Adventures in grade one

Greetings!

As I may have previously mentioned, I teach grade one. This is my first year, I have 18 kids in my French Immersion class and I absolutely LOVE them. No matter what mood I’m in when I get to school, I’m beyond happy within ten seconds of them arriving in class. They’re so loving, enthusiastic and curious and, most of the time, so am I!

One of the most satisfying parts of teaching grade one is the epic amount of growth that happens with your students. I’m assuming all grade one teachers feel this way, but when the kids are learning a second language, it’s especially noticeable. They come to class in September with limited number understanding, phonetic awareness and oral French and leave speaking, reading and writing in both languages with a fairly good understanding of numbers to 100. It’s enough to basically blow your mind.

I will now provide you with transcripts pieced together from my experiences to prove my point:

September

Me: Bonjour les amis! Trouve ton crayon, s’il vous plait. (Wild gestures demonstrating getting out your pencil)

Student: …. (Stares)

Me: Trouve ton crayon. (Get a pencil and show it to student)

Student: I don’t speak French.

April

Me: Bonjour les amis! Qu’est-ce que vous avez faites cette fin de semaine?

Student: J’ai joué avec ma soeur dans le parc. J’ai vu un oiseau dans un nid qui chante. Grand-maman et grand-papa visiter à ma maison. C’était fantastique! Aussi, regarde!  (Hands me a fully illustrated three part story about penguins written in French over the weekend)

For a transcribed all english version of this story, click here.

Now I know that the April student’s grammar isn’t perfect, but COME ON! Look at that progress!! Teacher’s in other grades have told me that they just don’t see that kind of visible growth in their students. This pretty much means that my grade is the most awesome, as is my class and my school.

A lot of the time, the awesomeness of my teaching career makes me feel like this:

Obviously, I would change the words to say that I like things about my teaching career. As it happens, I also feel pretty excited about my sisters, hair, whole house and all the other things she listed. hehehe

I’ve wanted to show you pictures of my class before and so I will now take you on a tour of my classroom. It’s changed somewhat since these pics, but you’ll get the jist.

This is my French reading corner. It is actually even more awesome now because I have more baskets. I super love the leaf and so do the kids. They like to sit underneath it when we have silent or partner reading or even when I’m reading them something over there. It is the most coveted of all places to sit in my class, other than my chair. They also love to sit in my chair! I want to get a carpet for this corner, but I already spend so much money on my class that I have to wait for this one item. The plan is that if my contract is renewed (or upgraded to permanent status!), Dave will get me the one I want for my birthday! Woot!

I’ve moved this table around a lot this year. Recently, it was a space where kids could write adventure stories. It even has had a stint in the hallway as a space for my parent volunteers. I moved it into this space under the window at the beginning of the month so that the kids could plant seeds and tend their plants for our plant unit (I’ll post about that on another day!).

Ok, there’s a lot happening in this photo! This table is an important space in my class as it’s used for centre activities, small group work and one on one time with me. I do a lot of my reading conferences here. A memorable activity that happened at this table was the time we made little race cars. It involved painting and nailing and, eventually, racing, so you can imagine how happy the kids were! To the left of this table is the English word wall and leveled book shelf.

This is one of the spaces that drove me the most crazy this year. It took me many months indeed to figure out how to organize all the math books, math manipulatives, whiteboards, etc. I feel so good about getting this organized and have received many compliments about it.

I love this bulletin board! It is part of a project that we did on places in our community. The idea was to introduce the community to our stuffies since they don’t get out much. The students had to pick their favourite place in our community, go there with their stuffy and take a picture. We then mapped their location on our map and used the picture in a written project. After all that, they presented their project orally with their stuffy. It was a huge hit! Plus the pictures are so cute, you could just cry.

Anywho, that’s all I have for pics of my class at the moment. I plan on sharing some of my ideas and activities that I do in grade one with you all, so stay tuned!

How do you like to organize your class? Do you think that your grade level is the best? Why?

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