Mrs. Strout's Class: First Grade Friends

"Quack, Quack," came out of the blue on Monday afternoon. The room and kids were being so quiet working independently (yes, I said independently) at their desks and I was getting ready for the next activity. One of my students spoke up and said, "Where's the duck?" I chuckled to myself at how easily they believed a duck was in the room. Then it sounded again, "quack, quack." I told them that there wasn't a duck in the classroom and their response was, "Didn't you hear the quack, quack????" I explained to them that I had heard it and yes, it sounded like a duck but that doesn't mean there is a duck in the classroom. Soon after, the quacking stopped and we still had no idea where the "duck" was.

Later on, I checked my email. I then realized my friend, who teaches in the next town over, had tried to reach us through facetime on one of our iPads. That was our duck sound!! The iPad was ringing! They were working on a St. Patrick's Day word problem book that I had given them, and they wanted to share what they were learning with us. How fun!! We were able to call her back and her students showed us the word problem booklets that they were working on. They read us the word problem and then showed us how they figured out the answer. The best part was when one of her students said they had to figure out how much Lucky and Lily would each get so they marked an X on Lucky's and put a dot in the middle of Lily's and some of my students collectively went "Ohhhhhhh." They now had a new strategy for figuring out word problems. It made me remember, students learn from each other at a much faster pace then from an adult. Here are some pictures from our new first grade friends working on word problems.

They put their word problems up on the Smartboard, while others used dry erase boards to work on.

Our class was working on fact families.

Each one of my kiddos picked three numbers that made a math sentence. They glued the three numbers at the top and then wrote four math sentences using the same three numbers. This project was a review of fact families from earlier in the year. I was glad to see how well they all remembered what they were taught!