was The Golden Goose, and the class did a fantastic job illustrating the story. Here are some of our fabulous illustrations:

Here, Simpleton discovers the Golden Goose

Here, Simpleton cuts down the tree per the Old Man's advice

Week 2: August 26

The consonant brothers this week were the Lip Coolers (F and V) and Tongue Scrapers (K and G). We practiced writing the letters, and we created words using the vowels /a/, /e/, and /i/. 

The story we read this week was Jack and the Beanstalk. The class did an absolutely amazing job with the illustrations of the story. I had the students visualize their favorite part in the story and then they painted it. These illustrations have inspired me to created Seaside Community Stories- so that is something to stay tuned for. 

Scooter, Jack Triumphantly Cuts the Beanstalk

Emilia, The Goose that Lays the Golden Egg

Lucas, Jack Takes Milky White to the Market

Week 1: August 19

This week we learned about the Lip Popper (B and P) and Tip Tapper (T and D) Consonant Brothers. Like other Waldorf Schools, we make our own lined paper using our special block crayons. On day one we practiced using the special block crayons from Germany. We learned how to make Big Papa Bear Lines, Medium Mama Bear Lines, and Tiny Baby Bear Lines.

As we got better at our lines, we started to practice writing our letters. Before practicing our letters we lined our paper using our special crayons. We always start with the green grass on the bottom, then we do our pink heart in the middle, and we save the bright yellow sun for the top. These special lines help the students to realize where their letters should be on the page. If you see below, the Upper Case B and Lower Case B are only in the pink and yellow.

After we practiced writing our letters we created characters for our Lip Popper and Tip Tapper Brothers. Visualizing words is a key strategy in helping students to read.

On Friday we created a round robin story using all the Lip Popper and Tip Tapper sounds we could think of. After we created the story students build the dungeon where Big Teeth took Pauly Princess. Working with blocks is an excellent way for students to develop fine motor skills.