High Frequency Word Wall

As promised, I am sharing my completed word wall!  I'm quite happy with it. Greg and I created the words for it last night and I hung them up backwards.  I can flip them over when each word is introduced. If you'd like to get the high frequency words I used for the word wall, you can get them from my Teachers Pay Teachers store here. They go with the SRA Imagine It language arts program, but includes words on most sight word lists.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

I love Dr. Seuss.  My first graders and I had a great week celebrating him. I chose a different book to be our focus each day.
Monday we celebrated "The Cat in the Hat."  The kids colored themselves as the cat and wrote about what they would do if the cat came to their house.  I love the responses! A mom also brought in marshmallow pops for a special snack.  She put the giant marshmallow on a stick and used red melting chocolate to draw stripes to make it look like the cat's hat.  They were so cute!

On Tuesday we read "The Butter Battle Book."  After reading the book the students created a drawing of what their banner to promote butter-side-up bread would look like.  We then made our own butter.  If you put heavy whipping cream in a mason jar and shake it for about 8-10 minutes, butter will form!  Next time we will add salt too! The kids tried their butter on homemade bread (thanks to the same mom for baking us bread!)

butter side up banner

shaking up the butter

tasting the bread & butter

On Wednesday we celebrated "Bartholomew and the Oobleck."  We read the story and then first and third graders made oobleck together outside.  It was a mess!  I may pass on this activity in the future!

 

Thursday we celebrated two stories.  We celebrated Green Eggs & Ham and we celebrated One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  I didn't get pictures on Thursday, but after we read Green Eggs & Ham the students had to write their own rhymes.  "I would eat it in a _____________.  I could eat it in a __________.  I would eat it with a _______________________.  I could eat it with a ___________."  I gave them white paper plates in which they drew green eggs and ham and then attached the writing to the paper plate.  Our special snack from the fabulous parent that helped us again was blue jello with red Swedish fish inside to tie in to One Fish, Two Fish.

Lastly, on Friday was Lorax day!  The kids listened to the story and then watched the cartoon version of The Lorax.  They made lorax crafts and wrote what they would do if they were the lorax.  I found a color by number math sheet that ended up being the lorax.  It was a little too difficult for my kiddos, but for the ones that persevered, it came out cute.  Oh! And I made them Truffula Tree seeds to send home with them.  I used Easter jelly beans to serve as the seeds!

teacher example

student work

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Penguin Mini Unit

Good Morning! It is 50 degrees this morning in FL! Which is a little bit warmer than it has been the past couple of days! So, it was very appropriate that we did a week-long study on penguins in 1st grade this week!
The Language Arts program I teach has science and social studies themes tied in to each unit, so normally I just follow what is given and expand upon that.  This past unit was based on maps and globes.  It was exciting at first! We did Google Earth and found our school, a couple of the students' houses, and even my parent's house up in NH!  We learned all the vocabulary.  We did a "Me on the Map" book that allowed the students to map their country, state, city/town, street, house, and room.  It was really fun for 2 weeks, but this past week was supposed to be a 3rd week on maps and globes.  I just needed to change it up.  I felt we had exhausted the theme.  So, instead I tied our mapping and globes into PENGUINS!  I used the globe for the starting point: penguins live in the southern hemisphere.  Emporer penguins live in Antarctica!
I'm so glad I chose to move in that direction! It was a hit with the kids and I even learned things from reading to the children.  I also found that many other first grade classrooms are learning about penguins too! There were a lot of resources I chose from to bring to my own classroom.  One of my favorites was watching the San Diego Sea World webcam that is in the penguin habitat!  We heard the penguins making all kinds of noises and there was one that would not leave from in front of the camera.  We decided that he was not camera-shy!
One of the facts we learned from reading non-fiction books about penguins, is that an Emporer Penguin can grow up to 48 inches tall!  I saw another teacher actually made an Emporer Penguin from paper and measured her students next to it.  We really need to do more measuring in my classroom, so I did it too! I took their picture and made a recording sheet for each student to fill in. Check out the pictures below!

Another activity that I did with the first graders was a guided drawing.  We have done them in the past.  I don't tell them what we are drawing to start.  I make a line on my drawing and they copy it.  Towards the end they always figure out what we are drawing and get so excited.  Then, they are allowed to color and personalize their picture a little bit.  These are a couple penguins from that activity. Even though they were both copying my directions, they look completely different!

We did other penguin work throughout the week and then culminated with a little multiple-choice assessment I created and we ate PENGUIN PIE!  I got the idea from What the Teacher Wants.  I bought blue bunny ice cream bars for the students and told them they were Penguin Pie.  They loved estimating how many bites it would take to eat their pie.  They thought of some creative things to fill in the similes on the worksheet.  It was a great theme for a chilly week!

 

Oh, and of course we read the Tacky books!! I love Tacky! He is a funny penguin for sure!

New Year's Resolutions and Froot Loops

This week at school we turned over our "goo" card in Language Arts.  The "goo" card has all the different spellings of the sound "oo".  So, this week we focused specifically on the double o spelling of "oo".  I found a cute way to practice oo words over at the "First Grade Wow" blog.  She created a printable where kids use Froot Loops to make oo words.  My kids thought it was so fun and then, of course, they enjoyed having a small Froot Loop snack after we finished our work.  To get her free printable you can click here!

One of my kiddos doing their work

Also, since this was our first week back since the new year, we talked about New Year's Resolutions. I ordered the book, "Squirrel's New Year's Resolution" from Barnes & Noble, but there must have been a high demand because it didn't show up in time.  I improvised and found this reading of the book on YouTube: Lisa reading Squirrel's New Year's Resolution.  After we talked about resolutions, I had the first graders set a goal for 2013.  Most of them chose to be nicer to others.  Two of them actually chose exercise! I had them record their resolutions on the recording sheet below.  I also printed out the numbers 2013 in big font.  I let them use markers, colored pencils, crayons, and JEWELS to decorate the numbers.  They cut out the 2013 and glued it to a large piece of construction paper with their resolutions.  I didn't get to take a picture, but it would look something like this from the Fun-In-First blog in 2012.  The resolutions paper I used is found here!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Christmas is right around the corner! We officially have 1 full day and 3 half days left of school.  I love Christmas and had so many great ideas to do with the kids back in September.  Now that the holidays are upon us, it seems there is so much I would LIKE to do, but simply do not have the time.  Yesterday we made our ornaments for the kids to give to their parents.  Today we decorated gingerbread men compliments of several grandparents that came to visit.  Tomorrow is my special day with the students.  It is our Polar Express Pajama Party!

I started the trend of decorating the classroom with monkeys from day one.  It has taken a turn and has become more of a sock monkey themed room.  I actually found some really fun sock monkey bulletin board decorations that I plan to put up over the holiday break.  Since we have started on this trend, I knew I wanted to make sock monkeys for Christmas.  I ended up tracing a monkey from the bulletin board set I found and using that as the template for our sock monkey ornaments.  We used sparkly pom poms for the sock monkey's hat and buttons from the eyes.  I also glued each students' picture to the belly of their sock monkey ornament.  They turned out really cute!  I included the template below.

Pictures from our gingerbread making are below.  The kids were able to decorate two big gingerbread men and one small gingerbread man.  The grandparents that came in to lead the activity used food coloring to color icing and then provided the children with paint brushes to paint on the icing.  Isn't that a great idea? I never thought of doing it that way!

This past week we learned about the sound of "ow" saying long o.  This was very fitting with winter and Christmas coming so soon.  I guided the students in a step by step snowman drawing project.  We used white crayon on blue paper.  After, we brainstormed sentences to go along with our snowmen drawings. See examples below.  They came out really cute!

Well, I don't have any pictures of the Polar Express stuff we'll be doing tomorrow yet, but we will read the story then do a sequencing activity.  In the afternoon we will watch the movie.  I will pass out hot cocoa and cookies.  Lastly, I will give my students the first gift of Christmas!! I found bells and red sparkly gift tags.  I put them in a mini stocking with a mini candy cane.  I hope they have as much fun as I'm going to!

Veteran's Day

Friday in our classroom we celebrated Veteran's Day.  This is a super important holiday for my classroom because one of my student's dad is on his way home from Afghanistan and another student's dad is a veteran.  Of course everyone else has grandparents etc. that are important to celebrate too.  But, since it is so close to home for some of the kids, I really wanted to make it special for them.

I asked parents to send their child in with a name and/or picture of a veteran they would like to honor.  We made Veteran's Day stars with the names/pictures of these men and women and hung them up on the wall.  The students also got to stand up and tell us a little bit about their special person.  It was really neat to hear all about them.  I even had one boy bring in a picture of his great grandmother.  She was in WWII.  I'm guessing she was probably a nurse.  The picture of her was so pretty.  I just love how women always had their hair all done up pretty back then.

Anyway, I had seen somewhere in the past, a bulletin board that had a turkey with the kids' handprints as feathers that said, "We are Thankful for our Veterans."  I thought this would be perfect for our classroom, so I did the turkey and then hung our Veteran's Day stars up.  I'm excited to keep it up for a week until Thanksgiving!

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I am going to take on the task of a Thanksgiving Day Reader's Theater!  I just love Reader's Theater!! I've never done it with students as young as mine, though, so we shall see how it goes! 

Election Day in First Grade!!

I have been bad about posting all the neat things that have been going on first grade!  Tuesday was Election Day and I knew I wanted to teach about the election process, but I also knew I didn't want to get too political.  For one, I am not a political person and for two, I had overheard the children arguing previously about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama (yes, they are only 6 and 7!).  I came across the book, "Duck For President."  I liked how the book talked about the process (ex. ballots, campaign, recount, etc) while still remaining fun and age appropriate.  After scouring the internet, I stumbled upon a great unit put together by Angela Rubin on TPT.  She had cute election activities to go along with "Duck for President" as well as literacy ideas.  The link to her packet is here: Duck For President.

We also used Time For Kids to read some non-fiction election facts.  Teaching and learning about the election was fun, but I am glad my students aren't old enough to vote!!  We all agreed in class discussion that Farmer Brown would be a better president because he was hard working and took care of his farm.  Once we voted on Duck or Farmer Brown being president, though, Duck won by a landslide just because "he is cool!"  Hahaha... Oh, well!  See pictures below of election fun in First Grade!! :-)

Campaign Poster for Duck

Campaign Poster for Farmer Brown

Voting Booths set up

Happy Teaching!!  On to Veteran's Day activities tomorrow!! :-)

Weather Field Trip & Responsibility!

Since I blogged last we have finished up our weather unit and we took our weather field trip, which was AMAZING!  We went to visit the meteorology dept at a local university.  They split the children into two groups and gave us a tour.  We went on the roof of the building and saw old and new weather equipment as well as some experiments students were currently working on.  The children liked being on the roof because they could see into the football stadium from the building we were standing on so that was pretty neat.  The second part of our tour took us into the National Weather Service office located at the university.  We saw the computers they use for forecasting and then we were able to see the actual weather balloon they were going to launch that evening.  It was pretty amazing to me to see that the balloon was located on the third floor, but the helium is piped up from the basement.  There is a door in the ceiling that opens up and the balloon is launched out the roof.  It takes two hours for the balloon to get enough altitude to pop (which is pretty much outer space when that happens).  When the balloon pops, they then have to go track down the "package" attached to the bottom that gives them all their data.  The last part of our tour was probably the children's favorite part.  We went into the weathercasting studio and they stood in front of the green screen pretending they were meteorologists.  We finished up the field trip with some demonstrations of air pressure.  Overall, I think the professor that set all this up for us is pretty amazing.  He as well as the other professors that helped with the tour, did this out of the goodness of their heart!  I can't wait to go back again next year!

weather balloon

green screen!

Our language arts unit that we just started is focused on responsibility.  I created a fun bulletin board using crayons as the theme to display responsibility.  The focus is being responsible to myself, at school, to my friends, my family, and the environment.  As a homework assignment last week, I had the kids bring in a news/magazine article about someone being responsible.  We decided who they were being responsible to and hung the picture from their story on the bulletin board under the appropriate category.  A while back, I had some grandparents ask if they could come in and do a sock monkey activity in the classroom, since they knew my theme was monkey.  I was also given a sock monkey book to read to the kids along with a sock monkey stuffed animal.  The book is called Sock Monkey goes to Hollywood: A star is bathed.  It fit with our responsibility unit by teaching the children that keeping themselves clean is part of being responsible to yourself.  So, we read that story and then the grandparents came in and led the class in an activity of making sock monkeys on paper.  It was really fun to see their creativity and I'm excited to hang them up!

close up of the board

whole bulletin board

working on their sock monkeys

trying to figure out how to make that paper into a shirt

 Well, fall carnival is next week and our booth is going to be an alphabet duck pond! Stay tuned for pics!

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.

The first week of school!

Well school started on Wednesday and I have been terrible at keeping up with blogging about my classroom, but I am going to try to be better about writing more often.  The first day of school was SUPER crazy.  The kids kept asking me what time lunch was, what we were going to do next, and "do we HAVE to do this?"  While teaching is very exciting and fun to me, the first day was a bit overwhelming and made me think, "is this what I have to look forward to EVERY day?!"  But, of course, day two and day three were steps in the direction I was hoping we would go.
One thing that I did not expect from my little first graders was that they FLY through work.  I thought I had over-planned, but we did each and every thing I planned and at a couple times I wished I had more planned.  I filled in the blanks with little games and things that ended up being successful.
Looking back over my first week of school, the best accomplishment I had was to provide magazines to the students and have them cut out their spelling words.  They LOVED the activity and were focused the entire time.  It was kind of an on the fly decision to do the activity because I didn't have magazines myself, but the teacher next door offered up some to me, and I'm glad she did!  Sometimes the least thought out projects end up working the best!
So as I prepare for my second week of school, I also am planning my sub folder.   I came across a wonderful website called education.com.  It is free to sign up and they have lots of worksheets you can download and print for free.  I found a bunch to put in my sub folder and also some I can use this upcoming week.  We will be learning basic addition and I found a monkey and banana addition worksheet which is just perfect to fit my classroom theme.
I hope everyone else is having a good end to their summer and a great beginning to the new school year! Happy Teaching!

My bulletin boards!

Progress has been made in the classroom on finishing up my bulletin boards.  I have also been working on more documents to provide to the parents at the start of the school year, but I'll blog about those in the next post.  Here are some of my bulletin boards and my ideas for how they will work in my room.

This will be used for our high frequency words.  We will add words to this board as the year goes on.

This board is a reminder of the numbers for the students.  I will add math vocab words as the year progresses as well.

This will be an extension of our calendar exercise.  Students will learn place value while counting the days in school.

This bulletin board will display the students' work.  The monkeys swinging on the vine say words like "great job" etc.

One week left until open house for the parents and students to come see the room! It's time to get everything wrapped up soon!

My Past Week

This time last week I was setting out on my first day at the 2012 Summer Institute for Technology Integration (SITI).  Four other fellow teachers and I drove down to Dunedin, FL to learn SMARTboard techniques as well as how to teach our students to use Higher Order Thinking skills.  We learned so much at the institute; especially my group, since we had little to no knowledge about the SMARTboard.  Throughout the week we created a 15 page lesson using many different strategies.
One of the greatest things I discovered was SMART exchange.  This is an online sharing forum for teachers to share the lessons they created.  This will be great to supplement my lessons without me having to re-create the wheel.  For example, somebody created a balloon pop game that is used for attendance.  I will bring it up on my SMARTboard each morning and the students can come in and "pop" their balloon so I know they are present.  I'll share more neat lessons as I discover them!
Once I returned home, I did go out and work in the classroom a little bit.  See the pictures below of a couple bulletin boards I am working on.

Monkey Calendar Bulletin Board

Our Daily Schedule

Welcome to the classroom!

The start of a great thing

Maybe a little over a month ago I was offered a position to teach at a private school as a first grade teacher. All of my previous school experience has been in public school where there are classrooms pushing 30 kids, limited supplies and para-professionals to help with the difficult students.  The school I was offered a position at is the antithesis of the environment I am used to.  I am the sole teacher, helper, and aide of the room.  I will have less than 20 kids and I can teach with my very own, personal SMARTboard installed beautifully at the front of the classroom.  So, needless to say I accepted the position and I am so excited to finally have the key to my very own classroom!  I think I literally jumped up and down when I got it!  In the weeks that have gone by since that moment I have felt the whole spectrum of emotions, including feeling like I'm never going to be prepared enough to teach the fragile little kids coming to the "big" school for the first time! 

While I have been fruitlessly planning in my spare time for this wonderful classroom of mine I have visited many other teachers' blogs to get inspiration and ideas.  I found so many great things that I decided to start a blog of my own.  I am going to share my thoughts, ideas, experiences, and failures on here for other teachers to learn and grow from as well.  I hope that my blog is able to help somebody the way that others have helped me.  And, if nothing else, I think it'll help me reflect on my own experiences as I journal my way through my first year as a Bobcat (our mascot)!

This is what the room looked like when I first went to visit it:

Stay tuned for the transformation that will soon be taking place!  I am thinking grouped desks, work areas for centers, and a "Swinging in to First Grade" monkey theme!