This week when we wrote our circle stories we went through all 5 steps of the writing process. {prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing} This is a very lengthy process for first graders but all of their hard work and patience really paid off.
Here’s a peek at our final copies that are on display in the hallway. Check out their clever titles!!!
Before Spring Break we were learning about circle stories. This week we are continuing our study. We read If You Give A Pig A Pancake by Laura Joffe Numeroff in our reading book and a few of her other popular circle stories. One of our favorites was If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. Many of us were already familiar with this story but we had lots of fun sequencing the events and making our very own mouse art project.
We have also read these other funny circle stories by Laura Numeroff.
Now that we know so much about circle stories and how they are written we are working on one of our own. Today we began by writing a circle story as a class called If You Give A Bunny A Carrot. Then during guided reading we began planning our own circle story on a graphic organizer. Tomorrow we will write our rough draft and by the end of the week we will our final copies ready to display in the hallway. This is always a fun writing project and from what I have seen we are going to have some very good stories this year.
To learn more about what a circle story is click on this link to view some examples. They are really cute!!!
Today we had the luckiest day ever. First we made shamrock crowns instead of our usual morning jobs.
Then during math we did a lucky lesson. Our class is taking part in an online St. Patrick’s Day project. The purpose of the project is to work on math skills by trying to prove that there are more green clover shaped marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms than any other shape.
{http://www.jenuinetech.com/Projects/st2010/sp2010_home.htm}.
We began by dividing our box of Lucky Charms cereal into 23 bowls. Then we sorted the marshmallows by shape and recorded how many of each kind we had.
Next we graphed how many of each shape we had. 
Then we used the data on our graph to make a tally mark chart.
Finally we combined all of our data and made a class tally mark chart to see if we had more clovers than any other shape. Unfortunately we ended up with a few more pots of gold. We had 511 total marshmallow shapes in our box of Lucky Charms.
All of the 1st grade classes in our hallway took part in this activity so we made a large tally mark chart in the hallway for us to record our class results.
Here were the final results. The shamrock shape won by 3. We all submitted our data to the website and should be able to check when we get back from spring break to see what shape was the overall winner in classrooms nation wide.
After we lunch we read a story about a dog named Tucker who had a very lucky day. 
Then we wrote stories about our own lucky day.
We ended the day by getting to go to an assembly where we got to see and learn some interesting facts about a few animals from Tanganiyka Wildlife Park. 
