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.

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.

Classroom Library & Misc. Pre-planning!

My daily thoughts lately have been, "so much to do, so little time!"  I feel like the school year has crept up on me very quickly!  In just 5 days my parents and students will be coming into the classroom for open house and then in exactly one week from tomorrow we will have our FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!  EEK! How exciting, but nerve-racking as well!

So, what have I done since last time that I can share with you?  I've finally finished my classroom library!  This has been the most drawn out project in the room, but I am completely satisfied!  Greg came to the classroom with me on Sunday evening and we labeled each bin of books with a color and capital letter.  We cut matching color construction paper bookmarks with the same capital letter as their corresponding bin.  This will enable students to put their books back in the correct bin and it will also allow me to control exactly which books they are reading at what time.  For example, I can say, "please choose a book to read from bin Q"  and I know that the books in bin Q are math books.  See my pictures below!

Another thing that I have worked on to prepare for the kids is to label their coat hooks and prepare my name sticks.  Using name sticks allows me to quickly and easily pick students in a fair way for groups or to call on them for answering questions. 

I would love to share more, but there's so much to do and so little time!  Blog more soon!  Happy Planning!

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!