RES Movie Night

All of this cold weather found you wondering what to do this weekend?  Bring the free popcorn you received in your home/school folder and.... 

 

Grab your sleeping bags or blankets and camp out on the RES gym floor for …

 

A Free Family Movie Night

Image from:  http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ scottmendelson/files/2014/04/the_lego_movie_2014-wide.jpg

Everything will be AWESOME when we view The LEGO Movietogether as a community!

We hope you can join us!

Friday, January 30th at 6:30 PM

Popcorn & Drinks will be available

*Please bring your own water bottles and cups!*

SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES!

Penguin writing

First graders are in the midst of learning about those very interesting birds, penguins!  They have, and continue to collect information from multiple sources including books, online resources, and nonfiction poems.  This afternoon we read a poem about the rockhopper penguin, and they also got to color in a picture of one to show its unique feather patterns and colorings.  We have been working together to gather the information, and now the students are creating their own nonfiction chapter books about these special birds.  They began by writing their chapter titles, and are currently in the process of writing the chapters.  We have a class full of wonderful writers!!  

Comparisons

This week we have continued to learn about nonfiction features. First graders learned about the index as well as the use of comparisons.  They learned that an index helps the reader to locate specific information, and that comparisons allow the reader to see something new compared with something known, for example, the purpose of understanding size.  

First Grade Library Classes: Red Clover Books

This is a guest post from RES teacher librarian Beth Redford.

2014-2015 Red Clover nominee 

A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin 

by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet

First graders are enjoying this year's Red Clover books in the RES library. Named after Vermont's state flower, the Red Clover Award is Vermont's children's choice award for picture books. Every year, a group of teachers and librarians puts together a list of  10 fiction and nonfiction Red Clover books. Students who read or listen to at least five titles from the list get to vote on their favorite book. Their votes, along with votes from students all over the state, help choose the Red Clover Award winner.

Scholars are practicing their critical thinking skills while they are discussing these books in library classes. Our questions to focus on are: do I like or dislike this book, and why? What specific details in the text or illustrations make me think this book is interesting or boring, beautiful or ugly, serious or funny?

This week we read and discussed A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet. More information about this unique American artist and his work is available at the Red Clover Website. More information about the Red Clover program and the rest of this year's reading list is also available at this link.



cover image is from https://sites.google.com/site/redcloveraward20142015/home/a-splash-of-red-the-life-and-art-of-horace-pippin

Survey Questions

Part of our math unit on data requires students to come up with a survey question that they can ask their classmates as a way to collect information about our group.  Students worked in pairs to come up with their question (which needed to be worded so that there were only two possible answer choices), gather their data, decide on a system to ensure that they asked their question everyone on our class, as well as keep track of their data.  Their next task involved creating a representation to show the information that they found out about our class.  Students completed a planning sheet before starting the project and then a final sheet which had them think about what they actually found out.  They had a lot of fun and did a great job!!

Eagle or Whale?

This week first graders started a new math unit on collecting and representing data.  Their first task was to answer the survey question, "Would you rather be an eagle or a whale?"  After they decided how to collect the data, they then worked together as a group to determine how to show, or represent the information we had gathered, in an organized way.  The students used cubes to represent each person's vote, and also color coded the cubes.  The final task was for them to each make their own representations of the data on paper.  At the end, students shared their work and noticed positive aspects of classmates' work.