Teachers Pay Teachers and another day in the first grade

So I officially made a teachers pay teachers account yesterday. Since then I have made two freebie items. Plus 1 and Plus 2 Penguin flashcards and a worksheet to help students write their writing goals. No one had downloaded or rated them yet. I am hoping someone will soon because I want some feedback. I came up with a few other ideas and I'm excited to make them this weekend.

In school today we worked on Median and Mode in math and my little kiddos are median and mode calculating machines! I can proudly say they can all teach me how to find it. In writing today we started to write letters to Cinderella's step sisters. These came out pretty funny. I will post some tomorrow! In the particular version of Cinderella we read today it had a very wide range of new vocabulary words. I even learned a word or two. My students' favorite word was haughty. The rest of the afternoon they were walking around trying to use it in sentences.

For social studies today I introduced them to the idea of why we have a government:
1. To keep us safe
2. To help solve our problems
3. To provide us services
4. To make laws

Of course they requested that I make it into a song or dance... I did not have the creative juices to design yet another dance for the kids though so we turned it into a super short song. We have a government to keep us safe... to solve our problems...to provide us with some services and to make us laws! Imagine it with a sing-songy voice!

On a completely random note, my file drawer is officially full so I am now on a quest for a cheap tall filing cabinet.

Arm Spans and Tall Tales

Zumba officially started back up again for my students. They were so full of energy and excitement. Ms. Jill has been on leave for her pregnancy to rest, but this week she's came back to teach her fill-in Ms. Kristen what to do. We also made a trip down to the library since last Friday we cancelled our trip when we saw how windy it was. We challenged all the students to find 2 books that challenge them and one had to be a chapter book. Every student followed this direction beautifully. My class was pretty awesome today. All my students were on their best behavior all day and even my two little troublemakers didn't need any major reminders today. We started off our morning by beginning to read Dona Flor: A Tall Tale about a Giant Woman with a Great Big Heart. The story is quite lengthy and I couldn't get through more than half of it during my 20 minute reading groups, so we had to break it up into a two day lesson. I was suprised when I realized the students actually liked the story and wanted to read more.

One of my students who has been struggling in both reading and math...( the one who actually tells everyone he doesn't like school) had an awesome day today. I was so happy. He was right on for everything. During reading he was ready to read when the others in the group were talking still. He noticed when Manetta changed something during snack on our "what do I need? board" and he immediately got it out so he was ready to go. He also for the last two days has been glued to an A to Z mystery book. When I asked him if I got more would he read them, he almost jumped out of his seat. So I will definitely have to get some more to add to our classroom library. This is the first time I have seen him this excited about reading ever! I was kind of sad when I realized the whole set through Scholastic was still rather expensive.

In math today we reviewed measuring and discussed gathering data. We measured our arm spans in centimeters and inches and then we measured the length of our jumps. The students giggled in delight when they found out our Everyday Math tape measures did go up high enough to measure my arm span. I couldn't help but smile with them.

I offically started my own store on Teacher'sPayTeachers.com

President's Day Week

We had Monday off of school this week and my students sure seemed to be still in vacation mode. We did a few fun projects this week. We made Abraham Lincoln beards and hand print cherry trees.

We also ended a unit in social studies with a BAM! Our last lesson was "What region do I live in?" we did the circles that you see for me on the map and we made a coloring book where we had to color where our state was on the map and then where our state and country were; then where our state, country and continent were. Last but not least they had to show all of those on the globe! They really seemed to like the assignment and did well on my end of unit assessment. 

Something else we were busy working on were comparisons of two little pig stories. We compared the James Marshall version of the Three Little Pigs to the book The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas. The students absolutely loved the Little Wolves. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
The students created a venn diagram comparing the two stories and then wrote a short comparison essay.

Another highlight of the week was our math lesson "The Wubbles" it's a lesson in the Everyday Math Curriculum for Second Grade. The lesson teaches doubling and halving telling a story similar to the Gremlins movie. The wubbles are creatures that double every time they go to sleep. I created a little wubble by using a pom pom and gluing on two googly eyes.

We also retold the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story by illustrating different parts of the story and then we practiced sequencing them . This particular version was rather unique because Goldilocks jump roped everywhere. The students were very excited to have their part in illustrating a story which makes me excited for when we create our own books.

P.s. Here's our Bee Mine projects from Valentine's Day!

Monster Boxes and Research Reports

So yesterday we started to make our monster boxes. They came out very cute. I like the fact that for the most part each one looks very unique. Some students chose to have one eye while others chose two or three. Our monster boxes we got the idea off of someone's Pinterest board. We used egg cartons for the eyes and kleenex boxes for the bodies. We then made them our own by adding pipe cleaner arms and googly eyes on top of the egg cartons. I was quite proud of the students most of them followed all the directions without too many disasters. Out of our original 2-3 helpers we were supposed to have we only ended up getting one. Her help was much appreciated though! Our Valentine's Day decorations have started to come up around the room. I'm excited to do our Bee Mine bumblebees tomorrow too!

Today we wrapped up our animal research reports. Our final copies were written, our illustrations were drawn and our diagrams were labeled. The students even created cover pages for their books. We also wrapped up chapter 6 in math and had our post test. I'm very curious to see how they are doing. I decided to hold off on starting a new chapter for a day or two so I can focus more on subtraction with regrouping. I have about 3 kiddos how are still struggling with it. They seem to know how to do it sometimes and other times they completely forget how to!

Manetta asked our director if we could have a fish tank in our classroom and with a little bit of discussion the director agreed. We can't have goldfish because they're "too dirty" but we can have tropical fish. She went out and got the fish at lunch. The students were so excited. They were told yesterday to start brainstorming ideas for names. They named the male purple Beta fish, Karate! Interesting name I know!

We did one other fun thing today... we made masks for Mardi Gras! Tomorrow we'll display them with a picture!

Splatter Monsters and animal reports

Our animal research reports are finally coming along. Almost every student is done with their rough draft. Tomorrow we will start to edit and revise our papers. I'm still struggling to find a way to help my first graders edit their own papers, but at the same time I do not believe my class is ready for peer editing yet either.

Something fun we did today was to create splatter monsters. The students put puddles of dark water colors on paper and then used a straw to blow the paint. Once the paint dried we put googly eyes and faces on the monsters. The students even named their monsters. They seemed to really enjoy the art project. One student did end up with A LOT of spit on his artwork though... :(



Today we had our fourth chess club meeting with the director's son. At first I was unsure of how my students would feel about chess, but they seem to love it. I'm learning how to play too. Yesterday I was partnered up with one of my super smart little guys and boy was he a challenge to play. So far we've learned the rook, bishop and pawn.

100th day and catching up

Happy 100th day of school! It's been a little while since I've posted. Today in our classroom Ms. Manetta and myself and a few of our students dressed up as if we were 100 years old. I thought our ensembles turned out pretty good. I wore an aqua track suit and some tan Keds I found at Value Village. I completed my outfit with a two-tone wig and big white earrings.

One student even drew wrinkles on her face and another did the grandma-ish makeup and brought a cane. For math we had 100 day centers. For one center we predicted how many different things we could do in 100 seconds. The actions varied from hopping to winking. The students were so tired after hopping and then standing and sitting. Another center including measuring items that were 100 cm long. The last center involved making estimates.

We also made 100th day glasses. I'm quite fond of my glasses I made.

Last Friday, we celebrated Groundhog's Day in our classroom. We definitely got some interesting questions about the groundhog after reading several fiction books. One question was, "How big is his house?" I truly have no idea how big it is... We made a cute 3-d art project with the groundhog stick puppet and a puffy cloud.
       Some other changes in our classroom are that Ms. Manetta wants to try doing literacy centers once a week during our normal reading block. I think it sounds like a great way to work on specific skills. We also started posting our goals for all the students to see and we made a what do I need board where students can look to see what they need for each lesson.