1D Diaries

January 11, 2014

Math Center Newbie!

One of the things about teaching over time is that you see things come and go.  In Math I have worked on four different curricula -- five if you count the three years I spent teaching 6th grade where we piloted a new junior high math curriculum during my second year.  

All of these different curricula were instituted with the purpose of deepening student learning and improving the instructional practices in our classroom.  No district chose and purchased a  new curriculum thinking things weren't going to get even better!   On the other hand, teachers get comfortable and familiar with lessons.  You know what works and what doesn't work.  You  find ways to teach students with different skills and dispositions.  Many times my colleagues and I reflected on the curriculum changes and say things like, " Wow, Curriculum A did a much better job of addressing that skill!"  And sometimes we would trot out lessons we had used in the past to supplement the ones in our new updated curriculum. In my closet I have at least three different manuals and materials purchased to support those lessons.  I've thrown out binders and old folders full of worksheets and lessons.  They might have been wonderful resources, but I just didn't have the time to search through them to find what I was looking for.

This year is no different.  

We don't have a new curriculum, per se, but we do have the Common Core.  Without getting into all of the issues surrounding the adoption of  Common Core standards, which are legion, let's just say I'm working on changing my practice  -- or updating my practice -- to reflect the underpinnings and habits of learning embedded in these new standards.  

I've been making some changes, not just in my teaching, but also in how students re-inforce their understanding of what we are learning.  And here's how it's new and different.  

In the past, we might begin our lessons with students on the "rug" (i.e., whole class lessons), and I would deliver a short, say 10-15 minute, "mini-lesson" about the skill or understanding of the day.  Then we would break up into small groups, with  some students with similar skills working on their "lab" workbooks, papers or activities or games reinforcing the "skill" taught that day.  My intern or student teacher would work with one of the groups.  A parent volunteer might work with another small group, and I'd work with the group that required the most support At the end of the lesson, we would return to the rug, for a brief follow-up lesson or problem, a kind of "summarizing" lesson. 

As a process, it was not always perfect, but it allowed students who were able to work independently to do so, and we could focus our teaching on students who required more small group support.  

This year with encouragement from our Math Coach and District Coordinator, we set up four Math Centers three days a week.  This was a really big move for me.  

What is a "Center" you may ask?  It's pretty much as it sounds:  at each Center I put together a box with an activity (materials and instructions) designed to focus upon one skill.   Students have an opportunity to practice the skill at the center for a period of time (about 18-20 minutes), and then move on to another station where they practice a different skill. For a concise explanation of centers, you can go here.

I was determined to work centers into our math routines this year, and  we began the year with four centers of  four-five students each.  At this point in the year, we have ten centers and students work in pairs:  Teacher Table, Computer Station, Fact Families, Adding 3 Addends, Clock Work, Word Problems (we write the solutions in our Math Journals), Number Race Game, Counters in a Cup, Calendar Work (this will be phased out when everyone has completed it), and Number of the Day (math journal).  Here are pictures from four centers,

Number of the Day: Students write, draw or make "today's number" using numbers, pictures, tally marks, tens frames -- you name it! 

Clock Work: this student is adding one hour to the time shown on the card.

Adding 3 Addends:  we use three dice ( Some dice go beyond six for students who want an extra challenge)

Butterfly fact families: we roll two dice to get the two addends!

I have to say...while it's by no means perfect, and we are still working out the "kinks" of moving from center to center,  I like them!  I really like the independence and confidence I see in my students.  I like that students get to experience a variety of reinforcing games and activities, and I really like that students practice skills they learned earlier in the month, or year. 

There are moments of clarity. Changing stations is a bit confusing.  For example, on Thursday we were about half-way through the period, and we were changing centers. As I walked around checking to make sure that everyone had safely landed at their next center, I discovered that two little girls had gone to the wrong place. When I asked them why, one responded, "Christopher told me to!" (go to Station 5)  I looked at my assistant.  Christopher???  I looked at Christopher who was already at his station playing a math game.  He shrugged and went back to work, explaining, "I was just trying to help!"  He was trying to help, even if he had given them the wrong advice.  I reminded the girls they needed to figure their destination out for themselves, and made a mental note that we needed to mark the stations with BIG numbers for next week.  After all, I'm figuring this whole station thing out too!

Back In Business

1D Diaries 

It’s been FOUR years since I wrote my last blog post – lots of reasons for this, but after this hiatus, I’m feeling the need to rub my hands together and re-start my efforts to catalog life in 1D. 

Gotta Love Mid-Winter Vacations…. 

Our students came back for one day after Winter/Holiday Break before having a snow day today and one the first things I noticed once we gathered for Morning Meeting (Quick overview of Morning Meeting here) was a new-found capacity for paying attention. My first grade colleagues have often noted that our firsties make a true “great leap forward” (Apologies to/for the Chairman Mao reference) in January and February. This developmental change enables our seven-year old selves to persevere and persist in what they are doing.
As if by magic first grade students work for longer periods of time, focus on what they’re doing and become much more productive when compared with only a few weeks earlier. 

It could be magic, or…it could be that we are almost half-way through the school year. All our hard work spent in the Fall learning and practicing work routines and setting forth expectations now pay big dividends! Our students have made so much progress us becoming thoughtful, responsible students. It’s a LOT more fun to work and learn when you can concentrate and sustain your interest for longer periods of time! And there’s that aspect of being well-rested and ready to tackle some new and interesting ventures…. 

Less Than 4 Weeks to…. Chinese New Year! 

We are about to start work on China geography in preparation for learning about Chinese New Year, a.k.a the “Spring Festival,” which this year begins on January 31st. We (mostly me) have a lot to do to organize this exciting time of year. This year, like last year, we will prepare by learning about China’s geography, landforms, culture, history, and celebrations. We’ll use resources from the library, websites, and document our new-found knowledge in China booklets using using  “Little BirdTales.com.”   This is a website which allows students to write, illustrate and publish individual pages and then assembles them together in a slide-show format which can be accessed on-line.  The students (and their parents and families)  love the fact that they can see their work on the internet!    

Mrs. D Tweets!

I am making an attempt to ramp up my tech know-how.  Perhaps I have been inspired by my colleagues --  some older and some much ( much!)  younger  -- who are beating the drum to find ways to incorporate technology into elementary classrooms.

Simply put:  I don’t want to be on the outside looking in.  For better or worse, I’m jumping into the fray!

I’ve started to “tweet” when I find things that catch my eye.  I like to read about developments in geology and astronomy, education, and literacy, so I’m following some industry “experts” in those fields as well as other colleagues and teacher-leaders in our district.

More importantly, I hope to send pictures of student work, and document some of the wonderfully creative and thoughtful ideas that our students come up with on a daily basis!  You can follow me by going to twitter @Runkle1D. 

More later…..

Keep warm and toasty,

Mrs. D.

  

The Starlab Visits!

The Museum of Science Star Lab came to our school last week.

It created quite a stir. The Library was closed all morning and the gray dome of the Star Lab was visible from the door, causing everyone but the first graders to ask, "What's that?" Kindergartners through 8th graders gazed curiously at it, wondering, "What's in there?"

The first graders got to find out.

We've been talking and reading books about stars for days. We moon-gazed and thought about why the moon looks different each night. We talked about the planets in our solar system. We tried to wrap our heads around how big Jupiter is (it can hold 1400 earths -- that's ONE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED). First graders have no idea how big that is really, but they know it's BIG, really big. We talked about how you can't walk on Jupiter because it's a gas giant, and Mercury is a small, rocky ball. Venus is hot, too hot to live on. Mars has red dust. We replayed the debate about poor Pluto and decided, for our purposes, that we'd think about it as a planet unless some new information came to our attention.

We spent time talking about constellations and demonstrated how some stars are nearer to Earth than others, while some are very far away. Light years and the dimensions of stars are pretty far outside the understanding of this age group. Come to think of it, a light year is pretty much outside the understanding of most adults! We talked about twinkling stars, red giants,and blue and white dwarfs. I think first graders find comfort when they talk about stars using images of giants and dwarfs. They are still enthralled by fairy tales with over-sized heroes and heroines who confront evil-doers and dispatch them to their well-deserved fate. The cosmos is a magical place for them as well.

We are re-working our science learning expectations in our town. I've been meeting for almost three years, working with colleagues to revamp our first grade curriculum, and in the process we have determined that we will eliminate the sun, moon and stars unit and replace it with a sun and shadows component. We hope to make our science more hands-on, exploratory and inquiry-based.

I understand and agree that we should be doing this: understanding the huge -- more accurately characterized --unknowable-- processes at work in the universe is beyond the understanding of six and seven-year olds. I know that as a result of our work our first grade science learning will be age appropriate and ultimately far better science; still, like most teachers, I find it difficult to give up experiences that I thought my students liked. It's going to be hard to say goodbye to demonstrations of moon phases and making planet models. I hope that our new lessons will generate excitement, the "wow!" and that thrill of not-quite-knowing-but-what-am-I-going-to-see my students experienced in the Starlab.

We will continue to read books about the moon, though. And maybe a poem or two about the constellations.

So I need to share one of my favorite children's poetry books here , Comets, Stars the Moon and Mars by illustrator/poet Douglas Florian. We can pay a visit to our solar system in poetry!

If you're out there in the blogosphere and have managed to stumble across the 1DDiaries, you already know I teach 1st Grade... and I'm still here!

I'm leap-frogging over the past eight months of school -- and five months before that -- perhaps we'll catch up later -- it's almost May and the first graders are humming along. They're reading, they're writing, they're whipping through math, they're just...amazing!

This is the time of year that I love. In the course of the year we worked first on setting up daily, then weekly routines which allowed for the One-ders to discover and make sense of our English language: finding and recognizing letter patterns, unscrambling letters to make two, then three, then four-letter words, re-organizing words until they made sense in a sentence, hours of reading and talking about one text in groups of five or six, finding rhymes in weekly poems, conversations and reinforcement of the previous days, now these come together.

On a "Big Picture" Language theme - The One-ders can approach a bookshelf, open a book, read the cover and make a decision as to whether they want to read that particular book -- or not. They return to their desk or chair or place on the rug -- and read independently. Sigh....

Of course we didn't get to this place without some pain.

The Podcasts Are Ready!

Our 1D Podcasts are ready! You can listen to any and all of podcasts by clicking on this link.

We hope you visit our podcast site and will send the link to grandparents, relatives and friends to enjoy. We are really proud of our work on this project. We particularly wish to thank Ms. Murphy, our school Technology Specialist, and Ms. Gallo-Toth, our school librarian, for their expert guidance and diligence in helping to make our podcasts a reality.

Enjoy!

Ms. D and all the students of 1D

How Far They've Come!

Where have the past two months gone?

Feels like forever since my last post. In eight weeks the landscape of the nation has been changed dramatically and the landscape of 1D is altered as well. Since we have returned from the Christmas vacation the students of 1D have made big learning leaps. Some differences in student performance are so subtle as to escape notice. Other changes in student are bold and sweeping. Attention must be paid!

There are several tectonic shifts that have taken place in our classroom. Each should be acknowledged, but I've only got so much time today to make a brief stab at one item in particular.

One really big leap is that we are all reading, every last one of us. When we arrived in September, we were all over the map in terms of our literacy skills. In 1D we spent the four months from September through December working on rhyming, word families, short vowels, lots and lots of reading in groups and individually, reading read-alouds, (you've read my thoughts on that subject in an earlier post) writing in journals, generating rhyming words... the list goes on and on. We continue to work on some of these activities; however, the shift in our literacy learning is that as of Friday, March 6th, we work (a lot) less on discrete skill-building and practice activities and concentrate our skills on projects.

Immediately upon returning to school after February vacation 1D went to the Library for our "Introduction to Podcasting" class. Our fabulous librarian, Ms. G-T, played digitally recorded voices of first graders from two years ago reading their personal book reviews.

Ms. G-T told the 1D students that in our Podcasts each student would choose a book, read it, and then write their own book review and record their voices on the computer; they would get to hear their voices, and their grandparents who live in California and Illinois would be able to go to the computer to hear them reading their book reviews! As 1D sat on the story-stage and listened to those other students telling about their chosen books, every child in 1D's face lit up, enthralled by the notion that he or she, too, could possibly be heard .... all over the world! Everybody jumped up and down with wild delight! They would get to pick their own music to play on their podcast! WOW!

1st Grade Podcasting began two years ago as a joint project between our Technology Integration Specialist at that time, Ms. Davis, Ms. G-T, our Librarian and me. As we begin the project we spend a lot of time in the Library, getting acquainted with the project, picking a "just-right" book from a group of pre-selected books. Ms. G-T and I made a decision to pre-select the books from which the students would pick for several reasons. The biggest reason to pre-select is that we want the students to be able to read and re-read the books within a relatively short amount of time; we do not want to take the chance that the book is too difficult or the vocabulary too unwieldy. We want all of the potential book choices to be completely accessible to the 1st graders.

The second and third sessions in the Library are spent looking over books, checking our options, making selections and book borrowing. We want the students to be excited about their book choices, since they will be wedded to the book for several weeks, or at least until they have recorded their review on the computer.

Days Four through Ten of Podcast Preparation are spent working on reading books and writing reviews. Many students write their reviews in one class session; others require two or three sessions to write and refine what they have written. We read our book reviews to each other. Sometimes once a student hears another student's review, he wants to go back and make changes to his writing. We practice reading our reviews during Morning Meeting, so that everyone can hear and benefit from the feedback I give the student readers.

When we read in groups we generally read silently, so we don't pay too much attention to speed. I remind the students to use their "Radio Announcer" voice; I model reading with exaggerated speed and a flat monotone voice, then ask the students for feedback. "Did anybody hear what I said?" "Could you understand me?" "What was wrong with the way I read that review?" Students quickly "get" the fact that they need to think about pacing as well as using pitch and intonation to make their reviews more interesting to listen to. They love being able to use dramatic, expressive and "big" announcer voices; it brings out the actors and actresses in them, and they love it.

We've begun to record our podcasts in the computer room with our Technology Integration Specialist, Ms. Murphy. I've reserved 30-45 minutes a day for two-three weeks in the computer lab for us to record; we may require more time, since only two students can complete recording in that amount of time. Ms. Murphy practices with the students before they record using the program "GarageBand" which allows her to record voices and the students' music choices.

The addition of music adds a kind of "public-radio" feel to the podcasts. GarageBand has pre-recorded thematic music clips available and the first graders really love listening to the clips and making choices. Yesterday Emily and Nathan recorded their book reviews and listened to their recorded reviews before choosing their music. Emily's review is about Commander Toad and the Intergalactic Spy by Jane Yolen. Because of its sci-fi subject, Ms. Murphy proposed that Emily listen to GarageBand's "Techno" and "Sci-Fi" clips, some of which were very New Age (read: atonal), most without any discernible melody. Emily listened carefully to some very challenging music, and finally decided upon a mysterious and ghostly techno-generated melody. Nathan was thrilled by his jazzy, bluesy choice.

I'm thrilled with the Podcasting project, for so many reasons. The students love it, parents love it, I love it because it represents the culmination of the students' many months of hard work. Podcasting requires a lot of planning and thinking together with my excellent, thoughtful colleagues. It represents an attempt to use technology to engage my first graders and I have to trumpet the fact that it works, it really works!

I'll exit here with a scene from the computer lab yesterday as Nathan finished recording his podcast. Nathan had listened to all of the sci-fi music with Emily after he'd made his pick. I could tell he was wavering in his musical choice; there were so many possibilities to choose from. We listened to his podcast music once more, and he finally agreed it was perfect for his review. As he left the computer lab, he reflected, to no one in particular, "Next year, if I read a sci-fi book, I'll pick one of those cool computer songs. This was the best school day of my life!"