The room is ready!

I'm going with a beachy theme this year! My word wall is a "word tank", my student of the week is our "starfish", we are digging in to help and diving into first grade!! We also have a birthday beach, and my tropical behavior birds. The clip chart is something new for me this year.

Beach Theme

I'm officially hired as a first grade teacher and am super excited to share my adventures in first grade this year!

This year I will be starting out with a beach theme! "We're diving into first grade", "Digging in to Help, Tropical Behavior birds, and a Word Tank... pictures to come soon

My new room!

Here is my new room! I'm so excited I have lots of blank space. Now to try to get it looking a little more cozy and warm! Hope to have the after pictures soon!

August 1

I just found out that I will be teaching FIRST grade again this year. Long story, but I'm so excited and grateful.

I think my theme is going to be a beach theme. It's calming and I can use it to feel like summer all year. I don't think I will go all out theme, but for some key parts I'm going to start with it.
I like the idea of "Look whose digging into First Grade?" or " What a Great Catch".

Lakeshore had a cute paper plate beach scene they did at the store the other day that I think I can incorporate on one of the first days.

I need to plan the routines in my class too. We will be using PBIS, so I have rules already set up. I also add fish or shells to move up or down into the ocean.

I'll do tables and each table will start with a team name. The table with the most tally's at the end of the week, gets PBIS tickets. I also need to create a beach theme calendar page for August/September for their take home folders.

So many ideas in my head, I've got to get myself organized.

The Puddle

We ended the year with some really fun projects. We made father's day cards and a really cute scrapbook for the end of the year. I really enjoyed being in first grade this year. I am hoping to return to the classroom in the fall.

One of our last stories was "The Puddle". We made umbrella glyph's, cut and paste rain people, wrote about favorite things to do in different seasons and read many vocab filled books. It was a great story!

Cinco de Mayo and Animal Research

This week in first grade we read a story about "How To Be A Nature Detective". This story skills are finding the main idea, long o, contractions, and using am/is/are/were. The story focuses on using clues to find out about animals in nature.

The week we completed a wonderful Animal Research Book. Ill update pictures when I go through them. The children were responsible to choose an animal and find a book from the library to help complete it. We used information found on line and in a variety of available texts from the library. We also went as a whole school to go see Disney's African Cats movie. It was a perfect fit for this week's lessons. One of the points in the story is comparing finger prints to animal tracks. I made a mystery fingerprint sheet and we made animals out of fingerprints. The students then worked in partners to guess with each other. Can anyone tell me how to upload with google documents here?

This week was also Cinco de Mayo. Learning about Cinco de Mayo is in our fourth quarter curriculum guide. We discussed using a globe and finding continents. We also focused on North America and Mexican traditions. Each child wrote a homework assignment discussing their family's original heritage. We will share these next week.

We made maraca's and listened to mariacchi music. We were also able to squeeze in a game I made up called, "Ole". The child in the middle has to guess who in the outside circle shakes their maracca and says, "Ole"

We finished up the week with Family Earth Night. I brought my own boys back and held an Eggimals project in my room. It was awesome to be there at night and be part of a family night.

Bears, Easter and Earth Day Oh My!

This week is jam packed with fun filled learning. We are moving though the reading series and I decided to continue on with the next story even though it's a short week.

For Earth Day we decorated grocery bags and handed them returned them to the neighborhood Dominicks. They will pass them on/around Earth Day. We decorated badges, wore blue, wore green , colored pictures of the earth, and wrote an acrostic to go with it. I also went to http://www.brainpopjr.com/ to see the free video on recycling, reusing and reducing. I LOVE this site. It has short videos to go along with just about every theme you could imagine! We discussed natural resources for social studies and several great Earth day books.

For the Fishing Bears story, we continued with the frog centers, but with this weeks group I changed to the correlating Bears leveled readers. We also talked about parts of a bear and labeled a picture, we did the "blubber experiment" using the scientific method and the essential question. We wrote a word web and paragraph using the 6 trait writing method. We read the story in whole group, partner, with a tape and independently.

For Easter, we decorated large eggs, had a "Guess What Is In The Egg" mystery game, made magnetic bunnies and played a math bunny game. The children *LOVED* the mystery egg game. We also made bunnies from Oriental Trading and played a really fun math graphing game.

We continued to focus on our long I, finding the main idea, sums though 12 and more.

A very busy week full of fun learning! I had time to bring each child to the small table and listen to them independently read a correlating paragraph and practice our core spelling words.

First Post and Frogs

I have recently discovered teacher blogs. Boy they are so creative. It certainly is inspiring to see how so many teachers can come together and share ideas. This last week was our Frog and Toad story. I am not super creative, but I am resourceful. Here are some of the activities we did this past week. The children loved it. They asked me everyday when we were doing centers.

Some of the activites we did were whole group and some of them centers. In the centers we did the following activites. A frog glyph, Frog/Toad diagram, HF word spinner game, Frog math spinner game, Frog handprint art project, guided reading . In whole group we did Tcharts of Frog and Toad, Frog/Toad Dialogue pictures and a seasons guilt. I had children rate their group on how they worked together at the end of the center time.

I've included the links to where I got the activities from. Thank you to all the creative teachers out there with their awesome ideas!

Frog Centers * Glyph http://www.misswhyte.com/files/back2school/FrogGlyph.pdf

*HF word spinnerhttp://www.4shared.com/get/jahEW_h0/spin_to_read_and_write_spinner.html *Math 2 digit gamehttp://swampfrogfirstgraders.blogspot.com **Research- * Venn/Diagram http://members.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/amphibians/frogs.shtml &hl=en&authkey=CLPfyJUL Art center: hand print frog: http://funhandprintart.blogspot.com/2010/01/handprint-frog-craft.html