March Recap [PICTURE HEAVY POST]

Hi friends! I'mmmmm back! Did you miss me? :D

I also didn't make Five for Friday like I had said because date night got moved to Friday so didn't get home until late. Spent the rest of the night preparing for the job fair on Saturday (more on that in a future post) so just didn't have time for it. 

It is now Sunday and almost the end of the month. Since I haven't written a post this month I thought it would make sense to just do a recap of what's happened in my classroom this month. I will warn you though, this post is going to long and VERY picture heavy so I hope you're prepared!

Read Across America

The theme for this year's Read Across America was "Oh, the Places You Will Go". 

We also did some free reading time with Dr. Seuss books along with some sequencing practice with the cat in the hat!

Friendly Visit

My friend from Canada came for her annual visit to my classroom. She comes every year to take pictures of my students with our published book. (Check out her photography skills on her website!)

St. Patrick's Day Activities

We read The Luckiest Leprechaun: A Tail-Wagging Tale of Friendship and talked about who we thought was worth more than gold to us.

Writing & Craft from The Teacher Wife!

We also did a directed drawing of a leprechaun from First Grade Blue Skies! Last year, I used educreations on my iPad to record myself teaching this to my class so that students who had been pulled out for resource during that time could learn the lesson when they returned. A year later, I just pull the video up, play it, and sit back and relax as I watch my new class create their leprechaun drawings. I need to do this more often!! 

We also read The Night Before St. Patrick's Day, which talks about setting out leprechaun traps. So I guess we needed to make some too!

From Second Grade Sweets

The kids couldn't wait to see if they caught any leprechauns. Unfortunately, their traps couldn't outsmart the leprechauns, who left quite a mess in the classroom.

But at least they left some pots of gold beads behind for each student to find!

Contractions
One of my favorite anchor charts that I've made so far (thank you pinterest for the idea)! We also made a flip book to help us practice our contractions.

Bombaloo
Our school is participating in Project Cornerstone and the character trait for March is self-discipline. We read Sometimes I'm Bombaloo which is a great book that talks about anger and dealing with it. In the story, a girl turns into Bombaloo when she gets angry after her brother knocks her castle down. As Bombaloo, she destroys everything around her. You'll have to read the book to find out how she turns herself back into her. :)

After reading the book, we talked about what we would we do when we turn into Bombaloo and how we can turn ourselves back to our normal self.  

I actually really love how we have read the book because now kids will come up to me during to tell me that someone has turned into a Bombaloo (displaying bad sportsmanship). Sometimes I will have students in the classroom who will get upset and I remind them that they need to turn Bombaloo back into themselves. It really works!

Math
Math has been all about place value this month. We talked about two-digit numbers, how they are composed of tens and ones. We then spent a week practicing different ways to find 1 more, 1 less, 10 more, and 10 less of a two-digit number. Using a math tool to figure it out was simple enough for the kids, but doing it mentally took a lot more practice.

Freebie Activity from K. Almaraz

Freebie Worksheet from Grella Monsters

Spring Birds
A directed drawing lesson on drawing a bird using oil pastels and then watercolors for coloring everything in. I was pleasantly surprised at the results! Thanks to Deep Space Sparkle for the idea!

And that concludes the March recap! Congrats to all who made it through the whole post! I will be back for the currently in April. See you then! :)

I'm Still Here!

Hi friends!

It's been so long since my last post (was that two months ago???), but I just wanted to drop by and say that I haven't disappeared! I'm still here! :D

These last two months have been crazy hectic with just so much stuff happening at work and personally that I haven't been able to gather up the energy to be doing my regular Five for Fridays postings! Springing forward last weekend most definitely didn't help either. Waking up and driving to work in the dark is totally not my forte! (I like to wake up to natural sunlight.)

I hope to get back into the blogging groove once report cards are over (due by the end of this week!). Thanks for not leaving me behind. Hope to be back in the blogging world soon! :)

Five for Friday: First Week Back!

It's finally Friday! To all those teachers who had to come back this week from their holiday break...we made it! Now it's time to celebrate with a Five for Friday!

On Monday, we read Squirrel's New Year's Resolution to learn what a resolution this.

[Click image above to see it on Amazon.]

Then we came up with some resolutions for the class as a whole...

...and also came up with

individual resolutions while completing a New Year's flipbook by Teaches Third in Georgia.

I got (well, requested) a bluetooth speaker from the boyfriend for Christmas! While messing around with trying to figure out how to upload music to my iPad without having to use iTunes, I also discovered iTunes radio. Did you know that there's a "Frozen" station which basically plays Disney songs only? No commercials too! (Probably being its a station for kids). So while we were working on a birthday book for a classmate, the class got to enjoy listening to different Disney songs on iTunes radio via my new bluetooth speakers!

This week was also snowman week! Snowman week included labeling a snowman, writing instructions on how to build a snowman, and creating a torn paper snowman masterpiece!

We also started our geometry unit this week. The kids always love it when the pattern blocks come out, especially when they are told to just use them to build whatever pictures they want!

We also started our new science unit on air and weather. Means we are adding some new Science vocabulary to our word bank!

You've read about my week. How was yours?? :)

Late Post: It's Gingerbread Time!

So I started writing this BEFORE holiday break started and never got to finishing. Now that holiday break is almost over (wah!), I supposed I should get this done. Haha.

December was filled with the world of gingerbread. We read different gingerbread stories, worked on different reading strategies while reading them, and then planned and wrote our own gingerbread stories! Somewhat similar to the Cinderella Unit that I did when I taught second grade, but more tailored for first.

Some of the books we read are shown below. 

[Disclaimer: If you click on the picture, it will bring you to Amazon through my Amazon Associate link.]

          

While reading the books, we filled out a story elements chart to compare and contrast each of the stories and look at their settings, main characters, supporting characters, and "rhymes" (as I liked to call it) that the gingerbread characters say. I told the kids that this was part of our research as authors because we would eventually be writing our own version of the story too. In the end, we ended up with a wall of gingerbread anchor charts as we read through the different books!

We also used many resources that I found on TpT to help with our research including the ones below:

  

Click on the images above to see the full product on TpT.

For the planning of our own story writing, the students started off with deciding who their main gingerbread character would be. We listed off some ideas and then everyone got busy creating a picture of their gingerbread character on a gingerbread template.

     

     

After that, we decided on the setting and our supporting characters, and also did some story mapping before finally writing the story.

What I got were some amazing stories! After spending almost three weeks working on these stories, we obviously had to throw a publishing party to celebrate this awesome accomplishment! The kids learned a very cute gingerbread dance very similar to this:

They performed it for their parents while wearing cute gingerbread headbands that they made. 

After the dance performance, the parents joined the kids for the publishing party. The kids read their stories to their parents and then got to decorate a gingerbread cookie together.

Everyone had lots of fun!

And that's the end of my blog post on our first grade gingerbread unit! Hooray! Time to go sleep now! :)

Welcoming the New Year...Currently Style!

Happy new year, everyone! :)

Best way to celebrate on the blog is to participate in the Currently linky!

Listening - Since most of my current tv shows are on break, time to catch up on some of the shows that I don't usually watch. All caught up Major Crimes, now catching up on Rizzoli and Isles!

Loving -  OMG, can't even explain how much I enjoy sleeping in! Working at this new school means waking up at 6am. Being a night person, that is no fun at all!

Thinking - Lots has happened in 2014, ups and downs. Only makes me wonder what 2015 will bring...

Wanting - How ridiculous does that sound coming from a teacher on break?? We have a district visit the Thursday we come back from break. The principal wants everything on display in our rooms to be recent, which means I have lots to change! We get our own security codes to get on campus and I had wanted to go last weekend, but campus was closed that weekend due to construction. It was only supposed to be closed until Tuesday, but now that's been extended to closed until this coming Saturday. 

Needing - Weak Californian here. It's cold!!!

Yes - Living at home will definitely help with that.

Maybe - Living at home is great, but eventually I do want to move out and possibly move in with the boyfriend. I figured a good time to do it would be in the summer so that's something to think about. 

I Wish - I wish I had the creative juices and energy to make all the awesome products that I could possibly make in the near future. 

Alright, that's it for now! Look out for my gingerbread entry tomorrow! :D