WBT: Mirror Variations

Happy Weekend! We only have one weekend left before school starts. Oh sweet summer, why must you end so soon? Some how we both managed to get today off from work at our second job so we have a little time to blog! Since "BACK TO SCHOOL" time is just around the corner we have "Whole Brain Teaching" on our minds. We started using the WBT methods two years ago and folks... we are never going back! 

One of our favorite parts of WBT is the Mirror strategy:

Teacher: Class!

Students: YES!

Teacher: Mirror (teacher puts hands up in front) 

Students: Mirror (students follow teacher gesture)

Once everyone is in position teacher will use hand motions and words (you can teach mirror with just hands or words if you'd like). 

After students have "mirrored" your gestures they are ready to teach each other.

Teacher: TEACH!

Students: OK!!!

*Give students about 1-2 minutes to "teach" concept using gestures and words learned while mirroring YOU! 

Watch this video below to see "mirror" in action: 

This strategy is using the motor cortex: 

Below you will find some variations to using MIRROR gestures in your classroom!

We're looking forward to spicing up our whole brain teaching approach this year! 

First Grade Buccaneers

AHOY Matey's! As you have probably already guessed, it's pirate week in our classrooms!! This is one of our favorite weeks of the year! We have been stalking up on pirate gear all year! Every time we see something on sale we grab it! We have pirate hats, eye patches, pirate tattoos, pirate stickers, pirate treasure maps, compasses, and pirate pAARRRty supplies! It's going to be such a fun week!

Today was a teacher work day we had a chance to get everything ready for a fun filled week of PHONICS!!!

A bunch of fabulous bloggers like Babbling Abby, Erica Bohrer, Michelle Oaks and The Teacher Wife (Lindsey) have already shared some fabulous ideas! Why recreate the wheel? We bought Abby's fabulous Pirate Pack last year and plan on using it again this year to focus our entire week around
pirates!!! Last year it proved to be one phonics pattern our kiddos NEVER forgot!

Tomorrow we are going to start our literacy block by introducing our new phonics pattern (r-controlled vowels /ar/) by reading "How I became a Pirate"

We have a bunch of other great read alouds for the week, too! After we introduce the spelling pattern we are going to do some fun online pirate activities to become more "pirate educated"! We are going to practice talking like pirates and mainly focus on "ARRRRR" which means a few things in "pirate" but we are going to focus on the "yes" and "I agree" version. We will also learn a few other pirate terms such as "AYE AYE" which means "I'll get right on that" and "AVAST" which means "check it out." And of course "Ahoy" for hello and "Matey" for friend/buddy! All of this information was found on Talk LIke A Pirate. It's also fun to use the Pirate Translator.

We are going to incorporate a little WHOLE BRAIN TEACHING/LEARNING by doing a little partner "mirror" and "teach" with the sounds of /ar/ in our best pirate voices! We will also bring in some Kagan learning by doing some rally robin with /ar/ words that sound like a pirate and words that sound like "air".         

  Examples:Yard/Garden/Tar and Care/Fare/Stare. We will use a T-Chart to record our new learning. 

We are going to give our students a few minutes to makeup their own pirate friend "matey".

To download Click Here

It will give them a chance to be creative! We plan to keep you updated on all of our fun activities this week! Stay tuned for more matey's! We hope ye would like to join us in teaching these lads some new things! Yo Ho Ho!

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Science Fair

The dreaded, REQUIRED, annual Science Fair project is due on Thursday. Our first graders LOVE LOVE LOVE Science, and we think it's pretty awesome too! However, something about the word required makes it not-so-fun for teachers. In k-2 at our school the class does a project together. This year we asked the question, "Which liquid stains teeth the most?" We are using hard boiled eggs (the shell is made of calcium, very similar to our tooth enamel) and a few of our favorite sugary drinks to find our results.

Before we went too far into what our project was all about, we decided to tackle the SCIENTIFIC METHOD with our firsties. We created an anchor chart together to explain the steps scientists use.

We suggest incorporating a lot of WHOLE BRAIN teaching when explaining these steps to your students. Fancy words like HYPOTHESIS can be very tricky for first graders to say, let alone understand. Trust us, the more whole brain learning... the better. 

Today we wrote out our question: "Which liquid stains teeth the most?"

Next we wrote down our Hypothesis. Most students think coffee will stain teeth the most. Even our student's were saying, "Oh no! Ms. Peterson and Ms. Prussing are in trouble. They love coffee"

We put one egg into each of the four liquids (coffee, grape juice, sweet tea and Root Beer). The eggs are going to soak in the liquids for the next few days. Tomorrow we plan on making observations and recording our data from day 1 and day 2. 

More Science Fair fun to come!

Chain of Events

Happy (almost) New Year Everyone! We hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating the holidays with your friends and families. We go back to school on Wednesday, so we are back in school mode a little bit already. We wanted to share with you something we with our students just before Winter Break started. We did an author study on Laura Numeroff. She is one of our favorite authors and our students love love love her books. First we used her books to teach "cause and effect" which later led to a lesson on "chain of events." Below you can find the anchor chart we used to introduce a CHAIN OF EVENTS. 

After reading If You Take A Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff we created our own chain of events by writing the events that took place in the story on strips  of paper (pre-made of course) and connecting the completed strips to create a "chain of events" with our groups. Our teams (we sit in groups of 4... totally Kagan) worked together to create the chains and then shared what they had made with the class. All of our firsties had a great time creating the chains all while COOPERATIVELY working together. To bring in a little WHOLE BRAIN teaching into this lesson we taught a chain of events motion where students made a circle using their fingers and linked them together to show a chain. They did this motion while saying "A chain of events are events or actions linked together." We let the students tug at their "chain" and discussed how without one event, the other may not happen. Rest assured, our students are masters at recognizing a chain of events in a story! Woo! Mission Accomplished!

*One more thing*

To complete our author study we sent Laura Numeroff an email using her contact information on her website and when we received not one, but TWO emails from our new favorite author the kids were THRILLED! It was adorable! 

Whole Brain Teaching and PB&Js

We are teaching the phonics pattern LONG A with the "sneaky e". We have been practicing the flippy dolphin (flip the sound) as a reading strategy for awhile so our students are already familiar with both long and short vowel sounds. One of our sorts this week is a called "PB and J Pairs" students need to find the short and long vowel match. We found peanut butter and jelly cards at the Dollar Tree (LOVE THAT PLACE). Each long a word has a short a match. Example: Fat/Fate. Just in case you don't have time to stop by the Dollar Tree we are attaching a remake of this sort using clipart. Also, the please feel free to download the recordings page by clicking the link below.

PB & J recording sheet

Peanut Butter

Jelly

P.S- We do a WHOLE lot of WHOLE BRAIN teaching. This requires a WHOLE lot of movement and cooperative learning. If you aren't using WBT we suggest you stop reading this blog immediately and look it up. It will change your life! We would never go back. Our students love it has made a world of difference in our classrooms!!! To teach the "flip the sound" strategy we simply use our hand. We face our hand upwards and say its short vowel sound then flip it over to say the long vowel sound. It works with words too!

Whole Brain Teaching

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