Weather Unit and other Misc. Things!

Now that I have a long weekend I can catch up on blogging about the fun things that have been happening in first grade!!  We started a weather unit and the kids are LOVING it.  Hurricane Isaac just passed, so they can relate to what we are talking about and it is fun to see how excited they get about learning.  I got the idea from "Fun in First Grade" to make a chart of weather words and then have them make their own little charts of words.  I had them list everything they knew about weather first (see pic below) as whole group and then instead of choosing 10 like "Fun in First Grade" did, I had them choose 6.  It was great to see how many weather words they could come up with.... I especially liked "drizzling."  Check out Fun In First Grade's blog post about it here: Fun In First Weather

Next we talked about wind.  We discussed "good wind" vs "bad wind."  For example, we talked about hurricanes and tornadoes being bad wind.  Then, we talked about good wind being wind for flying kites and cooling you off on a hot day.  I had the children take a large piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.  They drew one picture of good wind and one picture of bad wind.  I rolled the paper to make the top of a windsock and then let them glue strips of paper to hang off the bottom to complete their windsock.  They loved making the windsocks and talked about all the places they could hang them when they got home.  I didn't get a picture of them, but they were so cute!  Next year I'll make a point to take a picture!

Now we are on to clouds.  We watched a youtube video on the three types of clouds: YouTube Cloud Video.  We also visited this website to get another look at the three types of clouds: First Grade Learns Clouds.  One at a time, we used cotton balls to create the types of clouds in our "clouds" books.  On Monday we'll finish them by making the stratus clouds.

Some other random fun stuff that we have been doing in First Grade is cutting our spelling words out of kid-friendly magazines.  I thought of this one afternoon on a whim as a time-filler and the kids LOVED it.  I planned for it a second time and it was just as successful.  I am going to wait a little while before we do it again, so as not to overuse the idea, but it's a good one to keep in my back pocket! :-)

In Language Arts we introduced the topic of nouns, so I sent the kids on a hunt for nouns in the classroom with partners.  It was interesting to see which nouns they picked.  Almost all of them listed our classroom fish, Hunter!

Ooh and the last thing I wanted to share was my "Don't Monkey Around" behavior chart.  I talked with my mentor teacher and she said she thought my kiddos needed something more concrete to look at DURING the day to help manage their behavior.  At the end of the day I give stars out to the students that have good behavior and once they get 5 stars they pick from my treasure chest.  My "Don't Monkey Around" chart starts everyone out on the monkey.  If they have to flip a card for behavior, it goes to yellow and then red.  If they get to red a note goes home and they do not get their star for the day.