read across america

Room 1 Update: Reading & Measurements

By: Angela Luca Fischer, Teacher

This month we had many exiting events. We started the month celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday by reading each day a different story, by having fun with his silly rhymes, by acting out his characters (e.g. we pretended to be The Cat in the Hat, or Sam, or Thing One, or Thing Two), by acting out the stories we read, by making our own original famous hats, or by cooking green eggs and ham in the classroom. We started each day reminding our students Dr. Seuss’s famous quotation:” Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!Dr. Seuss.

  Then the annual reading motivation and awareness program Read Across America Day was very successful as we had a lot of guests who came into our classroom and brought reading excitement to our students. The community people who participated were: the parents, police officers, bus drivers, teachers from other classes, and our school employees.

   This month we started to explore measurement. We started this topic by using blocks to build towers that are smaller than their body, larger than their body, and the same size as their body. They also built two towers of the same size. Then, we used the measuring tape to find out how tall high they were. Then, we measured each child’s height that was recorded in a graph and then we compared who was the tallest child in the class, the medium height one, and who was the shortest in the class. Then we explored the volume concept and we used different sizes containers to compare which container holds more water. We also estimated how many cups of water it would take us to fill up a 1 gallon container, then we counted the actual cups and compared them our initial estimation. We talked about weight and using a balance scale, we compare which objects are light and which ones are heavy. In continuation to the weight concept we measured how many pounds we our students had and we compared the results making up a graph from the lightest to the heaviest in the classroom. Then, using the nonstandard measurement, we counted how many steps long was the tunnel, we measured how many unit blocks long were our block construction, how many steps it took us to get from the block center to the door, etc. We are looking forward to explore more measurement concepts next month like: distance, temperature, money, time.