In true Chapel Hill fashion, Glenwood celebrated the closing of our Read-a-Thon with a unique basketball game: students versus superheroes! You may have seen these superheroes around school or at Lincoln Center...can you figure out their real identities?
The top readers from each class played in the basketball game against the superheroes. Our technology specialist, Ms. Starkey, put together the fun video below, and you can also check out the slideshow below for shots of our very own Bruno playing in the game, as well as some candid shots of our other first graders cheering for Bruno!
Read-a-Thon Basketball Game 2013, produced by Ms. Starkey
Many famous book characters came to Glenwood today! Fancy Nancy from "Fancy Nancy, Bonjour Butterfly" and The Number Devil substitute taught the class for Mrs. Jiang and Ms Gondek. Even Ms. Tsai had a famous substitute - Totoro from "My Neighbor, Totoro"! Among our students we had:
Hermione
The Runaway Bunny
The Cat in the Hat
Jack from Magic Tree House
Curious George
Silly Kitty from Kiki's Delivery Service
Elfie from Elf on the Shelf
The Wicked Witch, Dorothy, and Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz (and Toto too!)
Cole ZX (Ninjago)
Flat Stanley
Greg Hefny (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)
Oggie Cooder
Legolas (Lord of the Rings)
Cinderella
Jasmine
Ladybug Girl
Emily Elizabeth (Clifford)
Bad Kitty
The Interrupting Chicken (we had twins!) and their dad
We had a great day of reading and sharing our favorite books. First Graders also LOVED seeing the other "substitutes" around the school, and the famous book characters in all grades! Check out the Glenwood facebook page for some great candid shots of many of Glenwood's famous book characters!
Tomorrow is Glenwood's Read-a-Thon Book Character day!
Students may come to school dressed as their favorite book character. These are just some of the great ideas our students came up with. I wonder what famous characters will come to school tomorrow?
Kindergarten and First Grade students celebrated the 100th day of school in February. Students worked in pairs as they rotated through reading, writing, and math centers focused on numbers to 100. Students practiced reading, writing, and counting to 100 in both English and Chinese. Watch the slideshow to see some of the activities students enjoyed on the 100th day!
Our first graders sure know a lot about Chinese New Year! We wanted our students to be able to synthesize what they've learned, and even more, we hoped that they could gain confidence as student leaders...so we turned them into the teachers!
Students worked with Mrs. Jiang and Mrs. Jackson, our media specialist, to create Chinese New Year presentations using VoiceThread, a digital presentation tool. This project helped our students study a wide range of Common Core and North Carolina Essential Standards. Students practiced the following skills (and more!):
Research: finding facts, synthesizing facts with background knowledge
Informative writing: introducing a topic, stating several facts about a topic, providing closure on a topic
Public speaking,
Using technology as a communication tool
Digital citizenship
To get started, students worked with Mrs. Jackson, our media specialist, to research Chinese New Year and add to their already impressive knowledge. After learning many new and interesting facts, students formed presentation teams. Each team selected their own topics and drew a storyboard to map out their presentation. Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Jiang helped students think about the topics on which they could become experts.
Then we got down to writing! Students had to think hard about what makes an interesting introduction and a strong conclusion. After Mrs. Jiang modeled these two parts of writing, students brainstormed different ways they could introduce and conclude their own topics. They worked with students who had chosen the same topics to write these portions of their presentation, and also to share facts and support each other in the writing process. Mrs. Gondek and Mrs. Jackson were instrumental in helping students organize their thoughts and turn them into truly excellent first grade writing.
Finally it was time to get into the actual "making" of our presentations! Mr. Brown, our technology specialist, helped Mrs. Jiang and Mrs. Jackson learn to use VoiceThread and got the iPads set up so we could use them to make our presentations. Students uploaded their pictures to VoiceThread, rearranged their pictures to match their storyboards, and worked together to record their presentations. Students edited the name and descriptions of their VoiceThreads and shared them with the teachers.
Now its time to celebrate! We will be sharing our first graders' presentations with the Dual Language kindergartners and possibly other kindergarten and first grade classes so they can learn about Chinese New Year too. And there was one group of people the first graders ESPECIALLY hoped could learn about Chinese New Year from them: their parents!
So, without further ado, here are our first four presentations! Stay tuned for the next two!
Chinese New Year by The Firecracker Girls
This VoiceThread has comments from the kindergartners in the beginning slide. We hope you enjoy hearing what the kindergartners learned from the first graders' excellent presentation!
First graders learned that objects move because of forces like a push or pull. Their challenge: Using only these materials, get an object to move. The trick: the object has to stay in motion for
at least two seconds without a person touching it! How can an object move without a person using a force like a push or pull?
