Sharing Our Learning

As helminthologist, we decided to teach our kindergarten friends all about earthworms.  After much discussion, our crew decided that writing an all about book would help our young friends learn best.  Each student embraced the challenge of writing a high quality all about book.

We realized that some of our kindergarten crew are readers who "read the pictures" instead of reading the words.  So, we thought about this question:

What do I need to make sure is in my picture to help my reader?

We looked at some mentor texts as well as high quality examples from our own first grade crew members.

After 2 weeks of hard work, we reviewed our own books and also got peer feedback on our high quality books.

We finally celebrated our hard work by reading our books to Ms. VP's kindergarten crew.  First graders were so excited to take their books home to celebrate with their families.

Collecting Data

First graders have really enjoyed our next math unit all about collecting, representing and analyzing data.

Our first step was to figure out - What is data?  Why do you collect data? How do you collect data?  

We asked several survey questions and worked to represent the data many different ways.

Students collaborated with a partner to ask a survey question of their choice.

Students had to figure out how to accurately represent their data.

Once students collect and represented their data accurately, they were given the challenge of analyzing the data.

 Mathematicians used language such as:
From this data, I know that more students in our class like ice cream than donuts.
From this data, I know fewer students like the New England Patriots.
I know that 26 people answered my survey questions because I used an equation to add the students who like pink (12)  and the students who liked gold (14).  I wrote 12+14=26