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! :)

 

Moving Day

2 weeks ago I decided to use the story , "Moving Day" from our Houghton Mifflin anthology as our shared reading. The kids did a fantastic job reading it all by themselves by the end of the week with amazing expression and fluency. As our celebration activity on Friday, we used water colors to paint a paper plate (which represented the crabs shell). We then made a red hand print for the body and pipe cleans and googly eyes. Inside their white folders they drew the crab from the story and used a bubble map to come up with adjectives for the crab. On the right hand side, they wrote about the crab and used some of those adjectives from the bubble map in their writing. Students used a flow map to sequence the story. I think it came out pretty cute!

 

 

Update on Tattling!!!

Hold your horses and iguanas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have a breakthrough update on the tattling box I posted the other day! I started testing one of my students at the back table and out of the corner of my eye I noticed my most honorary "tattler" in my whole class stand up to tell me something. One of the boys at her table said..."Just use the new Boo Boo box and don't bother Mrs. A." Oh....I could see the look on her face as she said, " aww... I don't want to fill out that whole form," and she reluctantly sat down and started doing her work again. Score!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Yes! I am so thrilled it worked. I had this huge smile inside of me and I think I may have even chuckled. It was too awesome of a moment!

I did have a boo boo report filled out that day though, which was just so incredibly hilarious. I had to post it. SO glad he used the boo boo box for this, but definitely had a good laugh with it! I especially liked the part where he said the character of his problem was "bothering him...he was looking at me." Then he goes on to say, "he was boring me." These kids are so silly!

Happy Wednesday!

100th Day of School

Awhile back we celebrated the 100th day of school. We did this really cute poem about it that I found online, except I can't remember where.

Here is a 100 day chart we did and a cute and a cute poem called "I Want 100."

The poem I downloaded from a nifty blog called Teaching in Blue Jeans. (So many awesome bloggers are out there with amazing ideas!)

My students did an art craft to go with the 100 day poem and they had such a blast doing it. I think they came out super cute. They envisioned what they would look like when they are 100 years old. I had them do tear art to give it a wrinkled skin effect. Some even chose to make themselves bald. Too funny! I think for next year I'll use light gray construction paper for their hair, but all I had this year was white.  Here's a picture of how they turned out.

I especially like the one with the stringy hair. So cute!

 

That's it for today...but have an awesome day! :)

Pete the Cat

I LOVE Pete the Cat...and so do my students!

They will eat up any and all books about him and we'll be singing his happy songs all day long! Since doing shared readings this year, I focus on 1 particular book a week and we really delve into it. The students love it and really are able to read with fluency and expression, even understanding the deeper elements of plot, characters, setting, and the author's message. We read "Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons," awhile back and this was the writing activity and craft that we celebrated with on that Friday. The kids wrote a summary of the book using a flow map and transition words. I think it came out pretty Pete-tastic! :)

You can also get a glimpse of my "Power Word" Wall. We use them to transition off the carpet to our desks. When I say the "power word" they can get up and go back to their "scholar spots" aka...desks. The words I pick are based on whatever unit of study  we are doing in a particular subject area. The week I took this picture it was on "civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr."

Tattling Box!!!!!!!

{Right after recess...} "Mrs. A..... _______ pushed me!!!!"
Oh...the joys of tattling in first grade! As much as I love my students, I can honestly say I do not enjoy hearing about every single little thing that happens, which they really could be learning to solve themselves! The funny thing is that as soon as I put my hand on the door to open my classroom after recess...I can almost feel the tattles knocking! Even when I am trying to test my students at the back table, I have some students that find it so hard to solve their own small problems.

So....what did I do to be a problem solver myself? Well..I'm trying out something I like to call my "boo-boo" box. It's a box where students can fill out a "boo-boo on my heart" form for anything that might be bothering them. I purposely made this form a full page, in the hopes that my students will decide that it's too much trouble to fill it out and perhaps....just perhaps...could start becoming more proactive problem solvers! (cross my fingers and toes) Of course I tell my students that for "big" problems, (getting hurt or something more serious in nature) that it's ok to come to me... but for other things...they need to start writing it down and feeding our boo boo box. Let's hope it works!

Here is a picture of my boo boo box:

I know it could look a whole lot cooler, but I was trying to work on it with my 2 sons and they had a blast sticking bandaids all over the box. Maybe next year I'll go for a fancier design. :)


Here is the BooBoo Tattling form that I use. You can also download a free copy from my TPT store! 

Enjoy! :) 
 

Dear Diary...

So, I decided to start a teacher blog! Yay! I haven't blogged in so many years...since becoming a mommy to 3 bouncing boys...life has it's way of pushing aside a lot of things I used to have time for. :) I love being a mommy to a super intelligent 6 year old (almost 7), an energizer bunny 3 year old (almost 4), and a goofy smiled and snuggly 15 month old! My life is filled with countless smiles, hugs, laughter, love, and I couldn't ask for anything more....well...maybe more sleep...but like many moms out there...coffee is my best friend...(aside from my husband of course). :)

I wanted to start a teacher blog to post my happenings in my classroom...and also because my memory is so terrible these days (due to lack of sleep I'm sure), that I figured this would be a good log of fun things that my students and I really enjoyed doing. So.....here goes!

Welcome to...the Diary of a First Grade Apple. Enjoy!