Five for Friday (Sat edition again)

Man, my Fridays have been busy days...no time to do my usual Five for Friday post!

1. Our Germinators have been doing wonders! The radish seeds are growing like crazy! Something new happens every day which makes for a very exciting beginning of the day for the students when they come into the classroom. 

2. We did Teacher's Wife's "Who is worth more to you than gold?" writing activity. How fortunate am I to have some students think I am worth more than gold to them. This illustration really blew me away because it depicts me well!!! I have seen many different drawings of me from my students. This would have to be the best one!

3. Second trimester report cards went home this week which also means...spring parent conferences! I use SignUpGenius.com for all my classroom sign-ups (class parties, field trip drivers, conferences, volunteers, etc.). It is very easy to use. Plus, it's free! 

4. We started our geometry unit this week! The kids love it! I'm sure they enjoy having a break from addition and subtraction. Of course, we still do our daily math facts practice. :)

5. What better way to celebrate the coming of St. Patrick's Day by making Leprechaun pudding? I saw this on Fern Smith's Classroom Ideas and thought, what a great idea! The kids absolutely love it!

One more week until Spring Break! Aaah!!! Can't wait!!! :)

Encouraging Reading - Book Bingo!

How do you encourage your students to read at home? After reading Teacher Wife's post on the 100 Book Challenge (which I think is an awesome idea, by the way) I thought I would share what I do to encourage reading at home.

I want my students to love reading, which is great because they already do. But I also want my students to be exposed to and experiment a variety of books. So in comes...Book Bingo!!

It's actually not my original idea, I had the help of Super Teachers Worksheets. But I think it's pretty awesome! They have different bingo boards for different grade levels but here is what the generic one looks like:

Click on the image to get to it!

So I stick this in the kids' MONKEY folders at the beginning of the school year. I explain to the students that this is completely optional. I don't make my students do this to avoid complaints about extra work, but I do encourage them to do it. And of course, there is a rewards system for it!

The kids can only get one bookmark per book bingo card.

Basically, the students work at their own pace. When they finish one of the items on their book bingo board, they put their MONKEY folder on my desk. I check their book bingo board and give them their prize. The bookmark is pretty self explanatory. The stickers for on the students' individual sticker charts which is connected to the clip chart in my room. Lastly, the book is ordered from Scholastic using the points I get from parent orders. Once an entire board is completed, I give the kid the month's Scholastic catalogs to look through. The kid then circles three books he/she wants and gives the catalogs back to me. I choose one of the circled books to order. 

The kids love getting their free book! I'll admit only a small percentage of students in my class actually actively work on completing their book bingo cards. But the students who do partake in this, they go crazy! Last year I had a student who completed three cards within 4 months. This year I have a student who has completed around five. 

Although it doesn't get everyone going, I still love it and definitely would continue doing it. Next year, I'm thinking of also using Teacher Wife's 100 book challenge to go with this. It would be great!

What do you do to encourage reading at home? What about exposure to different genres and authors?

Five For Friday (Sat edition!)

I was out with some friends Friday night so didn't get a chance to post. So my Five for Friday will be on Sat instead! :P

1. Saw on some teacher blogs that Wednesday is Principal Appreciation Day. Google couldn't help me confirm it because it told me that Principal Day is May 1st. But I decided we should do something for our principal anyways! Why do we need a reason to appreciate someone anyways? So we created a class book appreciating our principal. I think this was the best one so I made it the last page in our book. Save the best for last, right? :)

2. We went on a field trip on Wednesday to go watch a play. The play, "Tomas and the Library Lady", was a biography of Tomas Rivera, a Chicano poet, author, and educator. The kids really enjoyed it! The play had a mixture of English and Spanish so it was an extra delight for my Spanish speakers. There were a couple of students there who were hearing impaired and had hearing implants. Not sure who arranged this, but there were two sign language translators there signing for those students. I thought that was simply wonderful! 

3. After our field trip we still had some time to spare so I had the kids do a free-write in their journals. May favorite journal entry by far. :)

4. Our Science unit on plants and animals is done. However, I saw this pretty awesome Science investigation at RAFT (Resource Area for Teaching). It's like a warehouse for teachers with a whole bunch of random things. They also create science and math kits that are already prepared and ready to use in class. This particular one is the Germinator. You can't really see it in the picture but there are radish seeds near the top portion of the paper towels. I'll have another post with more close up pictures later.

5. This is a little cheating but since I'm writing on a Saturday I guess it's okay? Tonight is our school's big school fundraiser! It's a 50 themes this time. I'm excited to see the parents go crazy with their bidding! :)

Don't forget to link up! :)

Encouraging Others :)

Can I just say how much I enjoy this unit, "Keep Trying?" Today, we finished reading "The Kite", a Frog and Toad story. Basically Frog and Toad try to fly a kite but every method Toad is trying doesn't seem to work because the kite just falls to the ground. There are some robins who are watching and keep discouraging Toad with some not so nice words and make him want to give up. But Frog continues to encourage Toad to keep trying and finally after the fourth attempt, Toad is able to get the kite up and flying. Hooray!

After reading the story, we talked about why this story was selected to be a part of our unit. Then we talked about what lesson could be learned from the story. They were all good think-pair-share opportunities. For the last partner share question, I asked the class if they would rather be the person who says mean words and tells others to give up or the person who encourages others and tells them to keep trying. After some partner discussion, I did a quick poll and thank goodness! Everyone wanted to be the encouraging person. :)

After we shared our reasons for our choice, I had the students write their reasons down to put on our concept-question board. Cute responses. :)

Ha, when this one was brought up during our class discussion I literally laughed out loud.

Aren't these children simply adorable????

8888 Pageviews and Another Linky!

So blogger tells me that this blog has had 8,888 pageviews! How cool! In the Chinese culture, 8 is a lucky number because it sounds the same as wealth in Chinese. So I guess this is a very lucky moment for me. Maybe it will help me gain more followers. :)

But I'm not just here to announce that! I was trying to catch up with all my teacher blog subscriptions and came upon this lovely linky party.

Fifth in the Middle is hosting a "linky party" on her blog! I guess you can say it's more like she's creating a database of all the blogs based on states. I think that is really cool because then I get to see what other bloggers are from the same state as me. If you want to be included or simply want to check out what other blogs on from your state, go check it out! :)

March Currently

It's a new month! So fast! That means...it's time for Farley's March Currently!

Listening - Not actually watching this so I don't really know what is going on...

Loving - It's been a stressful and busy couple of weeks so little blogging has been going on. Glad that I can at least join some linky parties!

Thinking & Wanting - Well let's see...need to check and grade student work, set up my reading groups, change my daily 5 centers, write report card comments, etc, etc. The fun work never ends!

Needing - Anyone else have hay fever like me? Well it seems the allergies have gotten worse this year. It used to just be a stuffy nose and tons of sneezing. Now it has upgraded itself to itchy, red, and swollen eyes too. Argh!! Not fun.

Like, Love, Hate - Pam's the name so what's there to say? I like to play when I have the chance. I LOVE anything potato related...fries, mashed potato, tater tots, hash browns, etc. And I am absolutely annoyed and cannot stand peekers when we are taking a test!!!! :)

Hope you enjoyed reading! Don't forget to link up! :)

Five for Friday

It's been another busy week! But then again, when is it never busy????

Best way to sum up the week is to join Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five for Friday Linky Party!! Here we go...

1. We opened our new unit, "Keep Trying" on Monday. To start off the unit, we came up with some things we could say to encourage ourselves or others to not give up and keep trying.

2. Forgot to take a picture of our Oratorical program to include here but Wednesday was our school oratorical event! All the grades took turns performing for the parents first thing in the morning. Then after school, we had our oratorical assembly and everyone got to watch each others' performances! Pretty much took up all of Wednesday (our minimum day) but it was good. 

3. We are now reading anthology books! First graders are growing up! Woohoo! Our first reading was on "The Itsy Bitsy Spider". Did you know there were way more verses than the spider climbing the water spout? The kids didn't! We talked about cause and effect in the story/poem/song and charted it. 

4. I really need to blog about my art mom and her incredible art lessons with the kids. She comes up with some great ideas and the kids just love them! This week's lesson wrapped up our focus on texture. We look at the artwork of Peter Clark, a contemporary collage artist. We also talked about how manipulating paper in different ways can created texture. Then we created our own collage dogs!

5. We had to say good-bye and empty out our terrariums today since we have to return our science kits next week. But! Thanks to the idea of my first grade colleague, we didn't simply just dump the stuff out, I actually had the kids work together to empty their terrariums out step by step. First, we used tongue depressors to turn the soil so that we could pull out the plants. Then they went on a digging excavation to look for our living organisms (worms and pill bugs). Boy, was this an exciting moment for all the kids! I gathered all the living organisms in a plastic bag so that we could pass it on to the principal for his compost bin at home.

That's all for now folks! Report cards are due next Friday! Better get started! :)