Punny Easter Tags - Freebie!

Hi, friends!

I hope you all have the happiest of Easters!  Click the picture below to pick up these free Easter tags. :)

Weather Math Journal

Hi, teacher friends!

We are starting our Weather Unit next week, so I wanted to share this freebie with you.  I use this math journal as our math center for the week, but you can use it for morning work, independent work, small group or whole group lessons... pretty much any way you want!

There's an addition page and a subtraction page.  The students cut out the suns to use as counters for the math problems.  They also color in the sums/differences as they use them.

Enjoy!  If you download this, please let me know what you think! :)

Valentine's Day Centers

Happy (almost) Valentine's Day! I'm here to share some freebie center activities today. :)

The first one is "Words I Know By Heart" and it's a sight word read/write the room center. I will have it at my reading center next week. Students can use the heart pointers (drink stirrers!) to find the heart words around the room and record them on their paper. 

Click on the picture to pick up this freebie in my TpT store!

This next one is a blog exclusive! Students will find sight words in magazines and glue them onto the recording sheet. I'll have this as a Word Work option next week. Click the picture below for the recording sheet!

We've been hitting sight words hard lately, so my reading and word work centers are really focusing on that!

At the math center this week, I'm keeping it simple with heart facts!  The kids love this game.  They work with a partner and cover up the sum on the bottom of the heart.  The other player has to figure it out!

You can also have them play by covering up an addend for an extra challenge!

Click on either picture above for this center. :)

Have a great Valentine's Day!

Turkeys to Ten!

{Click the picture to download the freebie turkey pattern!}


Decomposing numbers can be tricky!  I always like for my students to see the relationship between the numbers before we start adding plus signs and equal signs.  I also like teaching decomposing numbers using the word "and."  This reinforces the idea that 8 and 2 make 10, & 2 and 8 make 10!  I always use the example:  "I like dogs AND cats" means the same thing as "I like cats AND dogs."  It doesn't matter what order the words are in, the sentence means the same thing.  This builds a solid foundation for later when we talk about the order of our addends in an addition sentence.

Happy Gobbling!

Common and Proper Christmas Nouns!

Hi everyone!  Sorry about my lack of posts lately - if you are in year 3 of RESA I know you feel me when I say I have had NO time between that and actually teaching to do much of anything else!

I just wanted to do a quick blog post because I just finished and submitted my first RESA task (woo hoo!) and now I have some time to share a little something!

I've just introduced common and proper nouns to my firsties.  We started with this anchor chart...

 

I had the common nouns listed and we worked to turn them into proper nouns together.  After we did this together, I had the students go back to their seats and do this sort independently.  They did a great job!

 

Click below for this freebie!

Halloween Math Centers

Hi friends!  I'm here to share some math center ideas today. I hope you can use some of these in your classroom this fun/busy week! :)

 

 

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Students roll one die and then double the number.  They color in the picture of their sum.

 

 

Spooky Shake-Up

This is an idea I originally saw on First Grader, At Last!  I just tweaked it to fit our needs.  I'm not including this in my freebies since you can get a similar egg carton cover (along with other holidays!) here in Sarah Cooley's shop!

 

 

Spider Addition

This center uses black and orange spider rings that can be found at most dollar stores.  They grab a handful of spiders and write their addition sentence.

 

October Roll, Add, and Color

This was a center that I blogged about last week.  I wanted to upload it in case anyone would like to use it!

 

Have a wonderful week!

 

 

This is how we do it: Morning Meeting!

Hello friends!  I'm here for some "This is how we do it!" fun... all about morning meeting!

 

I love morning meeting because I am a huge proponent of starting every day on a positive note.  Morning meeting gives us a chance to gather together, say good morning, read, sing, talk, and have fun together.  Here are the different things we do during our morning meeting: 

 

Good morning song

The first thing we do after we gather together on the carpet is sing a good morning song.  I created a little booklet of fun good morning songs and we use it like a flip chart, turning to the song we'd like to sing for the day.  Sometimes I pick, sometimes I let them pick! 

 

If you would like to download our good morning song book, click {HERE!}  It is geared to first grade, but if you would like me to edit it to your grade, please let me know!

 

After we sing our good morning song, we say good morning to the teacher (and any other aides/adults in the room) and then to each other!

 

Morning message

After greeting each other, we read the morning message.  I like to keep it short and sweet, and usually ask a question at the end.  Some days I let them have dry erase boards and they write their answer down.  Other days (depending on time) we just discuss it.

 

 

(You can see the good morning song we chose for that day in the above picture!)

 

Poetry

Next, we practice fluency through our weekly poem.  This poem is from Caitlin Clabby's (Kindergarten Smiles) free poetry pack.  I get poems from many, many different places.  We read this every day for a week or more, depending on the poem.  We practice reading it fluently -- not like robots!  "Read like you talk!"

 

Read aloud

Next, I read a story aloud to the class.  This read aloud is usually a theme book.  We've been digging into our Halloween books recently!  We also just finished up a class book, "Bootiful Halloween Adjectives" that I plan on reading aloud soon.

 

Sometimes, instead of a themed read aloud, I choose a big book and we choral read it together.

 

 

After the read aloud, we normally do a little comprehension activity.  This can be as simple or as complex as I feel necessary.  Here's one we did earlier this week.  We read "The Three Little Pigs" and used a venn diagram to compare and contrast the story to our weekly story.

 

Calendar

Lastly, we do our calendar routine.  We don't do ALL of these things every day (I pick and choose based on what I feel we need to work on), but here are the things we focus on during calendar time:  singing the months of the year and the days of the week, reading our monthly words, talking about the season, skip counting, talking about the year, etc.

 

And that about wraps it up!  All in all, our entire morning meeting lasts about 15-20 minutes.  If we do a longer story/activity, we will have a shorter calendar time, and vice versa.  It's all about balance! :)

 

Did I miss any important morning meeting staples??  Comment and let me know how you do morning meeting!

We Heart October!

Who doesn't love October?? This is my favorite time of year!  I love the themes and crafts for this time of year.  I also love decorating the classroom -- October galore! 

Our hallway display with our owl directed drawings from The Elementary Art Room!

 

Our lunch choice chart... students come in and move their pumpkin in the morning!

 

Fall and Halloween books are out!

 

We've also been doing some fun October themed center work!  This is how I "grade" center work... we keep all work from centers and math tubs in our stay at school folder all week.  If they don't finish something during center time, they can work on it whenever they have extra time.  On Fridays, I staple their work with this center rubric on top.  It's super simple and to the point -- so it's easy to check and hand back!  I just do this while they are doing Fun Friday.  Anyone who chooses not to do their work during the week misses Fun Friday and has to do their work instead.  Usually after one time of that happening, they get their bottom in gear during center time. :)

 

This was one of our math tubs last week.  This file is on my school computer, but if you would like it, leave me a comment with your email address and I will send it to you!

 

One of our reading centers this week was my Noun or Verb Read/Write the Room center.  This was a huge hit with the little ones!  I taught them to use the sentence "I can ____" to see if the word was a verb or a noun.  They loved it.  "I can ghost?? Noo!  That's a noun!" :)

 

If you would like to download this for free -- click {HERE!}

Happy October!!

Summer Fun :)

 

I love the end of the year... even with all its craziness! :)

 

We've been having some watermelon fun...

 

This craft can be found in my Watermelon Wonder unit!

 

We also made some summer bucket lists.  Click the cover page to get this freebie! :)

 

 

 

 Hope you're staying cool!  10 more days for us. :)

Five for Friday/Freebies!

Today, I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

 

 We've been learning about the different states of matter in science, and even after several examples and experiments, my some of my littles were still not quite grasping the concepts.  So I did what I usually do and made up a song!  We sang it daily and they each got their own copy so they could sing it at home. 

They LOVED it and they were able to better retain the information.  :)

 

 

 

Our shared reading story this week was "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds.  Don't you just love this story??  I know I do, and my first graders do too!  It's great for predicting, inferring, and especially comparing & contrasting.  It's also great for discussing how characters change.  We've been hitting those reading standards left and right this week.

I always want my students to connect to the story, so this week we completed this reader's response log.  They did such an awesome job at being creative and thinking outside the box!

 

 

 

This year, I'm doing writer's workshop very differently than I did last year (you can read about that here if you'd like!  I will make a post about how we do it now soon).  My class this year needs a lot more structure than my class last year.  This isn't a bad thing; we've just had to change up how we do a few things! :)

 

 

We finished up our "Ouch" stories this week.  They turned out great!  My little writers really put a lot of effort into writing, revising, and editing these stories.  I had parent helpers publish the stories for them. 

 

Today, we started "How-to" writing.

 

 

We began by discussing what "How-to" writing is.  The first step was thinking of some things we could do very well.  We made this "Things we ROCK at!" chart.

 

 

Then, they went back to their seat and made their own list.

 

 

We stopped there for this week.  Next week, we will start drawing and writing each step.

 

 

 

 

 Lately, my kiddos have been really impressing me during math tubs.  Working together, flying through the skills... so I decided it was time for a bit of a challenge.  One of our math tubs this week was Buggy Math: How Many Legs?  Let me tell you, this math tub definitely sharpened up some higher order thinking skills!  I got some little bugs from the dollar store and the students had to tell how many legs were on different numbers of bugs.

 I didn't get a picture of the back side, but they then had to add two bugs together before they told how many legs there were.

This little one above had written 5 bugs = 29 legs.  She realized she miscounted and said, "OH!  Because if you counted by 5s you wouldn't count 29.  It's 30!"  Wow, hello recognizing multiples of 5!

 

 

 

 

 

Last - but not least! - we've been working on our Mother's Day gifts.  They always turn out so cute.  :)  If you would be interested in this project you can click on the cover page below. 

 

Thanks for stopping by!  Have a fabulous weekend, friends!