Well, I survived Open House and have enjoyed 4 glorious days of spring break. It is crazy to me that we're half way through March and only 10 weeks away from this school year being over. Being incredibly busy sure does make the time fly!
Back to open house; the only way I know how to describe open house preparation is to say that it is utterly and completely exhausting. As I've previously mentioned, my school uses our ocean unit as the main attraction for open house. Over the past few weeks, we've been to the library to research the five oceans, participated in an ocean video conference with another school, chose an ocean animal to research using nonfiction books, had marine biologists bring in preserved marine animals and fossils, integrated technology by recording researched facts on the iPad, and learned facts about many different ocean animals. It has been fun to participate in so many different activities and see the kiddos light up and enjoy learning. The exhausting part comes when trying to decide what to display. Teachers (at least most that I know) feel a certain amount of pressure to display an elaborate and impressive open house display. Wonderful, creative, magnificent work that the kids have created and parents will love. However, you're not allowed to devote too much of your time to the creation of these masterpieces. Principals want the parents to be awed and the kids to be proud but they don't want to see any of this cutesy coloring nonsense going on during instruction time. (Disclaimer: MY principal has not said this or made any official rule changes. Just expressing how I feel.) All this to say that we had to take all of our ocean projects (that were already pretty low on the cutesy scale) and scale down the cutesy even more and up the educational factor. I know, not the end of the world. It is amazing to see how excited the kids still get about being allowed to color though. & don't even mention markers. You will get some squealing out of my kids if you use the magic word "marker!" While it was exhausting for me and a bit stressful (can you see asleep before 9pm?), it was great for my kids.
Sick of my rambling?
Here are some pictures of our finished product. The first is the inside of our room just after open house, with jellyfish facts and octopus facts hanging from the ceiling. Sitting on each table is/was a folder holding the rest of each child's ocean projects, their math journal, science journal, and problem solving journal. They also had coral at their seats that they were able to create when the marine biologists visited.
This second picture is the outside of our room. (My room is called the fishbowl because of it's crazy placement and very fishbowl-like feel so I made it a literal fishbowl. Perhaps ocean-bowl is more appropriate, though.) Hanging in the windows are more octopus and jellyfish facts, as well as shark facts, fish facts, whale facts, and two of the student's "first grade treasures." Hanging around the windows are my little oceanographers. The stories under their oceanographer detail why they would want to be an oceanographer, what they would bring on an ocean expedition, and what they would bring back from an ocean exploration. The inside of our windows look the same but I somehow forgot to get a picture of that before leaving for spring break.
Taking away the cutesy and adding in writing to every project, is what was so exhausting. No matter how many times I re-explained it, said it, pleaded, begged, and screamed - editing is really hard for first graders. (Ok, I don't really scream. I just have a very stern teacher voice and patience ran out about two weeks before open house.) I didn't want to put up absolutely perfect work because I wanted the work to be an accurate reflection of each kiddo. However, I absolutely refused to put up work that was full of misspelled word wall words, completely void of punctuation, and littered with lower case i's. I feel that at the very least, first graders that are 10 weeks away from leaving me should be capitalizing the word "I," attempting to put punctuation at the end of thoughts, and using the biggest resource in our room to check their sight word spelling. Needless to say, there were many conferences had during this process. Many rough drafts and rewritten drafts. Ab. So. Lutely. Exhausting.
I feel like I've complained a lot so let me be clear - I am thrilled with how everything turned out. Every single student showed up with a parent and it was so wonderful to see the kids take ownership of their classroom and show their parents around. The parents loved it too. I received several kind comments that night and emails since expressing gratitude and appreciation. Here is an action shot during open house:
Impressive, right?
What you see on the screen was really the "big hit" that night. Each student drew a picture of the animal that they chose to research when our nonfiction library books were being rotated through first grade. Then, they took the information they collected and wrote a small paragraph about their animal. I then took a picture of their animal using an app called face talk on the iPad and recorded the kids reading their paragraph. When finished, the mouth on the animal moved while the student talked. It was so cool!
Well, I feel like I've rambled enough and even on spring break, 11pm is still past my bedtime. Hope everyone has enjoyed the time off, if you're lucky enough to get it! We are having our wedding food tasting tomorrow! So excited!!!
But first, here are the rest of the pictures I took of our open house projects.
