Student Profile

I send home this student profile as well as my newsletter on the first day of school. I ask that parents send it back to school before the first set of oral interviews. This is a great starting point for chatting about expectations and how they are as a learner for these interviews. You can download it for FREE on my Teachers Pay Teachers page here.

Mrs. Dunn

Using Literature to teach Patterns in Math

Have you ever notice that there are patterns EVERYWHERE? If you haven't, a first grader can tell you all about it! Once we begin this unit (it is the first one in math for us) they are like pattern detectives, they can find them anywhere. One of our favourite places to look is, of course, in a book!

One of my absolute, all time favourite books to read is Pattern Fish, and Pattern Bugs, by Trudy Harris, shows many different kinds of patterns, and the translation lessons that you can do with this book, well let me tell you, it is so much fun! The kids love to make their own pattern fish and pattern bugs after we are finished reading these stories.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a classic story that I love to use for my patterning unit. Students enjoy reading this book because of the easy to remember word pattern. It is a valuable tool to teach that not just shapes, numbers, and colours can be patterns. We can also find words and sentence patterns in stories.

After we read Brown Bear we create our own story about shapes that follows the same word pattern format. I show the students the ABC pattern with pictures first, then we put the sentence strips in order on a pocket chart. We read this new pattern story as a class, and then I tell the students that they will now be the Author and make a story as a class all about patterns! 

They love creating class books and reading them over, and OVER again from the class library. Once each student completes a page, we put it together and read it. The kids feel so much ownership and pride when they hear their page being read in front of the class. Do you want to do this activity with your class? Click on the picture to find the activity.

Do you have any other favourite pattern stories that you love to read to your class?

Art Mosaic

I got this excellent idea for a beginning of the year project from Dali moustache. Again, I show instructions step by step on the smartboard.

 I pre-made the circle and drew out the students first name initial.

Students cut out shapes with straight edges, pick one colour.

Select another colour and fill in the missing spaces. This is my teacher sample of course!

Mrs. Dunn

Whole Brain Teaching...In the Beginning

So we are about a week into school, and I have begun Whole Brain Teaching already, and I am LOVIN IT!! I think the kids are more motivated to learn, and my lovely ELL students are really benefitting from this repetitive process. They all know the five rules and often recite them to each other when they are not following them. We use the happy face, sad face, with a big OH YAH when we get a point and an OH MAN when we get a sad face. Mirror= amazing! I love it. Teach, OK we are still working on. I have some students with little language and so they are uncomfortable talking to others. I have been practicing Teach, OK with mirroring me, and that seems to help them out. I also started Teach, OK with just going over directions for an activity, 

Class, Yes, Classity Class, is very much fun and they are getting quick with responses. It is hard for me to believe that they are catching on to this so fast, I am having so much fun with it!!

Mrs. Dunn

Classroom Pictures Take Two

Well after much construction and various other things, my classroom is finally looking a bit more settled. We now officially are not allowed to put paper, fabric or basically anything on the back of our wall, so we are stuck with what we have to make the best of it. Here is the new view of Grade One with Mrs. Dunn. Don't mind the boxes still left over from unpacking as well as the fact that it may actually be dark outside...

Mrs. Dunn

Labelling Books and Supplies

I always find it difficult to be efficient in labelling school supplies; I want it done quickly but I also want it to look good! I have a new system that allows the students to label their own books while still looking like I did it (most of the time)!

I have colour coded each subject, and so they put the blue label on the book and it goes into the blue bin. There are also some that have shapes so I can just say get out your triangle book. Students have all their labels on 1 and a 1/2 pages, with 14 labels on each page. I made a template so each year I just have to put in names, and they are ready to be printed!

Classroom set up photos

Our school was under construction over the summer, and so we had to move everything out of the classroom at the end of last year. The cleaners and movers came in yesterday (Friday) and got everything back in place, and so this is the state of my classroom with a full day of fixing as of today.

SCARYYYYYYYYYYY.   .   .    .   kids are coming on Tuesday.

So I have set up some things, this is my reading corner, I am going with a green and brown polka dot theme this year.

I have tables this year, I normally have desks so this could get interesting. I decided to have a shelf at the end of each table with only the five students things all in one place.

 So going from left to right, there is a bin for sharp and unsharp pencils, and storage for glue sticks, scissors and white glue in the bin at the back. Students hand in completed work in the pickle bin and hand ins (book orders, homework etc) in the other bin. 

The bottom shelf is where all books are kept, math, social and science scribblers etc. They are not yet labelled of course but will be with colour coding. 

More pictures will follow in the next couple of days as I get things organized.

Mrs. Dunn