December Student-made Student-Centered Email

Dear First Grade Families,

     Happy December!  Even with the holidays coming, we are focusing on becoming better readers, writers, mathematicians, and scientists in class!  Here’s what we are up to!

     In reading, Evan shares that we’ve been learning the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  London shares that nonfiction books have photographs and show real information. 

     In our writing center, we have choices!  Akirah has made a choice to research owls on PebbleGo.com with Asiyah and Julia.  Lucas and Alex have turned their research into informational posters teaching others about dinosaurs—ROAR!  Jacob L. has been writing  imaginative stories with Luke A. about gingerbread men and a big, fat policeman.  Payton has been choosing word work and using her phonics words to practice spelling.  In writing, Gracelyn and Payton are working on a nonfiction book about tigers.

     Science has been super!  Jacob S. shares that we are working on models, and yesterday we made moon out of clay and phases of the moon out of Oreo’s.  Luke A. shares that today we measured how high the moon is using handspans.

In math, Mckenzie says we wrote numbers on sentence strips.  Chase adds that we are also are counting all the way up to 200. Here is Akirah’s counting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpHjmxhf4s&feature=youtu.be

Happy Holidays and Feliz Navidad,

Mrs. Y’s First Graders

Teaching Nonfiction Text Features

Common Core Standards for Grade 1

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.1.5

Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text.

The Common Core standards for Reading Informational Text include having students know and use text features.  In this lesson, I begin building students' knowledge of text features. First,  we watch a video that introduces text features.  Who doesn't love a cowboy lassoing some text features?

Next, we read an article together and label the text features.  I love these adorable lightbulb sticky notes!  I chose an article on Animal Classification because it contained numerous features and also for student interest.  (Lately, we have been asking lots of questions about what makes a mammal a mammal, etc!)

Now, it's time for pairs of students to give it a try!  Here are some pictures and videos showing the classroom and check-ins!

In closing, we come back to the rug for a discussion.  Here's how our discussion started:

Next, students shared questions they came up with and other text features they found!

As a home-school connection, students put these pages in their Study Buddy.  The Study Buddy is a binder that goes home each night and comes back each day.  The "Strategies" section of the Study Buddy has ways parents can support students at home with reading by reinforcing what we are learning in class!

Check out this free version on TeachersPayTeachers.com!

After this lesson, I post the article we read together and some descriptions of text features in our classroom library for reference.  Our next lesson will get into the purpose of text features!