Silent Gallery Walk

We are ready to unveil our next Expedition.  In preparation, we looked at many artifacts today that gave us clues as to what we will be studying. The children rotated around the room and looked carefully at the items but were not allowed to talk about their thinking!  Tomorrow we will talk about our observations.  The children are excited!

Sorting...harder than it looks!

We've been sorting.
Classifying things into like groups is a helpful skill in life.

Here the children are sorting buttons from my mom's button box.  I brought in the tin of buttons that I played with when I was a little girl.  I read them the book The Button Box which is an amazing connection to this activity.  The buttons in the book look lots like mine.  There are gold ones, silver ones, shiny ones, some with two holes, some with four, and some with shanks.  This takes lots of negotiation within the group working on this.  Learning to work together and negotiate is hard work for first graders!

We've also worked on sorting dominoes.  

Expedition #1: The Family

THE MYSTERY PIECE...
First we experienced a silent gallery walk around pictures that held the answers to what we were  going to study...

Most of the children guessed: "babies"?, "children"? "Different kinds of people"? The next day I revealed that we would be studying the family.

Yes, that is me reading on grandpa's lap.  Me, the oldest of five children, holding my baby sister on my lap.  Me on my bike. (I've loved riding bikes my whole life!)

These are the questions we are focusing on.  

We have decided that our crew's definition of the family is:  "A group of people who love each other".  We know that our families look different within our crew and we respect and embrace that. 

We have also explored and graphed our the homes we live in might look like and we've learned about city homes and suburban homes.  We've also graphed the cities which our crew lives in. 

And Friday, we talked about what families eat and why, and we graphed our favorite foods.

Now we are moving in to learning about the past and the present.  How did our parents and grandparents live, play, work, go to school?  I hope you've had fun sharing these things over the weekend as you fill out the Remember When interview with your child.  Whether in person, by phone, or by Skype, your family is sharing the past and learning more about each other. 

As you can see by checking the Guiding Questions, at the end of the month we begin looking at families outside of America.  The children will love this!

We brainstormed about what the past was like for our parents/ grandparents to see what background knowledge the children had.  This is what they came up with! 

Exploring as mathematicians

Math Explorations is a part of Everyday Math that the children really enjoy and learn from.
We had our first exploration day last week as we took a look at geoboards, base ten blocks, and pattern blocks.  We will use these tools to help us in many ways in the days to come.  But this day was a "get to know our tools" day.  

Partner Reading

Reading plays an important role in our crew room.  I read aloud to them and take them to new reading levels in small groups in guided reading.  They are learning how to independently read for an extended period of time each day and then I give them a chance to share and talk about books with reading partners I've set up for them.  This is what readers do.  We read to take in information, escape, enjoy...and then we talk about it!  They love to share their books with each other!

Ask your child about The Treasure Tree.  I'm reading aloud from this book each day.  It is full of adventure and each character displays one of our character traits.  They BEG me to read this each day!  The illustrations are wonderful too.