Promise to Kate

One of my favorite traditions at Chets Creek is our "Seasons of Giving" project.  Each class is encouraged to support a cause that teaches the children about giving and service during the holiday season.  Classes choose deserving projects such as supporting Beth Young (a former Chets teacher that is now serving a full time mission in Africa) or collecting blankets for the homeless or  collecting coloring books for Wolfson Children's Hospital.   There is also a toy drive to help 165 families in our Chets Creek family!  There are so many opportunities.  

Our class chose to support "Promise to Kate" which is a foundation started by teacher Elizabeth Conte and her husband to find a cure for myotonic muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that their precious daughter Kate (on the left) was born with.  We are thrilled that other classes and friends have joined us in teaching our children about supporting Kate by making items for a silent auction.  Make sure to stop by our lobby and make a bid on one of the delightful items!  Below is just a sample!

The beautiful pots below were made and donated by our talented Art Teacher, Jen Snead.  

 

 Many of the classes made holiday items that included ornaments made by the children or that included each child's fingerprint.  Aren't they delightful?

Several of the classes collected items for baskets such as the "Chocolate Delicious" below.

Or how about this cake plate with recipe cards?

And look at this delightful basket of monogrammed hand towels made and donated by a Grandma of two of our Chets students!

The Advent calendar below was made and donated by Vickie Holtsman, who has adopted "Promise to Kate" as her platform as "Miss River City Outstanding Teen 2012."

One of my favorite items is ornaments made by a class that can be exchanged for a donation!  I have already picked out my ornaments and plan to make a donation to honor each of my grandchildren!

This is just a sampling of the beautiful items that are available - loving made and given by children who care about Kate!  Give yourself a present this holiday season and stop by our Lobby.  Just stroll through the posters and projects - it'll make you feel good to know that our children are making a difference - and make sure to bid on one of our "Promise to Kate" items!

Pow Wow 2013

One of my favorite Chets Creek traditions is Pow Wow because it reminds me of how far we've come.  We've moved from the days of a generic Native American celebration to studying tribes, their part of the country, their foods, clothes and traditions.  Pow Wow is a kindergarten performance with 5th grade woven into the day by their participation and the projects that they do, so that it is a circle activity bringing our children back to the beginning, full circle.

As first graders we are invited to watch the Pow Wow, remembering our days in the spotlight the year before.  When you're in the midst of it, you don't realize the pageantry, the beautiful colors as 200 kindergartners parade into the grounds and form tribal circles in their colorful native costumes.  I love the details, and the parents with their cameras and pride clicking away.  After the ceremony the kindergartners participate in centers for the rest of the day finishing up late in the afternoon.  One of the marvels of the day is a full sized tee pee that will seat an entire kindergarten class and the dynamic "Peaceful Waters" - our own Media Specialist, Miss KK.  KK enthralls everyone that enters the tee pee with her stories.  Of course, they are overwhelmed with just the idea of sitting inside this huge outside tent.  Then as she passes the "talking stick" and asks each child and adult tell the group what they are thankful for,  I am moved to tears every single time.  As the children leave, the Leadership Team and a few other adults lay down on the floor of the tee pee and just take a few minutes to enjoy the peace and quiet before the tee pee comes down at the end of the day.

I am always moved by this ritual.  I have worked in a dozen schools in three different states and I know that it's not like this at other places.  Not only have we designed the most fantastic learning experience for our children, we spend a few minutes reflecting and just enjoying the fruits of our labor.  I feel truly blessed to work in this very special place!

Kevin Henkes Characters and Charts

 We have read all of Kevin Henkes' "mouse"  books.  We used the books to study his characters.  First, with Wemberly, we worked with a partner to think of a single word that described worried Wemberly.  Then for Wendell and Sheila Rae and Louise we worked with partners and came up with a word to describe each character and then wrote our evidence - where in the text the character had demonstrated that quality.

 

 After several days of describing characters, we decided to see if we could come up with the word that Kevin Henkes used to describe each character.  The Kevin Henkes word is in red on the right.  The words that we came up with are in green.

 

Finally we decided which character was our favorite.  On one side of an index card we drew a picture of our favorite character and on the other side we wrote the reason that the character was our favorite.  As you can see Owen was our favorite, but Lilly came in a close second!

 

We also learned about Kevin Henkes' life so we could figure out how his life had affected his writing.  Students shared the most interesting thing they had learned about Henkes from their homework.

 All of this background helped us talk across the books - our favorite book, favorite character, which book we thought was Kevin Henkes' most important to first graders...  To have a book talk, we had to learn about Accountable Talk - how to wait for the silence to speak, how to make sure that everyone got a turn, how to disagree politely, how to listen and build on what others said.  We made the chart below of phrases to help us continue the conversation.

Fall Celebration Ideas

We start our fall celebration each year with a Literacy Parade.  Some children use their Halloween costumes and just find a book to match and others actually design a costume around a favorite book. As they arrive so full of excitement, we ooooh and ahhhh over the selections before we parade around the downstairs.

 We spend the rest of the day celebrating with fun activities that have a wee bit of academics.

We love "cooking" this year with our "Recipe for Success" theme so our first activity was making a ghost cookie.  The idea actually came from one of our mothers, that has her own cookie blog, that sent the teachers a few ghost cookies as a treat.  We simplified the cookie and the children loved this easy ghost - a Nutter Butter cookie covered with white icing and then two small chocolate chips for eyes and a larger one for the mouth.

When we did our Math Diagnostic earlier this year, we noticed that the students were really struggling with interpreting graphs so we took this opportunity to add some work with graphs. We looked for individually wrapped themed candies.  This year we found colored skulls and bones.  After each child graphed his candies and colored in his graph, we showcased different graphs, asking questions such as. How many more green bones than black skulls?  Which candies have equal amounts.  Make an equation using the red bones and green skulls.  Love that Math practice!

Also from our Math work, we put 10 candy corns and 10 candy pumpkins in a Ziploc for each child and then asked the children to make combinations of ten.  This is a play on our Math Investigations "peas and carrots" activity.  The children used these fun manipulatives to make the combinations and then shared their work in a typical math closing activity.

It seems like one of the things that often gets cut in our curriculum is art.  So... today we did our own version of pumpkin making.  Each pumpkin had its own personality!

After lunch we cut the traditional jack-o-lantern.  I am always amazed at the number of children who say they have never cut a jack-o-lantern. Every single child had a chance to stick a hand inside the pumpkin and pull out some "gunk".  Then we reviewed geometric shapes as we made a group decision on the shapes of the eyes, nose and mouth.  We lit the jack-o-lantern with a flashlight to shine tonight as the children came back to trick-or-treat during our annual school wide Fall Festival.  We saved the seeds to count and cook another day.

This year we also cut the top off one of the smaller pumpkins, cleaned it out, and replanted a few of the seeds inside the pumpkin.  The idea is to let the seeds sprout in the window and then replant the pumpkin (shell, soil and sprout) in a larger pot before the shell rots!  Will let you know how it goes.

A Little Gardening

It was out to the garden today to plant radishes. I feel so fortunate to have this opportunity with our students. Each row is marked off  for interested first grade classes and the seeds are supplied. This is a massive effort for a school with over 1200 students! 

After our visit to the the garden the children came back to the room and wrote about their garden predictions.

Thank you Dr. Zenk and the entire Science Council for making this opportunity available!

Compare/contrast

I think one of the most difficult things for a young first grader to do is to compare and contrast when they read - books, characters, themes, whatever.  So to begin teaching that skill, after we have talked deeply about characters, we have our students begin by comparing a character to themselves.  Who do they know better in the world than themselves?!

Although the new Common Core talks about changing directions and having children do less thinking about connections to their own lives and more thinking about the evidence that is actually stated or inferred in the story, very young children still need to think about what they know about stories before they begin and as they read. They do need to access their prior knowledge so that they can take that knowledge and put it with what the text says to form new opinions and interpretations.   They still need to think about times when the same thing happened to them so that they can understand the setting, the problem, the solution - so they can understand why a character does what she does.  That's not to say that our thinking and conversation don't need to be ratcheted up a level and that we then don't need to look for the direct evidence in the book to back up any claims we make.  We can't just talk off the text anymore.  The Common Core demands a much higher and deeper comprehension than we have expected from our youngest readers.

At least this is how my own thinking is going right now... as I grapple with these new expectations.  Below are some of the Venn diagrams that our students did as they were beginning to understand this very complex skill of comparing and contrasting.



Blend Project

After doing the Words Their Way assessment, we discovered that most of our students needed additional work on blends so we wrote a two week home project to assure that our students got some extra home practice working with blends.  Families were to look for four pictures for each of 16 blends.  They could use magazines or could google clip art.  To my surprise, all but one student completed the project (we did complete three of the projects at the MARC - our off-campus tutoring center - with second language students) and they were quite well done.  Some of the parents did complain about the work but when we gave the blends assessment, every single student scored 80% correct or above!  Rarely do we do a home project that is such an academic success.  We would certainly do this again!