St. Patrick's Day in 1st

Today is my last day of Spring Break! It went too fast! I was able to get some curriculum mapping done, though, so that was important!  My animals and I spent lots of time together too! They will be sad to go back in their crates next week.... which is only a 4 day week for me might I add!  We get Good Friday and Easter Monday off so it'll be a nice way to ease back into working again.
Anyway, without further ado.... here is how first grade celebrated good ole St. Patrick!
We read many different St. Patrick's Day stories and the children learned about the pot of gold myth sitting at the end of the rainbow.  So, we made our own pots of gold (with glitter of course!) and I explained the phrase, "worth more than gold."  The kids did a great job choosing someone who is worth more than gold to them and wrote about why they were special.  I LOVED this activity!  The kids did a great job and were so excited to take it home to share with their special person.  I got the template for this activity from The Teacher Wife.

We read the book That's What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting.  The children learned that leprechauns are supposed to be mischievous little guys.  I told them to imagine themselves as a leprechaun and create a wanted poster for yourself.  They named their leprechaun by using O' and then their first or last name.  They thought it was fun to think of themselves as leprechauns. I liked their "last seen" comments! The template for the wanted poster can be found here.

The last craftivity that we did for St. Patrick's Day was making leprechaun masks.  I found an old project that was a hand-me-down that had the children make a large leprechaun using brass brads to connect arms and legs, etc.  I took just the head part and had the children attach it to a Popsicle stick instead.  Below you'll see my little leprechauns posing for a picture.

And then I can't forget sock monkey getting in on the fun!

Alright, goodbye St. Patrick!  Time to make way for the Easter Bunny!

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!! :-)