Rainbows and Adjectives!

This week we learned about rainbows in first grade.  We talked about how rainbows form and looked at pictures of them on the computer.  Next, I taught the kids the colors of the rainbow.  To help us remember the colors, we created Mr. Roy G Biv to help us out! Thanks to Made for First Grade for the printable name tags!

The second rainbow activity I saw online somewhere in the past.  Maybe it was on Pinterest?  I started by reading the book EyeLike Colors to the children.  This book goes into many many different colors, including translucent and iridescent. To keep our activity focused, I chose to read only the colors pertaining to our rainbow.  After I read the book, I had the children color the red arch on their rainbow and write "Red reminds me of _________."  Then we went on to Orange and the rest of the colors.  It took us a three day span to finish this project and it was SO worth it!  I love what the children came up with.  One of my students said, "Red reminds me of my mom's world famous red cookies.  Orange reminds me of my mom's world famous orange brownies.  Green reminds me of my mom's world famous salad!"  Hehehe... I bet her mom will be so proud when she reads it!

On to a different topic, this week my kiddos also were introduced to adjectives in our Language Arts program.  One of my problems with the Language Arts program we use, is that they introduce a concept for about 2 seconds and then they might not talk about it again for months.  I think it is confusing to briefly introduce students to many small topics, but don't follow through to allow them practice with the concept.  SO as with nouns, I created some writing activities with adjectives and then for the "test" I had the students make "Awesome Adjectives that Describe Me."  I saw this on First Grade Lyons Den and loved the idea.  I noticed after my students did their "test"  that I mis-spelled adjectives :-(  (I'll have to send an apology home to my classroom parents before I send that project home! OOPS)

Possessive nouns next week!  Happy Teaching!

Precipitation and the Water Cycle

The beginning of this week we finished our cloud books.  They turned out great.  I discovered that I only have one set of watercolor paints in my classroom, though.  So, I had one student go around and dab on some grey/black water color paint to everyone's stratus clouds.  Note to self:  look for watercolor paints on sale so everyone can have their own next time!!

We talked about 4 types of precipitation this week:  rain, snow, sleet, and hail.  I used the chart that "Fun In First Grade" posted on her blog.  We brainstormed some words as a class to fill in the blank to describe each type of weather.  Words we came up with were wet, cold, round, etc. Then, I had the children choose one word to fill in the blank and draw a picture of the type of precipitation.  Since we live in FL, sleet was fun to explain!! See picture below:

We made a classroom thunderstorm together, which I was so excited to share with the kids!  I remember doing it when I was little and I've done it with camp kids in the past.  Everyone always loves it.  It goes like this: 

It all begins on a windy day. (Have students rub hands together slowly.)
The wind begins to blow hard. (Rub hands together quickly.)
Suddenly, big rain drops begin to drop from the sky. (Snap fingers slowly, then quicken the pace.)
Can you hear the rain drops coming faster and harder? (Clap hands for downpour!)
Oh no! It’s pouring! And what’s that I hear? Thunder! (Stomp your feet once and yell boom!
Continue to clap for rain.)
After thunder, you know lightning will be coming next. (Flick classroom lights.)
(Repeat the thunder and lightning pattern a few times. When ready, make the storm pass.)
Just like any storm, I think this storm is going away. (Begin snapping fingers quickly.)
It seems like there are just a few drops left. (Snap fingers slowly.)
There’s the quiet wind again. (Rub palms together.)
And, look, the sun comes out. It’s a nice quiet day again. (Turn lights back on.)

After learning the types of precipitation, we talked about what happens to the puddles that form during the rain.  The kids gave me all kinds of thoughts of where the rain goes, but one child actually came up with the word EVAPORATION.  I have to say I was impressed to hear that come out of a first grader, but it was a great lead in to the water cycle!  We colored and labeled the water cycle and I taught them a song to help them remember the big, long water cycle words.

Water Cycle Song 

(sung to Oh My Darling tune)

Evaporation (bring hands from ground to above head)

Condensation (hands for a cloud above head)

Precipitation (bring hands down to look like rain falling)

on my mind (point to head)

Oh it's called the water cycle (make a circle in the air)

and it happens all the time (point to wrist)

And that is where we are at this point.  I am so excited, I have just got a field trip lined up to go along with the end of our weather unit.  The local University nearby has a meteorology dept and the head of the Undergrad program said he'd take us on a tour and do some experiments with the kids!! I'll have to give them some background knowledge on air pressure before we go so his experiments make sense to them, but I think it is going to be great.  He is going to do a helium weather balloon launch off the roof with them.  Now to get my chaperones and bus lined up!! On to rainbows and snow next week to finish up learning about weather!

Happy Teaching!! :-)

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!

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!