Little Bit of This and That...

Well, I have been too busy to post so here is a little of this and a little of that of what we have been doing in our classroom. :)

First of all we had 100th day on February 1st. We had fun activities with the Kindergarten in the gym. We did things like counting to 100 by 1's, 5's, and 10's. We also grouped the kids into tens and had them dribble the ball, jump rope, and walk in circles by 10's. We then had them jog in place, do jumping jacks, and remain silent for 100 seconds. We ended the activities by having the kids get into the 100 formation. It isn't perfect but hey they are in Kindergarten and 1st grade! LOL

We also created a gumball machine with 100 gumballs inside. Each student cut out 5 gumballs and we placed them into the machine 5 at a time to count by 5's.

This is the machine my son helped me draw. LOL  He even came up with the saying to put inside. Thanks Chase!

Here is our finished product!

We also wrote predictions for groundhog's day. The students had to choose if Phil would see his shadow or if he would not see his shadow.  On Thursday, we made our groundhog craft to hang with our predictions. They turned out pretty cute. :)

Finally, last Thursday the 9th, we had our first official Family Reading Night. We had a theme of "Wild About Reading". We had a jungle theme with monkeys, lions, tigers, bears, and giraffes. We fed the families hot dogs and chips and then the kids went to four 15 min. stations. They could hear the story "Where the Wild Things Are" and the librarian dressed up as Max. We also had a making a book mark station and a room with sight word bingo. Also, we had a room where the kids would listen to the story and draw what they were visualizing. Overall, it wasn't a huge turn out but it was fun!

Well, we will see how this week goes with Valentine's Day on Tuesday and then I have a double birthday party on Friday!!  : P











Snow Much Fun in First Grade!!!

We had our P.B.I.S. grade-level celebration on Friday. Since we had been talking and writing about snow all week we decided to create some "snowy" stations for the kids to rotate through. We had 2 stations in my room and 2 in my partner's room. In my room we read "snowy stories" in one station and made "snow" in the second.

We read the story One Snowy Night  and also the The Missing Mitten Mystery in one of the stations.

This was a big favorite with all the kiddos. One scoop of snow powder, 2 oz. of water, and poof....snow!! See the movie below to see it in action. :) 

You can find your own snow powder here...

Across the hall in my partners room they were having "snow" much fun too!

This is a powdered donut, a valentine candy corn, and mini chocolate chips stuck on with white icing. :)

The other station (that I forgot to get pictures of) was face painting. The students could choose a snowman or a snowflake to be painted on their cheek. :)

We really did have a good time! We have our 100th day of school this Wednesday, February 1st, so look for more photos and hopefully videos of the fun we had.





Awesome weekend and a Versatile Blogger Award!!

What an amazing weekend! It started with Friday when my entire class reached the top of my clip chart to Outstanding!!  We had a short 3 day week last week coming back from winter break. Instead of starting a new story we learned about Penguins. So on Friday, we had our honor's assembly and then watched Happy Feet. We also made a Blubber Glove and got to feel how it helps to protect the penguins from the cold.



Photo source: http://www.mrsjumpsclass.com/



We finished the afternoon off with a penguin art project from the Party with the Penguins unit I bought made by Chrisite at First-Grade-Fever.  They were easy for the kids to cut out and put together and they are absolutely adorable! 

Anyway, the kids were fantastic and it started my weekend off just the right way! After school we headed out of town to "Grandma's cabin" at Kishauwau on the Vermilion.  It was beautiful! My family of 4, my aunt and uncle, and my 3 cousins and their spouses spent Friday night to Sunday morning spending time visiting, playing games and having lots of fun and good food together. Hated to see it come to an end. :(  We are already planning our next trip!

When I came back I found that I had been awarded the Versatile Blogger Award by Traci at Dragonflies at First! :)

Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them. 

Thanks Traci for the award! I checked out her site and it is awesome...so be sure to stop by and become a follower!



2. Tell 7 things about yourself.

* I was a receptionist at a doctor's office when I decided to go back to college to get my teaching degree. I continued working full time until I was ready for my student teaching.

* I am a technology addict! LOL My new phone is an iPhone 4S and I also got an iPad 2 for Christmas. I also cannot live without my laptop....well maybe I need it a little less now with my iPad. :)

*I have been married for 8 years to the man of my dreams! I was planning our wedding at the same time that I was going to college, working full time and raising 2 kids. I couldn't have done it without him and I love how supportive he was through it all.

* I love to watch my children in their extra curricular activities...this is the start of a busy show choir season for my son and daughter. We also spend a lot of time at baseball and soccer games for my son and swim meets for my daughter.

* After teaching for 2 years, I decided to go back and get my master's in reading and literacy. My husband really wanted me to go for administration, but my heart isn't in that at ALL! So, I chose to get it in something I could actually use. :)

* My husband and my kids both think I spend too much money on my classroom. I love to make it homey because sometimes I feel like I spend more time there than I do at home!

* I like to be involved in everything...I can't stand to have decisions being made about things and feel like I don't have a voice in the matter. Because of this, I am on WAY TOO MANY committees. But, at least I know what is going on and can speak up if I don't agree with something. :)

3. Pass this on to 15 newly discovered blogs  and let them know they received the award. These are a few new ones that I have recently started following! I had trouble finding brand new sites because it is past my bedtime, but I will post more as I find them.  :)



  

  

Happy New Year!!

Wow! I can't believe it has been so long since my last post! Between my two kids and my MULTIPLE committees I'm on at school, I have just not taken the time to keep up with my blog. Sorry!!  I am hoping to get back into the swing of things with 2012. :) 

I have a few New Year's resolutions...as I'm sure we all do... first of all, I plan to get my butt to the Y at least 4 times a week even if it seems like there is no way to squeeze it in. I also, plan to get serious about my diet, and actually stick to it this time! lol. To help with this feat, we are going to quit eating out so much, even though it is way easier when you are running late all the time. I also plan to get back to my blogging and work on creating some more items for the classroom. I have been extremely lazy over winter break and I have loved every minute of it! :) 

I hope you all have a wonderful New Years Day and enjoy your last little bit of break!  See ya soon! :)

Busy Busy Sunday

Well, I have been busy doing a million things today like laundry, lesson plans, entering grades, creating a couple of anchor charts, and a new math station to help my kiddos practice missing parts of numbers! So much for a relaxing day! :)

First of all, each month we have different comprehension strategies that each grade is expected to focus on at the same time. We started with visualize and making connections in September. In October, we focused on schema and making predictions. For November, we have three new strategies to teach. They are QAR, making inferences, and synthesizing. These strategies are a little hard for first graders, but they want us to at least start using the vocabulary so the kids will be familiar with it when they get to the upper grades. Here are two anchor charts I made to post in the room so we can start talking about them.

This is my QAR anchor chart. We are mainly going to focus on talking about what each kind of question is and being able to identify types of questions and where we can find the answers. Sorry for the crappy quality...I can't find my camera so I had to use my phone. :P

This is my synthesizing poster. I plan to make a chart of us changing our thinking as we read a story, but this is the one that will stay on the wall for the rest of the year as we continue to use the strategy. Wow...this pic looks really bad...I so need a better camera on my phone!

In EnVision, we have started talking about missing parts to numbers 6-9 and I really want my kiddos to practice this skill so they will understand subtraction better and also be able to understand that addition and subtraction are inverse operations. So, I created this one that isn't seasonal so I can use it as long as we need to until everyone understands the concept.  You can check it out and get your own copy at my TPT store.

Missing Parts Down on the Farm

Well, now it is time to make dinner, finish the laundry, and read the first two chapters of the Number Sense Routines book that I begin a book circle on tomorrow. Have any of you read this book? 

Have an awesome week!!

New Math Station Items

We adopted EnVision math as our new math series for K-2 this year. We had originally been using Saxon Math but it didn't seem to help prepare our kiddos for Harcourt math in 3rd grade. We are hoping to adopt the series for K-5 but we are waiting for all the common core to be aligned in the textbooks before we make the final decision.

Anyway, next week we will begin our next topic which is Understanding Subtraction. EnVision comes with its own centers but when I use math stations everyday, it is easier to have a lot of activities that practice the same type of concept but in different ways. So, I created two new games today.

The first game is "Talking Turkey Subtraction". This works the same way the lessons are introduced with missing parts of a whole. It gives the student the whole number and the part they know and asks them to figure out what is missing. So, my activity does the same. They will use a ten-frame and two-color counters to solve the problem with a partner and then record their answer on a worksheet.
You can check it out by clicking below. :)

Talking Turkey Subtraction

As we progress through the topic it introduces simple subtraction sentences. So, "Apple of My Eye" Subtraction is designed to practice this concept. The students can still use a ten-frame and counters if needed to find which apple matches the problem.

Apple of My Eye Subtraction

 Hope this helps some of you!  Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Pumpkin Week!

I am so mad at myself right now! We had an awesome pumpkin week and I didn't take one picture! I will take a few on Monday of our craft and pumpkins but it would have been so much better with the kiddos! Well, live and learn...note to self....dont.forget.camera!

We read fiction and non-fiction pumpkin stories and we wrote about the life of a pumpkin about how pumpkins grow for our writing this week. For our nonfiction story we read From Seed to Pumpkin by Wendy Pfeffer.

I'm sure there are tons of great non-fiction books for pumpkins but this was the one I had handy from my classroom library and it worked fine. :)

One of the stories we read was a favorite fiction story of mine...The Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis.

I brought in some different sizes and shapes of pumpkins and my mom even brought in a white one. :)  On Thursday, we did some estimating with my big pumpkin. We estimated how fat we thought it was by cutting how much string they thought they would need to fit around it and also estimating how many seeds they thought were inside it. Of course, I then scooped out the seeds and guts for the kids to see and feel.

Today we compared the kiddos estimates to the actual number of seeds taken from the pumpkin. We also voted on what type of face to carve into our pumpkin. They chose scary...big surprise! Lol. While I was carving the pumpkin they were working on their pumpkin crafts. Nothing too exciting...small paper plate colored orange, green or brown stem glued to the top, and 5 pumpkin seeds from our pumpkin glued to the middle.

We then lit our jack o'lanterns and read my all time favorite story....Pssst! It's Me the Bogeyman! If you haven't read this story you must go out and get it! It is just the right amount of scary mixed with funny and it is awesome!

We always have our PBIS monthly celebration on the last Friday of the month and with Halloween falling on Monday we had our parties today also. So, my partner and I came up with "Spooky Spots" for our kiddos. Between the two of us we have 40 kids so we split them into 4 groups of 10 kids and had 4 stations or spooky spots for them to visit. One was face painting where they could get a pumpkin or ghost on their face. We also had a coloring station with Halloween pages. We also made spider treats using a Ritz cracker, spray cheese, pretzel sticks for legs and 2 raisins for eyes.  And finally, we had a spooky story spot with two fun Halloween stories.

      





                    

We finished the day with our Halloween treats....cupcakes, rice krispie treats and of course too much candy to go home with them! I don't why some parents forget to send all the supplies on the school supply list, but they send enough Halloween candy to feed the whole school! Well, anyway it was a fun week! Now, if I can just survive the actual holiday and the day after! Lol.

Have an awesome weekend!