Remembrance Day Craft
I try to do something new each year with my class. This year we made finger print poppy wreaths. I found the idea on DLTK's crafts for kids. You can find the step by step instructions here. I printed out my own first grade version on chart paper for the students to follow along.
Tomorrow we are going to use the computers to type out the word PEACE to place in the middle of our wreaths. This is a great starting point for my students to begin using Microsoft Word. They are shown some of the text features (e.g. how to pick a font, change the size, change or add colour, make it bold, etc.) using only one word, so the time can be spent on the features and not the actual typing.
Remembrance Day Text/Writing Activity
I also like to introduce a new book each year. This year I have chosen "The Peace Book" by Todd Parr. He is also going to be the focus of our new author study. The students watched the video of Todd Parr reading the story today and tomorrow we will be brainstorming ideas for our very own Peace Book written and illustrated by our first grade class.
I am going to re-read each page out of the book to the class tomorrow. We are then going to take Todd Parr's idea and make it our own. Focusing on text to self/text to world connections, we will tie the idea from the text to something from their lives or from what we have been learning or discussing in the classroom. For example, one of the pages in the book reads "Peace is keeping the water blue for all the fish," and the students came up with "Peace is keeping the waters clean from garbage and toxic pollution." This was all on their own; I just read a page and asked them how we could make this page our own. Another really good example of this is when the students came up with changing Todd Parr's page "Peace is saying sorry when you hurt someone" to "Peace is forgiving a friend for making a mistake." This relates to our religion program, in which we are currently talking about forgiveness. For the illustrations I am going to keep with the colour techniques Parr has chosen. We will be cutting and pasting our full coloured pictures on vibrant background with no white showing. I am very excited to see what they come up with. Just our brief talk about it today was very impressive. Each child in the class will have a positive experience at being an author and illustrator.
Have a great week.
Christine
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