Week in Review

I don't think we could have packed one more thing into this week! I am exhausted and I am sure the rest of Room 222 is also.

First up, International Dot Day:

Love the spirit from the Sharks table!

We celebrated everything that made us special. Some of our activities included a dot scavenger hunt and a Dot Day parade to celebrate what makes us special. See if you can find these events in our video:

My Movie 6 from LBright on Vimeo.

We also celebrated Dot Day by making a new connection and Skyped with Mrs. Hogan's class in Dallas, Texas. 

As always, reading was the focus of our week. 

We celebrated our reading skills as a  few of our friends shared their hot reads with us. 

A.C. shared David Gets in Trouble. Classic!

A.H shared a popular Elephant and Piggie book, My Friend is Sad. 

Our wonder this week caught us by surprise. As we were Skyping, Mrs. Hogan's students informed us that they have a Bearded Dragon as a class pet. We were very interested in that. Then we learned that we have a Bearded Dragon expert in Room 222! J. S. informed us that he has a pet Bearded Dragon at home. So J. S. and his family sent us a picture of Desert and told us all about him. J.S. is so knowledgeable about his pet but we always research with more than one source. 

So, after we charted J.S.'s knowledge, we visited an amazing site called PebbleGo to hear from another source. The research groups used Chromebooks to help them gather this information. 

Room 222 is officially the McDole headquarters for Bearded Dragon knowledge. 

Last but not least, we had an amazing (and tiring) Fun Run. Thanks to all of the parents that came out and supported us!

Thanks for checking in!

Guest Post: Room 222's Writing Club

*teacher note: graphics, commercial and photos were created and taken independently by A.J. and S.S. Writing Club idea was fully developed and implemented by our bloggers as well. 

Guest Bloggers: A. J. and S. S. 

Welcome to Writing Club.

It all started when we talked about it at lunch. 

We talked to the teacher about the club and asked if we could do one and she said yes. 

To tell people about our club, we made poster...

and a movie!

Writing Club from LBright on Vimeo.

We also made up some rules and we picked a day to hold our first club meeting.

We talked to the class about it and they agreed. 

We had our 1st meeting  on September 17th during recess. 

Photo Credit A. J. 

Photo Credit A. J. 

Photo Credit A. J. 

Photo Credit A. J. 

It was very fun and 6 people joined us!

Here is a sneak peek at Writing Club. 

Writing Club review from LBright on Vimeo.

Our next meeting is October 17th! We hope even more people will come. 

Powerful Week in Review

Powerful was the "Word of the Week" this week in room 222. 

We started with conversations about story characters and what makes each of them powerful. 

Our first powerful character this week was a little creature named, Something Else. 

Then we talked about the little cloud that could, Cloudette. 

Teaching Illustration done by BW and CG

Then we talked about ourselves as powerful characters during our digital citizenship discussions.

First we talked about using our powers for good. We drew a picture of our best friend and practiced giving them a compliment. 

Then we demonstrated using our super powers for evil and we became villains. We said something mean to our best friend and crumpled up the paper face when doing so. 

Then we apologized and tried to make our friend happy again by  smoothing out his/her face. We notice that we could never undo the mean words that we said. Our best friend was never the same again. 

We also practiced our three rules of digital safety:
1. Never talk with someone you don't know. 
2. Only visit kid appropriate sites.
3. Always ask a grown-up before visiting the internet. 

The students kindly asked me if they could visit the San Diego Zoo website together. So we took a trip to the computer lab and worked with Miss Woodruff on all of the cool components of this website. 

See our first post on Digital Citizenship/Safety here.

Last but certainly not least... we created our own guidelines for commenting on the work of others. We used a great website called Comments 4 Kids as a guide to create our own video to share with other learners. 

Once the group decided on our 4 steps, we began storyboarding as a class. The students decided if they wanted to be actors, directors, film crew or producers. As soon as the jobs were chosen, we split into different groups to plan each segment of the movie. Finally, we came together and began filming. 

And now presenting... How to Comment, Room 222 Style:

Comments from LBright on Vimeo.

Directors (started and stopped filming, approved it for final video):

P.E., C.L., L.S., S.S., T.R.

Film Crew (Managed the iPad, focused and zoomed in, worked closely with the directors):

J.D., J.E., J.S.,  M.W.B., B.Wells.

Actors (created their own lines, delivered the message):

C.G., K.G., C.S., A.H., C.L, M.S., B.Welch, A.C., E.D., K.K., A. J., V.M., K.A.

Producers (Produced the final product, independently in iMovie, designed and added graphics, chose music and edited length of the feature film):

E.F. and C.W.

Now that you are an expert at leaving a good comment, please try leaving a comment on this blog post. See if the Room 222 experts can assist you. 

We have another big week coming up! International Dot Day, 1st Grade Tech Boot Camp, Reading Groups, Personal Narrative Writing!!! Will the fun ever end?!?

Tech Boot Camp: Week 1 - Digital Safety and Citizenship

I love traveling. I love going to the zoo, mountains and ocean. 

Sometimes I travel in the car and sometimes I can travel without leaving my chair!

This has been the topic of conversation in 1st grade this week. McDole 1st Graders are learning how to be safe and productive digital citizens. 

We have learned some powerful new vocabulary.

We used these vocabulary words when talking about going on virtual field trips. Anytime we enter the world of the internet, we are on a virtual field trip. We used 3 new safety rules when traveling on the web.

1. Always ask a parent or teacher before reviewing a website.

2. Visit websites that are kid appropriate.

3. Only chat with people we know.

Our first virtual field trip lead us to the San Diego Zoo! Check it out here!

Today we talked about password safety and internet interaction. We used BrainPop Jr. to help guide our discussion.

Finally we went over some scenarios that we could encounter and the students shared how they felt.

We used stoplight colors to help: Green = Great Choice, Yellow = I need to chat with a grown-up to make sure, Red = Not ok for me, tell an adult 

If we had conflicting colors, we talked about it. The arguments for the conflicting colors were very well thought out and made sense. I am so proud of these great thinkers!

Here are two example scenarios:

Scenario A: My teacher gave me a website for research

Scenario B: Someone I don't know tried to chat with me online.

We will continue talking about our Room 222 Digital Expectations for the rest of the week and reinforce these ideas all year. 

The focus will be on our "no name with a face" rule and kind words with appropriate comments. 

We are becoming digital rock stars!

Week in Review - Sept 2-5

The students in Room 222 returned from their long weekend ready to learn. 
It was a week filled with firsts.

It was the first time we measured our Read Alouds Chart. We read 29 books in August!

It was the first time we enjoyed our Reading Zone. The Reading Zone looks and feels very different from Read-to-Self. 

We talked about our Daily 5 and worked in our first 2 Dailies: Read-to-Self and Word Work.

(much more coming on this topic)

SS working hard at our rainbow roll activity. 

We had a big week in Math too!

We discussed our addition and subtraction mascots, Gus and Linus. Then the students were challenged to create a Gus and Linus that showed us what they were all about. Here are our two official Room 222 mascots.

This year's motto in math: Prove it!
The students used one of our favorite apps ScreenChomp to prove their knowledge of 10 frames. When finished, they emailed me their presentations. 

ED and KG preplanned their presentation before beginning. 

Here is an excellent "prove it" video from P.E. and L.S.

We also work a great deal on "noticing" in Room 222. Our teams worked on noticing items and concepts using number models. 

Last but not least, we let our brains wonder about a new topic on Friday. The topic was Rabbit Island and here are our questions:

We watched two videos that showed us a glimpse of Rabbit Island. We had many of our questions answered. It was really fun to let our mind ponder something new. 

I am looking forward to another great week!

Room 222 - A Week in Review - Aug 25-29

Our first full week was a big one! We are excited to share our awesome with you!

Reading is a must in first grade and we have been reading up a storm! Each book we read as a class gets collected on our Read Alouds Chart. We ended the week with a strong August list. 

Talking about our reading is almost as important as reading itself! So we spent a lot of time talking about our books as well.

The students made their first book talk videos and they were amazing. Soon we will share lots of our videos. However, we are still fine tuning the arts of the book talking and video making. 

Check out this great video done by E.F. and C. G. 

Book Review from LBright on Vimeo.

We also had a math visitor this week. Mrs. Carlson joined us for a 10 Frame number talk. She was really impressed with our number sense!

In Writing Workshop, we are working on learning the steps for writing a personal narrative or "small moment". We have discussed thinking of an topic, planning, writing and sharing. In the planning stage, we sketch out our idea so that it is easy to remember our topic when we continue working on our book the following day. 

We discuss how different a sketch is from an illustration. With a sketch, we need just a little bit of time, a pencil and piece of paper. 

We practiced the fine art of sketching while enjoying our beautiful McDole prairie. 

Reading is still at the top of our list in Room 222. We made sure that we worked hard on following our Read-to-Self expectations this week. 

Here is a glimpse of our room during Read-to-Self.

Read To Self from LBright on Vimeo.

Last but not least, we had an amazing week on Twitter! If you have not yet, please consider following our learning as it happens! Twitter is free and we would love for you to join us. 

Follow us using @mrsbrightmcdole

Here is a glimpse of our week on Twitter:

We tweeted at one of our new favorite authors and she "favorited" our tweet!

We also connected with others who left comments for us. 

We shared our reading stamina progress. 

We shared thoughts about our day. 

We also connected with Miss G's class!

Thanks for checking in! We can't wait to share more of our learning with you.