Wow, Fridays came and gone like the wind over the last two months. I'm still in awe that it is the end October!! We packed in so many activities this month in first grade. I can't wait to tell you all about our Bat Week, Paragraph Writing, All About Animals Books and using QR Codes for Parent Teacher Conferences!
First up is a few fun bits from our Bat Week. I swear bats have to be one of the most interesting creatures. The kiddos gushed over how creepy, cute, cool, etc these guys are!
I found this read aloud of Stellaluna yesterday on YouTube and it features the guy from Reading Rainbow! I love it because he gives a little forward discussing nocturnal animals before the read aloud. You can find it HERE.
Last week the first grade read the story, "How Animals Communicate" in the Journeys series and went crazy over the animal facts! I decided to 'whip' up (whip as in take over a week to finish) some informative writing templates to create animal reports. At first I created general templates to use with any animal. Then I took at look at Educlips Animals A-Z clipart and just had to have it!
One hundred and fifty-two pages later, All About Animals was born! :)
The kids loved creating an actual book and I think the favorite was the All About The Author page. :) I loved the use of text features that my STUDENTS created. Here are some pics of it in action!
We used my Little Writers Workshop unit and created our very first paragraph!
First we gathered what we know about bats on a graphic organizer. Then we added a topic sentence and opinion for the last sentence. They did so well!!!
We just finished the read aloud, Charlotte's Web and celebrated our favorite pig, Wilbur!
Love that story!!
Now for a project that takes time, but is totally worth it! To make Parent Teacher conferences a little more creative and unique, I interviewed each student. Before the interviews, we decided which questions to ask:
1. Name
2. Fave Color
3. Fave Animal
4. Fave Book (they had it to show to the camera)
5. Fave Part of School
6. Subject You Are Best At
7. Subject That Is Hard
They turned out so cute! A few got a little flustered, but that only added to the cuteness!
Next, I uploaded the videos to my Google Drive. You can find this in your Google Mail account. Another option is uploading it to another server like Dropbox.
After uploaded each video, I went into Drive and clicked on the Share button by the title. A box will popup asked who you want to share it with. Click on the top of the box where it says Create A Link or Shareable Link.
After the link is created, copy it. Next, go to a QR Code generator website. Here's a few choices:
Paste the link into the generator box and click download QR Code. A box will pop up with the code. Copy the code and paste it onto a Word document. To make identifying the codes easier, I would type in the student's name under each code that you paste.
After you are done, print off the Word document. I had each student color a self-portrait and I taped the QR codes underneath each picture. Here's how my display looked at conference night.
This portrait is my sweet nephew's. Love those freckles!!
Happy Halloween!!! To celebrate, my entire TPT store is
20 % off!!!
