I never thought I would say this:
But I truly love to blog!
I always thought:
“How do people do it?” “How do they find the time to take such awesome pictures and talk about their teaching?”
Honestly, I love to do this.
Every Friday night, after a long day {let’s face it: we all probably have a love/hate relationship with Fridays} I get my BFF Merlot on the side, my boys in bed, my chihuahua and Honey Graham next to me, laptop on… and just write. Quiet. Geeky. Cathartic.
*********************************************************************************
Movin’ along…
This week as I have introduced the “apples” theme, I took two books and truly modeled how to compare two texts on the same topic.
It is important to model text-to-text connections with fiction and nonfiction text because the kiddos really need to be able to see the differences between stories and informational books. These are some of the misconceptions I was able to tackle:
-
Informational books are called stories
-
Informational books have story elements like characters, problems, solutions.
-
Fiction books can be read in sections. In other words, you can read the beginning, ignore the middle, and pick up by the end.
Tip: If you use sticky notes and you let your students be part of your focus lesson, you will have an interactive anchor chart! 
I also took “Amelia Bedelia’s First Apple Pie” and modeled, for the first time this year, a written retelling.
Written retelling is a HUGE skill! These are some observations based on my first mini-lesson:
- Teach the kids to truly address THAT particular prompt. After I read the prompt word by word, we discussed as a class what a retelling is. They were talking about everything, except a true sense of the story.
- Teach the kids the meaning of the word prompt.
- Teach the kids to determine importance when retelling. There are some details in every story that are not crucial.
Lots of good teaching to do!
In math we continue to build fluency to the number ten. This week we worked on missing parts of a ten, this is the anchor chart I made with my sweet firsties:
Pardon the crooked lines! #madeinahurry
Learning about missing parts of a ten was a great way to introduce number bonds and missing addend number sentences.
We have also been working on ordering numbers:
Comparing numbers:
Different ways to make a ten:
All these activities are included in My Apple a Day! Math stations for firs grade, they are perfect for the first months of first grade. You can click on the picture to get this product from my store
I have also translated it into Spanish for those immersion and dual language classrooms. Click on the picture to check it from my TpT store.
If you would like a sample from this product, click HERE!
I will see you all again next week to show you what we have done for Apple Day! Have a blessed and productive week!!
Leave a Reply