Leverett School Grade 1 Joyful Learning For Young Children 

Last week, we had visiting poet, Verandah Porche, come visit our school.  She kicked off her residency with us by doing an all school assembly.

Then we met with her in the library and she helped us write our own short poems.  

We even got to read them to our class and the second graders.  This was a great start to our time with Verandah learning all about how fun it is to write poems and play with words.  

In math this week we have been learning about and making polygons.  

We have new see through shapes that are so fun to use and make all kinds of patterns with.

Verandah inspired us all and one student brought in this sweet little poem for your pocket, which we all received a copy of.  The kids cut it up and put it in their pockets, very excited to show it to Verandah who came in to visit us later in the day.

 

Here we are working in our poetry notebooks.  Every week we add a new poem to our books and illustrate a beautiful picture to match it.  Each week the students read and reread these poems to build fluency.

  

When Verandah came she helped us write this group poem together.  We all have a collection of our own poems that we have written since she first visited us last week.  

We have been busy writing about the collections we brought in from home and learning strategies to help us show in writing what we think the best object in our collections is.  Today the children took out the object that won “Best In Show” and the piece they wrote stating their opinion about why it won.  They read these pieces to each other and children received feedback from their peers.  “Why do you think it is cool?”  “Your ending sentence was very convincing.”  “I like how you used the word unique.”  These are the comments I overheard them giving each other.  Below is a chart of some of the strategies the kids are starting to use in their writing.

 

In Social Studies, we are studying famous characters from around the world by reading narrative biographies and defining specific character traits of each person.  This is a chart we made of all the character traits we could think of so far.   We are also studying characters in folktales, specifically the Fox.  We read books, we read a poem, and we watched a couple video clips of folktales put to music.   All of these had the fox as a main character.  Children are talking about what kind of a character the fox is, why they think that, and they are giving reasons to support their opinion.  Here are some pictures about the Fox that we made this week that are hanging on the bulletin board in our classroom

.