A Week in 1st Grade

Now that I am home from school for the summer, I will be volunteering in several elementary school classes in Williamsburg. This week I spent most of my time helping in a first grade class.



The first graders are doing a big writing project where each student creates his/her own book to read to their parents during an Author's Tea at the beginning of June. This week, I helped the students finish writing their stories and then typed the stories on the computer as the students read them aloud to me. I also worked with each student to help them create an "About the Author" page for the back of their book by filling in the blanks in a paragraph listing where they go to school, who they live with, their favorite part of school (which was usually recess or math), what they like to do outside out school, their favorite color, and their favorite thing to write about. After working on this project all week, I have now finished typing all 17 stories and About the Author pages and the books are ready for the kids to start illustrating them next week. It is a very time-consuming process, but I think the books will look very nice when they are finished and will be a great way for students to share some of their writing with their friends and families.




In addition to making their books, the main topics that the 1st graders were learning about this week were money and economics. In math, the first graders have been learning about money and in social studies, they have been studying economics. So we did a lot of activities related to coins and money this week. For social studies, we read several good books related to money and economics, including The Go-Around Dollar by Barbara Johnston Adams, Tight Times by Barbara Hazen, The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills, and A Chair for my Mother by Vera William. The students learned the difference between goods - something that you can make or grow and that someone can take home with them after they buy it - and services - something that you do for someone - and we discussed examples of both goods and services in each of the stories that I read to them. We also used several graphic organizers to help the students review what they had learned. After reading Tight Times and The Rag Coat, we created a "double bubble chart" as a class to compare and contrast the 2 stories. At the end of the unit, each student made a circle chart listing things they had learned about money and then wrote 7 sentences starting with the prompt "We have been learning about money..." When they went to computer as their center class on Wednesday, the students used Kidspiration to make a tree chart with columns of pictures showing needs, wants, goods, and services.

In math on Tuesday and Wednesday, the students used money manipulatives to help them complete several worksheets about counting coins. On Thursday, they played the game "Race to a Quarter" with a partner, and then on Friday, the students rotated to 8 fun money stations to review what they had learned about counting coins. The students really enjoyed the money station activities and by the end of the weekend, everyone seemed to have a pretty good understanding of how to count pennies, nickels, and dimes as well as what money can be used for. Click here for instructions for the "Race to a Quarter" game. You can find additional money activities, including a money PowerPoint with interactives games on my class website.



Yesterday, the students also made an extremely cute Mother's Day card . The card was shaped like a purse and their moms can open up the top of the purse to see the note that they wrote inside. The teacher had already cut the purses out of several different colors of construction paper and then the students used sparkly pom-poms, foam stickers, and gems to decorate their card. I will definitely consider using this idea with my students in the future. Here is a link to a similar project, although the one the kids made at school was much simpler.

What Makes a Good Teacher?

What makes a good teacher? A kind, caring, and patient personality? A desire to make a difference in the lives of his/her students? The ability to motivate students and present content in a way that is fun and engaging and will make students eager to learn? Being an expert at content knowledge? A combination of some or all of the above? And can people learn how to be effective teachers, or is teaching a natural skill or instinct that people either have or don't have?

A few days ago, I read the article Can Good Teaching Be Learned from the March 2010 NY Times Magazine. This article addresses several current issues related to education, including some of the characteristics that make an effective teacher and how school systems can "create" better teachers. Click here to view this article on nytimes.com (the article has a different name online, but it is the exact same article as in the magazine). As the article points out, individual teachers can make a difference in the lives of their students. I certainly believe that, and that is one of the main reasons that I want to be a teacher. According to the article, researchers have actually proven the significant impact that individual teachers have on students' learning; numerous studies about which factors most affect and improve student learning have shown that

"Every factor under a school's control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to."

So if we know that the quality of a child's teacher influences how much they learn, then the question becomes what can school systems do to get better teachers? One aspect of teaching that is emphasized in the article as a characteristic of good teachers is classroom management. As the article explains and as we have discussed in my classroom management class this semester, a teacher cannot effectively teach a lesson (no matter how good that lesson is) if the he/she does not have control of the class:

"Students can't learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions."

I have also seen the importance of good classroom management while I have been observing and helping in different elementary school classes this year. As mentioned in the article positive reinforcement, modeling, and giving clear step-by-step instructions, all seem to be very effective, especially in early elementary grades. In each class where I have observed, the teachers have had different systems and strategies for managing their classroom and the classroom management systems varied depending on the personality of the teacher as well as the needs of the students in the class. I don't think that there is really any one best way or that one way will necessarily work for all teachers or with all classes, but some ideas that seemed to work well and that I would like to incorporate into my future classrooms include:

• Commenting on what a certain student(s) is doing well in order to encourage everyone else to do the same - for example "I like the way Sally and Bob are sitting quietly...". I have noticed that this technique can be very effective in getting a class of 5 or 6 year-olds to pay attention and listen to their teacher or to me.



• Class reward systems for good behavior - here are 2 examples that I really liked:
  
  1. Awarding points to each table when students do something good, such as everyone at that table working quietly on an assignment or being the first table to clean up and all sit down quietly. The teacher used tally marks to keep track of each table's points on the board and then the table with the most points at the end of the day/week received a sticker and got to have the class Woody doll sit at the table for the next day.
  
  
  2. Class marble jar - whenever the class as a whole did something good, the teacher added a handful of marbles to the jar and then when the jar is full, the class gets to vote on a special treat.

• A "talking signal" that is made like a traffic light and is used to tell students how loudly they are allowed to talk at any given time (the picture below is from Mrs. Nelson's Class web page, but I have also seen this idea used in one of the kindergarten classes that I volunteer in on Tuesdays and Thursdays)

First Grade Science Fun

This week I was home for spring break and I spent a few days helping in a first grade class at an elementary school in Williamsburg. It was a lot of fun and the kids were SO cute! The first graders were finishing up their science unit on matter this week, and we did several fun activities about solids, liquids, and gases, including making root beer floats, "cooking" Jello, and playing with Oobleck.

Yesterday we made root beer floats and talked about how the ice cream is a solid, the root beer is a liquid, and the bubbles that appeared when we poured the root beer on top of the ice cream are a gas. Then the class made a T chart listing different qualities of each type of matter and wrote a short story about what type of matter they would like to be - for example one little girl wrote, "I am air. I am a gas. I would like to be air because then I could go flying through the sky" Another student wrote, "I am root beer. I am a liquid. I want to be root beer because I could drink myself". Then this morning the kids helped their teacher make Jello and talked about the powder (a solid) dissolving, the steam rising from the boiling water, and the Jello solidifying and changing from a liquid into a solid while it was in the refrigerator. These were both simple (and yummy) activities that provided real examples of the different states of matter.

Another science activity that we did this week was the "Oobleck" experiment, which is based on the book Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. I read this story (which is VERY long) to the class while the teacher covered the tables with paper and got ready for the kids to play with their own Oobleck. In the story, the king is bored with the sun, fog, rain, and snow that usually come from the sky so he orders his royal magicians to create something new to fall from the sky. The magicians comply with his request, and their new creation is a green sticky goo called Oobleck, which eventually gets stuck to everything in the town and creates a big gooey mess. The Oobleck continues falling in bigger and bigger globs until the king finally realizes that he has caused the whole problem by asking for this goo and then admits his mistake. As soon as the king says the simple words "I'm sorry", sun comes out and the Oobleck disappears, adding a moral lesson to go along with the science experiment.

This gooey green slime is easy to make; all you need is water, cornstarch, and a little food coloring. Click here for a recipe for making Oobleck. The 1st grade teacher had made the Oobleck ahead of time, which seemed like a very good idea with young children. The Oobleck was a little messy, but the kids thought it was really cool and we managed to keep it mainly on the paper covering the tables. We discovered that Oobleck has properties of both liquids and solids at the same time. Like a liquid, it molds to the shape of the container that you put it in and if you hold it in your hand it will start to drip. If you press quickly on the Oobleck with your finger, it will be hard like a solid and your finger will not go into the Oobleck. Here are links to 2 Oobleck lesson plans that I found online:

• Discovering the Properties of Oobleck
• Oobleck cooperative learning activity

These lessons are designed for upper elementary students, but they could easily be adapted for use with 1st or 2nd graders as well.

These activities were all a lot of fun for both me and the students. The kids learned a lot about matter and the activities seemed to increase their understanding about the different states of matter. I will definitely consider doing all 3 of them with my own students in the future.