Freebies

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Lots of good stuff!

So many amazing things happen in the second half of first grade! I'm excited to be able to link up with Curious Firsties for Wednesday WOW for the first time! It's a long post, but there is a freebie at the end. :)



Last week I wrote about how much we were enjoying Tacky the Penguin. 


 I just wanted to share some of the writing we did. We made lists of words describing Tacky and words describing his companions. I asked the students to think about whether they were more like Tacky or his companions then they used our word list compare themselves to the characters. Some of them are just hilarious!



I really think that the compare/contrast component of the assignment got them to describe themselves much more than just asking them to describe themselves. By the way, the fun paper is an old freebie from Primary Graffiti.


The other thing I'm super excited about is my math test results!  The most challenging skill this trimester was the problem solving. Students had to solve some challenging problem types and correctly write an equation. Ninety-five percent of the class was able to correctly solve a compare problem. That's up from about 10% on the pretest. I like to use Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) whenever I can. My class really needed to work on 'join-change-unknown' and 'compare-difference-unknown.' I wrote a bunch of problems focusing on these two problem types, and almost all my kids were able to correctly solve both these problem types. Most of them could write the equations as well (which is really difficult with the compare problems.) If you are trying to get your class to learn these skills, check out my JCU and CDU Problems. Things started out a bit rocky, but after about 2 weeks, they really got it!
One more little WOW--I wore a fleece today during recess duty (and probably didn't even need that), and tomorrow school could be closed because of a blizzard. 


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4 comments:

  1. Em HutchisonFebruary 19, 2014 at 9:36 PM

    I love the comparing and contrasting! The penguins are cute ;) Math....it has really been a focus of mine to get better at this year. I will need to check out your link! Story problems have been a big focus for us this year and we just started our new theme this week. I can't wait to share about it.
    Thanks for linking up!
    Em

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  2. Carla February 20, 2014 at 5:05 AM

    Hi Deb! I'm from Iowa too...but now live in Virginia! I really love the Tacky writing. :-) Your students have great vocabularies for firsties! What a great prompt idea too.
    Carla

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    Replies
    1. Deb MaxwellFebruary 20, 2014 at 5:00 PM

      Thanks for visiting and following, Carla. I do have a handful of kids with incredible vocabularies, so we were able to generate a pretty impressive list. I was actually really impressed with how well the others were able to select and use the words on their own!

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  3. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2014 at 1:35 PM

    Thanks for commenting on my blog post! Thought I'd come and check yours out as well. Love the 'Tacky' writing, and I'm always looking to stock up my centers with activities for the future so today was a good day for me :) Looking at your firsties' writing, it looks like they'd definitely be able to produce great stuff with iPad programming. It's been a challenge for my firsties, but they are getting so much out of it, and it's actually easier than it looks! Feel free to message me if you have any questions!
    ~Char @ Early Years English

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