Timelines

We have learned about past, present and future in Social Studies and the entire first grade assigned a timeline project so that students could share their personal histories over time and show how they have changed.  The instructions were simply to create a timeline with dates, descriptions in complete sentences and photos.  I used rubistar to make a rubric that we used to grade the projects.  I loved seeing all the baby photos!  These projects were adorable and the kids loved presenting them to the class!

Chinese New Year

For Chinese New Year we watched some videos and made a graphic organizer about how people celebrate.  We also looked at the Chinese Zodiac and read about the personalities of the animals for the years the students were born.

They wrote about how they planned to celebrate Chinese New Year and made dragon masks with construction paper to decorate.  They came out pretty great!

Martin Luther King Day

I saw this idea for a really cute writing activity on pinterest.  Great directions for how to make the artwork can be found here.  I cut all the paper ahead of time and made my own as I helped the kids step by step.  

The writing prompt they were given was to write about a dream they have for the future.  They wrote the cutest, sweetest things!



On a separate note, although I have had parents sign media release forms for the photos, I have gone back through all the photos on my blog and added little sunglasses or pencil stickers using picnik in order to protect the anonymity of my students.  In the future I will not add photos of the children themselves, and just focus on their work.

Pilgrims Compare Contrast

We have been learning to compare and contrast in our reading lessons this week.  I saw some great things on other first grade blogs and decided to do a Venn Diagram comparing Pilgrim life to life today.

After watching several videos on united streaming and brain pop jr. and reading a few books, we discussed what we have in common with the Pilgrims and how we are different.  I wrote several of those ideas down, printed them and cut them out.  I passed them out to the students and they pasted them in our big Venn diagram.  It was a great formative assessment!

Next we labeled the diagram and started a writing activity.  More on that soon!

Levels of Government

This is an anchor chart we made a few weeks ago in social studies to learn about the different levels of government.  My students always have such a hard time distinguishing local, state, and national levels so this gives them a great visual reference to start to remember the concept.