First Grade News!
Sharing the Planet
Sharing the Planet-Inquiry into Opportunity, Distribution of Resources, and Relief Efforts!
Transdisciplinary Theme: Sharing the Planet
Central idea: The availability of resources affects a community's wealth.
Key concepts: Connection, Causation, Responsibility
Lines of inquiry
- Distribution of natural and human made resources
- How opportunity impacts a community
- Efforts to distribute resources equally
Here's a look at what we've been doing, and what's to come...
- Students have been examining how everyday tasks are done differently around the world, depending on the resources available in different places. The tasks students have examined included fishing, laundry, and cooking. Students looked at images of how these and other tasks are completed in places of varying levels of development around the world. Our discussions around this have been so interesting, and I have thoroughly enjoyed watching our kids construct such profound conclusions along the way!
- Students have started to realize that the availability of resources are not the same everywhere around the world, and have been making amazing connections to our transdisicplinary theme by realizing our responsibility as people who have been given an abundance of resources is to make efforts to share and bring these resources to people who don't have them at their disposal. Students have also started to realize that available resources are what largely defines a community or place.
- Students will learn about groups that make efforts to distribute specific resources around the world more equally. We will look at the efforts of the following relief efforts and organizations:
- Soles for Souls
- 1st/2nd Grade Class' 2015-2016, TA's Light Up Gaza Crowdfunding Campaign
- 3rd Grade Class' current crowdfunding campaign to build wells in impoverished areas
- "Three Cups of Tea" story-bringing Education/Schools to rural/impoverished areas
- UNICEF
- Living Water International
- Nobel Prize Winner, Mohammed Yunus and Grameem Bank-expanding opportunity
Some UOI Vocabulary: opportunity, resources, natural, human-made, availability
Key Concept-Causation in the UOI
How opportunity impacts a community
Key Concept-Responsibility in the UOI
Efforts to distribute resources equally
Key Concept-Connection in the UOI
Distribution of natural and human-made resources
More About What Are We Learning in this UOI
Math
Here are the concepts we'll be working on in Math!
- We will continue to work on addition and subtraction, all with a focus on place value
- We will work with numbers up to sums of 100
- We will work on adding ones to ones and tens to tens, with some regrouping; this is foundational work for working with larger numbers and sums in 2nd grade and beyond.
- Students will largely work on creating their own conclusions, given a small prompt. For example, when given a Math story, students decide what operation is needed to solve the problem, how to express that in "Math terms" (expressions/equations), how to express the problem and solution in words/sentences, and how to present or "flip" the problem around to express it with an opposite operation.
- Students will work on using various strategies to solve problems and working through the process, including using number bonds and drawing "quick tens"
Daily 5-English Language Arts
We continue to use the Daily 5 model to guide our Reading/Language Arts instruction. During Daily 5, students receive a burst of whole group instruction followed by working independently on a meaningful task while I conference with individual students and small groups. During this time, students are working on reading fluency, reading comprehension, reading skills and strategies, vocabulary, sight words, writing, and spelling.
Vocabulary Words
We will continue to work on the following words, as well as review all past vocabulary words through activities and small group work:
delighted, mischief, splendid, stun, grateful, romp, sprinkle, groan, selfish, stormy, attach, dainty, jealous, silent, complete, damage, misty, create, edge, roam, anxious, limp, creak, plead, drowsy, polite, exchange, trust, footprint, whimper
Sight Words
Students have excelled with their sight words! I will test students this week on their final set of sight words and they will practice new and previous words.
Phonics/Spelling
We will continue to review "vowel team" combinations, as well as work with consonant diagraphs found in different parts of a word (beginning, middle, or end). We will continue to work on the "stretch the sound" strategy when reading and spelling, as well using a combination of various vowel and consonant teams in our spelling (e.g. "shirt" has "sh" sound as well as "ir" sound).
Here are the focus patterns and spelling words we will focus on for the next two weeks:
"ch" consonant digraph:
chart, chin, child, chips, chop, each, such, lunch, chest, catch, cheep, cheek, cheer, march, bunch
"sh" consonant digraph:
shoe, shirt, shed, shrink, shop, shape, sheet, shell, shirt, shark, shade
"ay" team (continued)
clay, day, play, hay, pray, jay, stay, lay, tray, pay, relay, ray, today, say, away
"y" as a vowel sound (continued)
any, baby, battery, belly, berry, body, bony, brainy, buggy, carry, cherry, chilly, city, cloudy, copy, daisy, dizzy, dolly, early, easy, every, ferry, hairy, icy, jelly, lady, party, penny, potty, pretty, salty, shiny, sorry, sticky, tidy, tiny, ugly, very, windy, worry, daddy
Writing
We are very excited that our individual books are in the process of publishing! Through the writing we've completed, we've worked on our sentence structure, adding details to writing, using capitalization/punctuation, and adding a concluding sentence to our writing. Students are now writing in groups of sentences, in preparation for more topic-focused paragraph writing in 2nd grade, in sha Allah.
For the remainder of the year, students will work on responding to a question/prompt through writing with independence in forming ideas and revising/editing and developing them further.
Comprehension
We will continue to work on applying the following strategies while reading:
- making connections within one text (e.g. cause/effect, compare/contrast two characters, etc.)
In addition, we will work on other CAFE strategies to improve our accuracy, comprehension, and vocabulary. These are:
- distinguishing between proper nouns and common nouns in writing and reading
- distinguishing between adjectives and verbs in writing and reading
- infer & support with evidence from the text
- using word parts to determine meaning (e.g. prefixes and suffixes)
- determining author's purpose
Contact Information
- Ms. Aboubakr - haboubakr@tarbiyahacademy.org (Hmrm)
Email: info@tarbiyahacademy.org
Website: http://www.tarbiyahacademy.com
Location: 6785 Business Parkway, Elkridge, MD, United States
Phone: 844-827-2492
Facebook: facebook.com/tarbiyahacademy