Igloo (924 milk jugs!)

    924 milk jugs
    3 1/2 months
    25 students
    countless helpers
 + $30 worth of hot glue
 -------------------------
    1 Awesome Igloo

My first grade class has built an igloo out of recycled milk jugs.  To our complete surprise, we collected nearly 1,000 milk jugs!  At the end of September we learned about the harm of too much waste.  Plastic takes 100's of years to break down.  We decided to do something to make a change.

Over the past 3 1/2 months we have practiced our counting skills, recording how many milk jugs we've collected on a given day.  We refined our sorting skills, organizing and counting milk jugs by color of lid, type of milk and so on.  We learned how to read "short-hand" dates.  We experienced what expired milk looks like.  We used our reasoning skills to decide how and where to bulid the igloo.  We expanded our estimating skills, making educated guesses about how many milk jugs were in a set group.

Thanks to all who helped us collect milk jugs and glue.  Huge "THANKS" goes out to Carol Brennan for spending countless hours each weekend gluing milk jugs (So sorry about the loss of your fingerprint to the glue gun.)!

Next step: Students are working on a presentation about recycling and our igloo.  Check out http://www.gogreenfirstgrade.weebly.com/ for updates in February.

New goal!

I have finished my Masters.  Now I need a new professional goal to work on.  Many ideas are floating around: second Masters in Leadership (not my cup of tea), National Board Certification (sounds like more schooling and I'm burned out), or...  wait for it...  yes, I am this nuts...  might need to take an extended leave to start think straight... write a book. 

Now don't get me all wrong here.  I don't think I have any great wisdom to pass along to others as I know I have so much to learn yet and soak up all I can.  I don't think I am an amazing writer as I am surrounded by so many talented authors that just amaze me.  I simply want to write. 

So now I must find something to write about that others would actually want to read.  My amazing colleague, Cary Roller, and I have been working on a year-long, project-based, community-in-action project (for a lack of a better word): IT ONLY TAKES ONE.  We have started bouncing around the idea of writing about our experiences together with this project...something that would be both informative and reflective:
 

A Year of Project Based Learning in 1^st Grade

(Let’s roll some snowballs)

Any thoughts (Other than, "The title is no good.")????

ActivExpression

When I was in first grade, I was awe-struck by the overhead projector.  What a machine!  It could display words typed on a clear page and you could use special colored markers to write on the screen and it would show up in black on the screen. 

As I look around my room I see no overhead projector.  In its place, sits an Elmo and on the wall, a Promethean board.  To usher students from one lesson to the next I open my desk drawer and pull out an iPod.  When students want to read along to stories on CD they turn on one of the netbooks.  To blog with other students across the school, my students scoot up to my desk computer and log on-line. 

What amazing advancements in technology in such a short span of time!  I never would have imagined the possibilities when I was 6, sitting in first grade, in awe of the overhead projector.

In December our school received 2 sets of ActivExpressions.  These hand-held voting devices work with the ActivInspire software and the Promethean board to allow students another method to communicate with the teacher and with each other.  I can formatively and summatively assess students knowledge and understandings of concepts with a few quick key strokes on the computer.  Results are visible to the teacher (in several graphs and charts) while students have anonymity amongst their peers.

This coming week we plan to use our ActivExpressions to record data for a class survey and graph as well as check students understanding of nouns and to solve math problems with anonymity.  As the teacher, I will be able to see who answered each problem correctly and who may need more work with each concept.  Students will have the comfort of answering questions without fear of other students judgement.