Published Big Book!

Today we finished our class book all about the parks in New York City!  This collaborative writing assignment walked us through the writing process so that we can begin our independent writing projects next week already knowing the entire process.

First, we immersed ourselves in the genre of nonfiction informational texts to learn the features.  We charted those noticings before our on-demand writing at the beginning of the unit.

Then we began planning our writing by mapping out our chapters and the headings within those chapters.

After that, we used lots of books, maps, pictures, observations, and interviews to gather even more information about the parks in NYC.

Then we began drafting our sections.  Each student wrote under one heading, working in groups of students within their chapter.  After three days of drafting, students began revising by adding more details, writing "kick-off sentences" to hook the reader, changing our words, and deleting repetitive phrases.

Because the purpose of this work was to practice the craft of writing information texts, the editing (for punctuation, spelling, and capitals) and the publishing (for improved handwriting and legibility) was not necessary for the students to practice.  The book was published so that the legibility would not be an issue for any reader who wanted to read our book.  After the writing was done, we reviewed our list of what nonfiction all-about books should have based on our notes during the immersion.  We realized that a lot of things we saw informational text had we didn't have in our book!  To begin fixing this, we each created an informative picture that had a caption and labels to teach our readers more about our topics.  After that, we reviewed our list of attributes again.  We realized that there were still six things we needed to add to our book:

- A cover with a catchy title that tells the reader what the whole book is about and a picture that matches
- A blurb on the back that tells the reader about the entire book
- An introduction to begin the book
- Fun Facts throughout the book
- An index and a glossary
- Additional pictures to fill in the spaces throughout the book

We first wrote the introduction together as a shared writing piece.  Then we broke into five groups to plan the cover, the back of the book, the index (the students deemed a glossary unnecessary since all new words were defined within the text), the Fun Fact boxes, and the additional pictures to add more information to the book.  The students worked in groups of 3-5 to complete the book today.

Below are picture of our completed, published book.  If you are around, feel free to come check out our actual book in Room 402!  We'll be sharing it with our reading buddies, the first graders across the hall, and many others throughout the coming weeks.  We now know the writing process for informational texts, so next week we will be off to a great start for our personal writing pieces!

- Liz

Inside Schools

From InsideSchools.Org

Just wanted to let everyone know that the new write-up about EVCS by Inside Schools is now on their website.  There are a few photos from their visit to our classroom as well.  Enjoy!

http://insideschools.org/elementary/browse/school/17

The Pencil Trick

Today in science we did something incredible.  We balanced a pencil on its point!

We have been studying balance for the past two weeks and have learned a lot.  For each experiment, we first chose a balance point and then attempted to balance the object. Today's object was an ordinary pencil, and we chose the pencil point as the balance point.  We tried to balance it alone over and over, but it just wouldn't work.  We then received some counterweights (in the form of clothes pins) and a piece of wire to help us attach the counterweights to the pencil.  It took us a lot of tries, but eventually we got the pencils to balance!  We used what we had learned (that the counterweights should be below the balance point) to help us find a stable position.  Check it out!

Parks and Geography

Yesterday was our first trip!  We are studying the geography of New York City as well as learning to become better observers in the process.  We walked to the East River and both wrote about and sketched what we saw.  Both as scientists and anthropologists we have to be able to describe what we see and experience in both words and pictures.

Thanks to all of the parents who came help us travel and work!

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Today in writing we began gathering materials to begin our research.  We discussed that research can come from many sources:  books, the internet, movies, pictures, interviews, observations, maps, artifacts, and experiences.  We already know an awful lot about parks from experiences, observations, and interviews - but now we are using the other resources to learn more!  Today we explored the materials and sorted them to help us use them.  Some of us started to take notes on what we learned too.  Tomorrow we begin writing our nonfiction sections to make our All About NYC Parks book!

Town Meeting and Question of the Day

The schedule for the 2013/2014 Town Meetings is out, and we will begin next week!  Town Meetings are a time for the school community to gather together and sing. We will be using our brand-new auditorium, so all parents are welcome to join us this year.

All Town Meetings are on Monday mornings, immediately following drop-off.  Hope to see you there!

Town Meeting Dates

October 28
November 25
December 9
January 13
February 3
March 3
March 17
March 31
April 28
May 12
June 2
June 16

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A routine that we practice every day is our Question of the Day. Each morning, the students find their colored card (it matches the table they sit at) and complete our class's bar graph about a question. After we've all unpacked and begun our Morning Meeting, we discuss the data. We've learned how many siblings we each have, their favorite animals, how many pockets they wore on that day, and lots more! Bar graphs are great ways to express information to see trends and information quickly.

Today, Jessica asked us how we got to school. The 18 students who came to school today answered our question before the Morning Meeting. It looked like this:

"How did you get to school today?"
-car- -walking- -scooter- -bike- -bus/train-

We then made mathematical statements about the data. Today, students said,

"Walking was the most popular way to get to school."

"The same number of students rode bikes, scooters, or a bus/train."

"Driving was the least popular way to get here."

"Five more kids walked than went in a car."

"Half of the red table walked and half of the red table rode scooters."

"Ten kids walked or biked to school."

We are learning a lot about each other using our class bar graph - I wonder what our next Question of the Day will be!

- Liz

Moving Forward as Writers

Today we finalized our four chapters for our NYC Parks All-About Book and created title for them.  Our four chapters will be:

1. Plants and Animals Around You

2. Playing at the Park

3. People All Around

4. Parks in the Past

We then learned more about the organization of Information Texts. In kindergarten we learned that the title of a nonfiction book tells us what the whole text will be about.  In first grade we learned that the title's idea is split into smaller ideas that become chapter titles. Organizing our thoughts into chapters took a lot of work last year.  This year, we are breaking those chapters into even smaller ideas using headings.  We studied a published book about Abraham Lincoln first to see how this text feature helped us find ideas quickly without reading the entire book. We then looked at an informational text about poodles and found out how much water a poodle should drink in less than a minute - even though the book was quite long!

We then began creating headings within our four chapters. Tomorrow, we'll continue that work before deciding which chapter and heading we'd like to draft individually to contribute to our class book.  Stay tuned!

 

Planning our Class Book and Math Pockets

As I emailed earlier this week, we began our Nonfiction Information Text unit last week.  If you missed my email, here it is:

In your child's folder, you will find a writing piece with an attached rubric. I wanted to make sure that families knew what this was.  We have just begun a new writing unit about Nonfiction Informational Texts during our writing workshop.  To begin every writing unit we first immerse ourselves in the genre (in this case, nonfiction informational texts) to remind ourselves of the text features and to brainstorm a list of similarities we see among the professionally published books. We then write an "on demand" piece of writing from that genre. Students were given 45 minutes to completely write a piece of nonfiction informational text based on what they were recently immersed in, but no instruction about the genre.
These "On Demand" pieces were then scored with the "Yes/No Rubric" students will be using at the end of the unit to score themselves before we have one-on-one writing conferences about their published pieces. Students were scored on a 1-4 scale based on how many Yes's and how many No's they received. Today the class and I went through the rubric. They all did exceptionally well in the areas that are First Grade standards. Certain parts of the rubric (for example, writing an introduction) are second-grade standards based, and so have not been taught to the students yet.  The students all understand that receiving a 3 or a 4 before a unit is taught would be quite rare, since being on or above grade level before a unit is taught is not expected at all. 
I wanted you to be aware of this since all students' scores were where they were expected to be - at level 1 or 2 - on this "On Demand" task, yet it can be surprising to a parent who is unaware of the context of the assignment. A copy of this task is kept in their writing file and will be used to compare their published piece at the end of the writing unit to how they were writing before the unit began.  This is so students can see personal growth in terms of themselves as writers.
If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to ask.

As my email said, we first immersed ourselves in the genre and took notes on what we noticed. Then we did the "on demand" piece. After that, we began to work on a class book all about the parks in NYC.  As we begin studying New York City, both past and present, our students will choose one place or feature of NYC to write their own information book about.  Parks are a great part of our city, and they are something the kids have a lot of first-hand knowledge about.  

To start our book, students were asked to list the 4 chapters they thought our book should have. These ideas were then recorded on pink post-it notes.  Today we spread all of the post-it notes out on the board. When ones were exactly alike, we put them on top of one another. Some chapters were really popular (such as trees and squirrels) while other post-it notes stood alone (like swimming pools and jump ropes).  We then started to sort our post-it notes. We had a limitation though - we had to eventually get everything sorted into only 4 chapters. Sorting those 80 post-it notes took quite a long time!

After 30 minutes of intense discussion, we have our tentative chapter categories: Nature, Workers/People in Parks, History of Parks, and Playing at the Park.  We wrote those on yellow post-it notes.  We still want to consider using the History of Parks chapter as merely "fun facts" or "fact boxes" throughout the book and then splitting either the Nature chapter into two separate chapters (Plants and Animals) or splitting the Workers/People in Parks chapter into two chapters (People Who Work at the Park and People Who Play at the Park).

We will soon begin researching these categories by using books, the internet, interviews, and observations. Then we will choose a chapter to draft and begin splitting each chapter into Headings and Subheadings within our chapter-writing groups. We plan to have a published book in the next few weeks to share with our friends, families, and reading buddies!

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Today we also used a new math material for the first time:  Math Pockets!  We will be using them on a near-daily basis. Our math pockets are blue on one side and white on the other. Between those two sides is a dry-erase marker, a piece of felt, and any needed math manipulatives for our current unit.  First, we used our Math Pockets to answer questions on the rug.  Once we had our answer written down on the white side, we flipped over to the blue. It was so easy to see a sea of blue and know everyone was ready to talk. Then we shared our answers. After that, we worked in partners to find the missing number of dots on our Tens Frames and write at least one equation that showed how we found the missing number.  It was a lot of fun!

Historians and Scientists

Today we became both historians and scientists in Room 402!

This morning, we had a visitor, Leah, from the New York Historical Society.  Leah discussed the importance of studying history - and using maps and artifacts to do so.  We first looked at a map of NYC as it is today. We noticed a Map Key/Legend, a Compass Rose, a Title, and a Date from when it was published. We saw lots of things we knew from our own lives. We inferred from the pictures that the colors on the map represented different things as well - the green was the parks and the blue was the water.

Then each table received a map of NYC from a different time period. We studied the differences between the maps and learned a lot about how NYC has changed. We even learned that Wall Street got its name from a very real wall that used to stand right where the street now is. It was built to keep the Dutch protected against others.  We also learned that there used to be water where Water Street now is.  Lots of other changes were noticed - we certainly have a lot more roads, bridges, and buildings than we used to.  Throughout the year we'll be studying this a ton - but today was a great introduction with Leah!

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Then, this afternoon we became scientists!  We have begun our study of Balance and Motion. (If you click that link, there is a ton of information from our FOSS curriculum website. It has at-home activities, a unit overview, and much more!)  We began today with balance.

First, we charted what we thought of when we heard the word "Balance". We said that we thought of see-saws, of tight-rope walking, of things not falling down, and of yoga.  Then we were each given a paper cut-out of a crayfish. We tried to balance the crayfish on just one finger. Even after 10 minutes of trying, we weren't too successful.  We then each received 2 clothes pins. After another 10 minutes, some of us had balanced our crayfish on one finger! Those skilled balancers showed us all how to use the clothes pins to make it balance. It was really cool!

We then charted some information we learned. We have three words now defined our our Balance and Motion chart: Balance, Balance Point, and Counterweight. As a class we tried to come up with a definition for each word.  We may not be 100% happy with our definitions of these three words yet, but we feel closer than when we started. We will continue our explorations with balance for the next few weeks. Stay tuned!