The Fairy Tales Continue and Virtual Field Trips

This week we continued to work on our "Cinderella" stories.  Students were able to add backgrounds, graphics, and drawings.  They are very proud of their work and getting so excited to share!  Students have continue to work on updating their blogs every morning and many of them come in very excited to update.  This week our story was A Trip to Washington DC.  We were able to extend our learning by taking a virtual field trip of the White House.  The kids loved it and asked when we would be able to go on another field trip!

                         

Going Digital with Fairy Tales

The next few weeks we will be working on fairy tales and creating our own "Cinderella" stories digitally.  Last week we read several version of Cinderella.  We also talked about the elements of a fairy tale and brainstormed the characters, setting, and plot for our own "Cinderella" stories.  During our tech time this week we did a refresher on Book Creator.  We are looking forward to composing and publishing our "Cinderella" stories.  To finish off our project we will have a "book signing" party to celebrate and share our accomplishments. Stay tuned for our stories and pictures from our "book signing" party!!!

Blogging in 1st Grade!

This week we tried something new during our morning work time! I showed students my blog and challenged them to help me create a classroom blog for themselves. This week we tried to upload a drawing and recording of something they wanted to share with the class. This was very simple but yet very powerful! We viewed these together at the end of the day and the students also had the opportunity to comment on each other's blog entries throughout the day! Next, week I am going to continue this by asking students to add a sentence to their drawing and read/record that sentence for their blog post. The goal of keeping this blog will be to eventually use it to reflect on their learning (especially in writing) throughout the rest of the year!

 Here is the link to our classroom SeeSaw blog:  https://blog.seesaw.me/blankenship1516

Opinions galore!

This semester we have been working on opinion writing.  This last week we have been working on trying to write a four sentence or more opinion piece.  In the first sentence students state their opinion.  In the second and third sentences they give their reasons for their opinion.  In their fourth sentence they conclude the piece and restate their opinion.  We worked on this piece for two weeks.  Students were asked to choose a book that they would recommend to their peers.  They would try to convince their classmates to read the book by writing an opinion piece and then creating a "book trailer" based on their opinion piece.  To get everyone excited we viewed a few Disney movie trailers and the students were very excited to make their own videos.  After all students were finished we had a "Viewing Party" and students were able to vote on which book they would like to read!  This was a really engaging and motivating way to incorporate a book review and opinion piece.

Productive Week

We had a very productive week this week.  We really got into using our workstations menu and the kids LOVED it.  The kids were very engaged, motivated, and excited to finish each task!  We had some visitors this week and I was impressed and proud that my students could explain their workstations menu and what they needed to do to accomplish the week's tasks.  This week we also used Shadow Puppet to create a presentation of the butterfly lifecycle to go along with our story. To end the week we celebrated the 100th day of school.  We had a great time using the aging booth app to make ourselves look 100 years old.  Students then used this picture as inspiration to write what it would be like to be 100.   It was a great week and I am looking forward to what excitement this week holds!

I DON'T want to be 100!