Fluent Reading

I just found an interesting little video that might be useful for parents and teachers. It talks about the importance of becoming a fluent reader and how fluent reading is a key contributor to reading efficiency and comprehension.

The best way to achieve this? By rereading familiar, just-right books.  Most new readers need to read a book many, many times before their reading is fluent. This means, in a nutshell, that their reading should sound like talking. There should be expression, phrasing and appropriate intonation. 

(Right at the start of this video you can hear 

the difference between a fluent and non-fluent reader)

A "just-right" book is crucial. Kids don't become better readers by reading books that are too hard for them. If they're struggling with some of the words and their reading tends to be word-by-word, then either find an easier book or have them continue reading the same one until they sound like the children in the video.

If you're getting "tired" of listening to your child or student read the same old book over and over again, take heart:)  It's very necessary for their reading development. When children revisit familiar books, they improve their fluency, which leads to increased comprehension and enjoyment.

Happy  Reading!

Math & Poetry Freebies

I'm having a hard time fitting in math with Christmas break so close and the kids so excited. Oh yeah! And the snow we got today:)  But we've forged ahead and started our addition unit.

Our first addition strategy was "Plus Zero". Our second one is "Count Up".  Since my class has a wide range of abilities (as most classes do) I like worksheets that accommodate everyone. This is a good one because it can be as easy as rolling one die to determine the first addend OR it can be as challenging as rolling two or three dice (adding those) and then counting up.

Click the image if you'd like to grab the sheet.

BTW, if you like the little Santa graphic, I made him a few nights ago. You can grab your own HERE.

As you know, I like to teach the kids a poem a week. Here's this week's poem. If you click the image you can grab a coloured and black/white version.

(clipart from mycutegraphics.com)

Have a great Friday!

Our Advent Calendars

A few years ago I quilted this advent calendar for my class. Each December I fill the trains with chocolates and every day leading up to the Christmas break a different child gets to pull a chocolate out of one of the trains.

As you can imagine, this is a VERY popular activity!

The kids worked hard on their own advent calendars this morning. Here are a couple of them.

And we also wrote our letters to Santa. We write them together (with me on the document camera) and spend a lot of time stretching out words, remembering spaces and talking about punctuation and upper case letters. 

The letters are finished and ready to mail. If this beautiful weather holds up then I hope to go for a walk with the kids and mail them Wednesday afternoon.

Christmas Countdown!

Christmas in Grade 1 is so much fun. Yeah, it gets a little crazy sometimes, but mostly it's all good:)

Tomorrow we're going to be writing our letters to Santa. In the past I've walked the children to the "Village" to mail their letters. It's a VERY exciting walk. My new school is a little further from the mailbox but I'm hoping with a couple of parent volunteers to help keep the kids "in line", we'll be able to manage.

Here's the letter template we're using. I got the clip art from My Cute Graphics.

The empty box at the bottom is where I print the child's full name and address so that Santa knows where to send his reply!

We're also starting our Santa advent calendars. I found this cute one on-line. Sorry, but I couldn't find a source to credit it.

The kids will print their own numbers from 1 to 24 in the circles. This is great practice for them because most of them have a couple of reversals still.  As each day goes by we'll put a cotton ball on the date. Nothing new here :)  but the kids LOVE this!

You can grab both by CLICKING HERE.

One of the activities I like to do with our weekly poems is to have the kids sequence the verse.

Everyone did a very good job!

We've now started our addition unit. We've been practicing adding one and two to a number using number lines, buttons and 10-frames. We've also been using cubes to make up addition stories.

I took my ipad to school last week so some of the kids could play some math games using 10-frames. That was a BIG hit so I'll be sure to bring it in this week, too.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bye For Now, Clementine!

We finished reading Clementine yesterday! It was such a good book it's actually hard to let it go. I want to live with Clementine forever:)  You can read my book review here. Fortunately there are 3 more books in the series.  I have The Talented Clementine which we'll start reading in the new year.

After we turned the last page and closed the book the kids and I talked about our favourite parts. Then they painted those scenes and wrote about them.  One of our PLO's (prescribed learning outcomes) is to learn to express an opinion about books and to be able to give a reason for your opinion, so that's what we did.

Margaret's hair cut and The Great Pigeon War were the top favourites!

We've just started our third novel by a well-known children's author, Cornelia Funke. I'm also reading Inkheart at home right now. What an amazing author Miss Funke is!

We've read the first two chapters and so far it's a big hit. The funniest bits are the naughty elves. They're kind and helpful (sort of), as elves should be, but they have a bad habit of saying things like "booger burps and reindeer poo"!  Hilarious stuff when you're six years old :)

A Peek at Our Bat Week

We worked hard last week on our bat unit. After a few final touch-ups on our books ... we'll be done!

The kids wrote about one or two things they learned about bats and then glued their writing onto these sweet paper bag bats. 

We read Stellaluna and compared bats to birds.

We had a ton of delicious fun making chocolate pretzel bats. These were super easy in case you'd like to try them yourself. You place two mini pretzel twists on a plate (for the wings), then pour a spoonful of melted dark chocolate between the pretzels (for the bat body), then add a couple of mini M & Ms for the eyes. We put our bats in the fridge for a couple of hours to harden the chocolate. Afterwards the bats easily peeled right off the tinfoil.

During the process the kids wrote out a recipe. I listed the ingredients for them but they wrote the directions on their own!

Our district Aboriginal teacher, Sharlene, came in to our class and showed the kids how to use ovoids and u-shapes to make Native-type bats!

Lastly, the kids spent an afternoon working on bat posters. Their job was to show in pictures (words were optional) what they had learned about bat appearance, homes, food, enemies and babies. They ALL did a fabulous job!!  Afterwards, the kids all stood up in front of the class and shared their work.

Parents, be sure to check out our poetry and sight word pages (top links) ... they've both been updated.

Next week we're starting a new unit in Math: Addition and Subtraction to 10.

Enjoy the rest of this beautiful weekend!

Oh My Darling Clementine!

Have you read this fabulous book yet? 

Oh my goodness! My class is finding it screamingly funny!  At first they didn't want me to read it. I'm not really sure why but I think some of the more vocal boys didn't think a book about a 3rd grade girl would be very good. But they were won over with the very first chapter.

Clementine is one of the funniest and most delightful female characters in children's literature. She's a strong character with an even stronger sense of fairness. The problem is, she's always getting into trouble. Even when it's not her fault! How unfair is that? :)  

The book opens with: "Clementine is having not so good of a week".  Hard to imagine given that she's just helped her friend Margaret cut off ALL her hair and then coloured it with a marker!

The best part of this book is that it's the first in a series of four. I haven't read the others yet, but I'm definitely going to.

Resources:

1. You can grab this amazing teacher's guide right HERE. It's 36 pages long and has some fabulous ideas for discussions and writing.

2. Here's the official Clementine site ... definitely worth looking at!

Click to visit the site

3. There's a great book trailer at Scholastic you'll have fun checking out.

Happy Reading!

Some Changes ~ Newsletter

Both long-time readers of Grade ONEderful and the parents of my students are probably noticing some changes here! Since there's quite a bit of overlap between this blog and my classroom blog, I decided to meld the two.

I'll continue to write book reviews and have lots of freebies for my teacher friends, but I'll also be including weekly updates for parents.

Keeping my fingers crossed this works!

Some weekly highlights:

We're almost finished our Bat Books! The kids have been working really hard on these and they should be finished next week.

The kids worked on some bat posters Friday afternoon. They buddied up with a partner to show in pictures and words everything they've learned about bats. I'll have some pictures to show you later!

In MATH this week, we spent a lot of time reviewing the teens. One of our math learning outcomes is to be able to count on from any number between one and 100, so we often play a game of Buzz to practice that skill and/or to practice skip counting.  This week we counted from 11 to 19 over and over again. You can click HERE to see how it's played.

Next week I hope to finish our Number Books and then we'll begin an addition unit.

Our focus in WRITING this week has been "zooming in on small moments". It's a tricky concept for young writers (even old writers:)) but the students have been doing a fabulous job remembering to write about one part of a broader event. For example, instead of trying to write about the entire birthday party they attended, I encourage them to pick out one moment to develop, such as the birthday cake, or the games, or popping the balloons.

 This child did a great job writing about the dinner she had when she went to her cousin's house.

And this little writer zoomed in on the fish he caught.

Parents, be sure to check the poetry page for our new poem and the parent page to have a look at our calendar and some other pertinent information.

Have a great weekend, everyone!