Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Remember that song we used to sing in Children's Church as kids?

He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands!

Such a simple song with such a powerful meaning....God is in control.  Not me.

For a few years now, we have been using that simple kid's song as the tune to our continents poem, "I've Got The Whole World On My Body."  The kids adore this song.  It's a perfect Total Physical Response activity and in just a couple of short singings the kids can name all 7 continents {on their bodies, of course!}

We sing the song in 3 different ways to keep the song fresh and because I just can't pick a favorite way!

On Our Body

First, we sing the song by tapping the beat on each part of our body:
Africa >>> Head
North America >>> Shoulders
South America >>> Hips
Europe >>> Left Hand
Asia >>> Right Hand
Australia >>> Knees
Antarctica >>> Feet

With A Partner

The second way we sing the continents song is with a partner.  Each kid faces a partner and they tap each other for each continent...

Head to head for Africa...

Foot to foot for Antarctica....

And so forth!  This version always includes lots of giggles! :)

Travel the Room

The last way we practice the song is traveling the room.  Since I have the continents hanging above our group tables in our room, we "travel around the world" and go to each continent table as we sing! Along with the Continental Drift, it's one of their favorite brain breaks for this unit!

Once we are continental pros, we add the poem to our poetry folder.  

We highlighted the continent names in each stanza and they illustrated the continents to match our class' world map.

You can find this poem and song in my Cinderella Around the World Unit.  I also love to use this song during our Me on the Map Unit!
      
    
Before the days of the Science of Reading, I loved me some Shared Reading.  And after learning more about how our brains learn to read, I had to be honest with myself... the poems I was using for shared reading were themed and repetitive text.  And while they were cute songs and had some oral language benefits, they were not good for learning to decode words.  But I didn't want to let go of our shared reading time.


Here's a look at how I combine an old routine, shared reading, with updated SoR aligned decodable poems for a silly and rigorous part of our literacy block.

Highlight the Focus Sound

On Monday or Tuesday, I introduce the new poem.  Most of the time it's Tuesday, because, let's be honest, Mondays are crazy.  In my Super Phonics curriculum, I don't even have it built in until Tuesday, because... IYKYK, right?? :)

Anyways, let's use this poem, The Family of Bears. It goes to the tune of, The Itsy Bitsy Spider.


On our first poem day, I read through the poem while the students follow along and then we look for our focus sound.  I pull up the digital poem on our white board and call students up to highlight the sound on our board.

When a kid highlights a word, we all read it together. We make up a motion to go with our sound to add some movement too.  For /air/ it usually ends of being some kind of finger-wiggling movement to mimic air moving. :)  You can also just have them jump or clap on the sound.  So as we read the word, we do the motion.

After all sounds are highlighted, we stand up to get our blood flowing and read the poem together.  We do our sound motion each time we get to the sound. 

And that's it for the first read!  If that seems short, it's because it is.  I try to keep it to 5 minutes or less.  Just a quick reinforcement of our phonics skill for the week.

High Frequency Word Hunt

During the 2nd read, usually on Wednesdays, we look for high frequency words, or heart words. 

Similar to the first read, I introduce the sight word and then call on students to come circle the word.  The sight word for this phonics unit are different, family, letter, watch, really.  But only two words are used in this poem.  I still go through each word and have them look for it and tell me it's not there.

After we circle the sight words on the digital poem on our white board, we stand up and choral read the poem.  We do our focus sound motion when we read the focus sound and we do another motion like clap or make a heart with our fingers for our heart words.

Comprehension Work

On the 3rd read, usually Thursdays, we stand and reread our poem together, doing our focus sound and high frequency word motions as we read.  Then the kids sit and we focus on some comprehension.  

This looks different for every poem.  When I'm planning out our comprehension focuses, I might focus on...
1) Tier 2 vocab words: we call them SPARKLE words because they make the writing sparkle with interest.

2) Who? What? Where? questions: Who is the poem about? What are the characters doing?  Where does the poem take place?

3) Higher order comprehension: This is more poem to poem specific. But it's pushing kids to creative or critical thinking where they might need to imagine something that's not explicitly in the poem.   These would include Why? and How? questions or inferring or telling the author's purpose for writing the poem.  Not all of the decodable poems will include all of these.

In this poem, we talk about the word, "pair" and what that means.  We also discuss the phrase, "fair and square."  I add sparkles around theses words to show that they are tier 2 vocab words.  

Then, we go over the Who? What? and Where? questions by turning and answering each question with our carpet partners.  Then, I call on students to answer the questions for the group.  

Finally, I choose one higher-order question to ask.  With this poem, I ask, "Why did the family of bears stop sharing?  Do you agree or disagree with this decision?

Fluency Practice

Fluency day!  My kiddos LOVE this day!  This is usually on Friday.  We reread of poem with our motions for review.  Then, we play read in 4 voices....using this anchor chart to help us.

We all read together in each voice.  The fourth voice, the star voice, is for kids to make up a voice they'd like to read the poem in.  My all time favorite voice they've come up with is a chipmunk voice (with your nose pinched!)  #cracksmeupeverytime

We also talk about any punctuation marks that may affect our expression or pacing in the poem as well on this day.

Then, I pass out the decodable  poems and the kids highlight the focus sounds, circle their sight words, and then reread their poem 3 times to practice their fluency.  

Once they've read it 3 times, they put it in their poetry folder and color the illustrations.

I love that there's SO much we can do for just 5 minutes a day with these poems.  You can find all 36 decodable poems for first grade here!



Earlier this week, I blogged about the content packed fun Christmas activities we did, but this little blog is devoted to all of those classroom celebrations for Christmas! :)

Parent Gifts

I love these gifts that the first graders make at my new school!  It's my first year for these and they turned out adorably!  One of my teammates got the 6 inch tiles donated from a local tile store so they were very little cost too!

And since one of my sweeties' moms is a first grade teacher at our school, he chose to do a different design to surprise her!

Didn't they wrap up so nicely? (One small group at a time.... *wink, wink*)

Cards for Parents

We made cards to go with our gifts this year and I love how fun they turned out.  I've done the Christmas trees before, but I wanted to give my kids a few more options this year.  I cut small strips of scrapbook paper.  I piled them by color on our back counter.  The kids grabbed the colors they needed and went to work.  I had my examples for them to copy, which most did....

But a few went off on their own.  One made a candy cane (which I didn't get a picture of) and another one made this present!

First Grade Gifts

So here's the teacher fail moment of the year....

I always get my kiddos the dollar book from Scholastic's December magazine issue as their main Christmas gift.  This year....no dollar book to be found.  And let's face it, my teacher salary can't afford $2.00 books for 25 kiddos every year!

So, I had to get a little crafty.  Since we were finishing our Fables Unit and had been reading How The Grinch Stole Christmas, I decided to make some Grinch-Doh...you know, home-made green play-doh with a little glitter added in.

First of all, I'm in love with how they wrapped up!  We played pass the present {on the word "Grinch"} while reading the story again, and the kids were super excited about their gift!
You can grab the gift tags HERE.

Besides the fact that I *failed* to get my kids a book for Christmas this year, my play-doh gift *failed* too.  Oh, it looked super cute.  But my kids begged to play with it.

And it was messy.

Like super bad messy.

Like the kind of messy where play doh sticks all over 25 kid's hands and they can't wash it off.

And the carpet.  OOOOHHHH, the carpet had play doh all in it!

So, yeah, it was pretty much a bust, but hopefully I can make it up to them at the end of the year! :)

And, actually, looking back on it, it was really a great gift idea...but maybe I'll try buying the play-doh next time and adding the glitter into that to keep it from being so messy!

Christmas Phonics

The week before Christmas Break, we took a break from phonics and just did review.  So, I supplemented with some Christmas poems from my Year Long Poetry Pack.  We focused on ordinal number words and quotation marks with this one!

Class Giving Project

I saved the best for last!  I am SUPER proud of my class this year.  As part of our Fables Unit, we read the Giving Tree (read about those activities HERE) and decided on a class service project.  We set a goal of giving 34 cans of food to our local food bank through our school's food drive.  We ended up giving over 75 cans of food--more than double our goal! (The picture was taken before our final cans came in!)
Yesterday was Dr. Seuss' birthday and we celebrated in style!  By the time my first graders come to me, they've already had the green eggs and ham feast and "fun" stuff in kindergarten.  So we do some different activities that are still fun and engaging and a little more first grade appropriate!
{affiliate links have been added in this post. The small percentage of proceeds go to support this website and my chocolate addiction!}

Rhyming Sentences

Monday morning we read Hop on Pop and brainstormed rhyming words from the book as we read.  Then, we became authors like Dr. Seuss and wrote rhyming sentences just as his book is patterned.  In first grade, we did the first 2 together, then they did 2 with their group as my intern and I walked around to check and then they wrote 2 on their own after they were checked.  This was such a *fun* review on rhymes and writing complete sentences.  It was also an easy way to review our mechanics {capitals, sight words, spaces and periods} for some of my low babies {which is why this activity is great for kinder through 2nd because it can be whole group, productive groups, independent work, or a combo of all of them like we did!

They absolutely loved coming up with silly sentences like Dr. Seuss writes!

Love the bat poop one this group came up with! :)

Antonym Opposites!

Monday afternoon, we talked about antonyms.  I'm not sure who to give the credit to for this story.  I kinda think one of my college professors told us this story, but I can't find anybody to back me up on that.  So maybe I made it up.  That's totally possible, too, since I can tell some cRaZy stories!

....but anyways...the antonym story goes like this:
Antonym means opposites.  Have you ever found an ant hill before?  What happens if you accidentally--or on purpose--step on the ant hill???  The ants go EVERYWHERE!  They run away in opposite directions screaming, "ANTonyms!!!!"

I know what you're thinking.  That's the silliest story you've ever heard.  And it is.  But year after year, it works.  When I hear the word antonym, all I can think about are ants running in opposite directions.  Silly as it is, my firsties remember what antonym means because of that crazy story.

And I *promise* this relates to Dr. Seuss....We read The Foot Book, by Dr. Seuss, which is all about...OPPOSITES!

We found the pairs of opposites as we read and charted them on our antonyms chart.

Then they "paired up" and traced two feet.  With their partners, they came up with a pair of antonyms to write and illustrated.  We posted our pairs of antonyms on our big foot in the hallway!
Yes, the big foot is a bit wrinkled, but it is several years old....and it just gets rolled up and stored until the next year so I guess I shouldn't be surprised!
 I loved this one...thought it was so original!

I have some opposite cards included in the packet that go in my ABC literacy station.  Partners work to reinforce opposites by matching pairs and recording them on our antonym feet recording page!

So much fun these past two days and so much more from this fun little Seuss packet that we didn't have time to squeeze in!
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