A Belated MLK Post

 

Ok, this is a very belated post. :) In January, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I chose the poem below to focus on as our shared reading for the week. I really loved it. Super cute. (If I can find where I discovered this cute poem from I will add it to this post). We also did a MLK Pictorial Input chart. I sketched the picture of him as I told his story to the kids. The next day I passed out "Smart Cards" to the students, that had important information about him on them. We practiced sounding out some of the words and then as I retold the story of MLK they got to come up to the poster and stick their card on as they heard their word. We also did a writing assignment on what their dream was and MLK craft (pictured below) as our celebration activity on that Friday. :)

 

Emergency Sub Plans

So it's Sunday night and I just found out that I have to take a personal day tomorrow because of a family situation. Now I totally wasn't expecting to have to miss work, and if you're like me...I don't like to do last minute sub plans. Well, I don't really like to do sub plans at all. :) Emergency sub plans are the worst, because I feel so unprepared. Usually I have no copies made and I cringe at the thought of giving someone else work that focus' around what I have been working with my students on. (I've had too many bad experiences of my lesson plans being done incorrectly and having to go back and make corrections or reteach something.) So...what was my alternative. Emergency sub plans without having to make copies! Yay! I made these up today so that I can use them with my sub tomorrow and anytime I have to take an unexpected day off and I'm not...well.. planned! Being a mommy to 3 little ones also makes it much more likely that I'll need this in the future, because kiddos getting sick in the middle of the night is pretty common. So, I hope you find this as useful as I did. I've posted it to my TPT store. You can click here to get connected directly to it! :)

Bossy R

The last few weeks our phonics focus has been the Bossy R. We mad a tree map to sort the different sounds over the past few weeks and sang this cute little song to go with it.

Equivalent Party Time!

My 1st grade teams focus for math over the past 2 months was "equivalent forms of a number." We noticed that in the past students really had difficulty with this concept during testing time. I found this really cute party had idea from an awesome blogger First Grade W.O.W.. I just lover her blog! It's really been my inspiration for creativity and to start a blog of my own.

 

She did an equivalent expression activity that I tried and my kids LOVED! Here is a link to her activity. The picture below is what our art activty looked like. I think it came out pretty cute!

It's the Doubles Baby! :)

A few weeks ago we started doubles facts in class. Kids had a lot of fun chanting the "Doubles Rap" I found online. Click here to get a copy. Then we took a large piece of construction paper, folded it in 1/2 (length wise), and cut flaps on the front side. We wrote doubles facts on the front flap, and the answer under the flap. Kids did a great job! Here is a sample of what we did.

 Not sure why the picture came out sideways, but you can still get the idea!

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Good Readers ask Questions when they read

We recently started a unit on Questions in Readers Workshop. I'm really trying to focus on students understand how good readers ask questions before, during, and after reading. I'm also trying to teach students how to track their questions and to share them with their  "Power Partners." We started looking at a nonfiction text on Sea Turtles. Studetns sang our questioning song to begin and pondered the cover for the first day. They jotted their "before" questions down and stuck them on our cute sea turtle. The next day we focused on questions that come up during our reading. We are going to tackle after questions in the upcoming week. Students did great though!
Here are some pics:

Bats and Schema

In January, we began our Nonfiction unit in readers workshop. We spent a lot of time going over what nonfiction books are and what they contain. The kids learned the structure of nonfiction and also how we can have schema before reading on a nonfiction topic and how our schema can grow as we read. I had a really cool book on bats that I thought would grab the kids attention. The kids had a lot of schema for bats already, so I had them jot their schema down on a post it. They got to share it and stick it onto a bats wing under the heading "Schema." Then as we read the book, I asked them to jot down any new learning they had on a different colored post it. They placed in under the other bat wing with the heading, "New Learning." Kids really got into it and loved learning about bats. We also used some nonficiton text note taking sheets that I found online. It was a lot of fun! We even talked about the misconception that people have about all bats drinking blood. Kids were interested to find out that not all bats do. Even my schema grew! :)