Day 19- All my ducklings back in a row

After all the rain, I feel like I have webbed feet. I was very happy to see my soldiers again! I was glad to see that no one floated away. :)

We started an hour late today, but that didn't affect our learning! My soldiers came right in and started their morning routine as if nothing were different. We began with a new poem "Apples, Apples".

It sure does seem like we've done a lot of poems on apples. I'd like to say there was a serious educational reason, but in all honesty, they are just cute poems that are easy enough to use when working with rhyming words and sight words. And I like apples.
 Ms. Rader, another 1st grade teacher, found the poem for us this week for us to use for fluency. We loved it! Not only is it about a delicious fruit, but it has color and number sight words. This is what it looked like in the beginning.

Nice length. Clever illustration. It was found at www.superteacherworksheets.com, feel free to check them out!Here is what we did to it today.

We turned the word "apple" into an apple, labeled the number words with their numbers, found color words and labeled them, and created illustrations to help us with sight words. By the end of this activity, the students realized that they knew most of the words already! They caught onto the rhyme and were able to predict the next phrase. With more practice, there should be a video in our future!

After fluency practice we moved to the carpet for our whole group lesson. We are focusing on sentence types this week. Mainly, we are focusing on 4 types: Statements, Commands, Questions and Exclamations.

A Statement is a sentence that tells someone something, they end with a period. Did you know that there are 2 types of periods in sentences? Well there are! Statements end with a "soft period". Statements are calmly stated, and are used to inform. Example: The sky is blue. I have a dog. It is cold in the winter.
Here are the kids showing you they know how to properly end a statement.

Calmly pointing their pointer finger to their palm; that's a soft period.

Commands are different from statements. They tell someone TO DO something. A command is an order that is expected to be followed out. Commands end with the second kind of period, a "hard period". Commands are firm and need a period that can match.

A hard period is your fist in your palm.

Examples of commands are: Sit down. Eat your dinner. Stop annoying your sister.

Questions are pretty easy. A question is anything you ask another person. They end with a question mark. We practiced asking questions last week, so we were all over this!

Here the kids are showing a question face, and we hooked our arms like a question mark.

Exclamations were our favorite today! We loved using them! They were so much fun to think up! An exclamation shows excitement about something. Some examples are: Wow! Surprise! Boo! Holy cow!

Here we turned our arms into exclamation marks. Woo-hoo!

After practicing on the carpet we moved to our seats and I read the book Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!

If you've never read this book, I highly recommend it! It's about a pigeon that keeps trying to come up with excuses to stay up late. It's full of great sentences for practicing punctuation types. 

After every page I had the kids show me the type of sentence that was just read. They did a great job. Tomorrow we will work on filling in the chart with examples of each type of sentence.

Skipping ahead to science, we are reviewing this week. Today we reviewed habitats: wetlands, forests, and deserts. Their activity was cutting out and pasting different plants and animals into their proper habitat. 

Tomorrow we are starting a project! I was looking at some of the education blogs that I follow (check out the 1+1+1=1 blog! It is full of great ideas!) and I found a really neat idea called "lapbooks". Basically they are file folders that students fill with information about a certain topic. They seem relatively easy, and really fun to make, and they are filled with information the students find themselves! Early research projects!

The plan is for us to make a "lapbook" on living things. Remember those flowers we made last week?

They will go in our lapbook! Today's activity on habitats? They'll go in there too!

Since this is our first try with lapbooks, I'm not expecting perfection. I am, however, expecting the kids to really get in to this! The idea of filling up an entire file folder with information might seem difficult in the beginning, but I'm betting the students will be surprised with the results! Keep your fingers crossed!

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