I LOVE LOVE LOVE self portraits made by my littles. They always make me smile. That is why I make their self portraits a focal point of my classroom. I just feel happy when I see them and I know the kids enjoy them too. This year I used them to jazz up my cabinet doors and I just love how they turned out, don’t you?
My little firsties have been working with Character and Setting this week. Most of my kiddos were already familiar with these elements, but we needed a review. I started the lesson with a large anchor chart. We went over the terms as a class and came up with student friendly definitions. I then told my students that they needed to go back to their seats and look UNDER their chair for a special picture. This was hilarious. They just couldn’t understand why I would tell them to look under their chair. Ha Ha. Finally they all started getting under their chairs and pulling out the pictures I had taped there. Each student either had a character or a setting. I pulled images from google for this. We then reconvened at the carpet as we decided where each picture belonged on our anchor chart. My littles LOVED this activity. The next day I decided to do some teamwork as a review for character and setting. I found this fun post from Rulin’ the Roost. I gave each table a large sheet of butcher paper, character setting cards from Rulin’ the Roost and let them decide how to sort them. They had…
Wow! I start a blog and then slack on my posting duties. Yikes! I’m not off to a great blogger start. In my defense, my son started playing high school football and that has become like a second job. On top of starting the school year, switching grades and now becoming a “football mom” my time to blog has been sparse. Plus, my Little Miss S was asked to appear on the Steve Harvey Show. Wow! That was right as the beginning of the school year and kinda threw me for a loop. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity though and it was AMAZING. She was on the show to promote eye exams for school age kids. I’m back in the saddle now and have lots of fun activities to share with you as we ROCK first grade.
I finally finished this little gem in time for Meet the Teacher night. I was inspired by this bulletin board from Doodle Bugs Teaching blog. She has great directions on how to make that fantastic poof. I think it was the poof that got me. I really thought it would take me weeks to make and it didn’t! It was quick and easy. I think it only took me one episode of Real Housewives to finish it. Great way to measure the complexity of a project- the Real Housewives Scale of Complexity. That may be it’s own blog post. Ha Ha! I found this awesome tutorial on blowing up fonts and images and then I KNEW Melonheadz Rockstars needed to be part of this bulletin board. I think they make the cutest addition. I can’t wait for my little firsties to see it. Rock On!
I can NOT go into Target without perusing their dollar section. Today I SCORED! They are starting to put out the teacher stuff and it was awesome. I want to be clear, I do not get this excited when the school supplies are out this early. But… teacher swag is a whole other ball game friends. Check out my haul. I was blessed enough to have a very generous Target gift card as an end of the year gift and I put it to good use today. I am redoing my classroom this year using rainbow colors and apparently that is Target’s theme too. Yippee!! I found a calendar, table caddies, name tags, pocket charts, blank books, chalkboard tags, workbooks, and my absolute favorite is the neon finger pointers. I have tons of ideas for those babies. I did see that some teachers were finding non fiction readers (sharks, volcanoes, etc.) at their Target. I will keep checking back for those.
Working with students to compose teen numbers can be tricky. I love getting my students engaged in learning through Legos. What kid can resist working with Legos? Uh, none! So I came up with this lesson to practice composing teen numbers. I use this activity in small group or it could be used as a math center. If you have enough Legos you could even teach it whole group. I used 2 x 4 bricks, but any size would work. I pulled two colors so we could use one color for the tens and one color for the ones. For the activity the student flips over 1 of the included teen number Lego cards. The student makes the number shown with their Legos. When a student has 10 ones (loose Lego bricks) they connect them into a ten. I had my students put a mini fig on top of the ten they built. They were really motivated to make a ten so they could put their mini fig on it. Ha! Once they built their ten the students lined the ones up separately next to it. I used post it notes to label the tens and ones. The students then …
Better late than never right? I’m just beginning this blogging journey so I’m posting some of my end of the year activities now. Ha. But, if you’re like me you are probably thinking about next year already. So let’s think of this as very early posting for next year. When Spring Fever hits it is time to bring it up a notch and keep those kids moving! I came up with my unit, “Catching Up on Plurals” as a way to get the kids out of the classroom while learning about plurals. I started the lesson with a Kahoot! I made on plurals. If you haven’t tried Kahoot! yet– YOU MUST! You can check it out {here}.This was a fun way to get the kids thinking about plurals. Then we went outside and I batted out 100 balls with plurals, adjectives, singular nouns, adverbs etc. on them. The designated runners had to run out on the field and bring back 1 ball at a time to their team. The team decided if it was a plural and if it was it went on the team’s mitt. If it was not a plural the runner put it back on the field…
Learning never ends when your mom is a teacher! Summer teacher mommy needs to rock all summer long. But, let’s be honest- it is SUMMER VACATION and I want to enjoy every minute of it with my kids. So there will be no boring learning happening at this teacher’s house-No Way! One fun way we work on math skills over the summer is with Dreambox learning. Little Miss S and I LOVE Dreambox and it is a fun way to keep kids learning in the summer. The activities are very interactive and engaging. The child takes a placement assessment and the program adapts itself to that specific learner’s skill level. Dreambox can be used to reinforce those tricky concepts or enrich a child’s skills. The parent component is excellent too. After Little Miss S took the placement test I looked at what she needed to work on and it matched up with what was on her report card–AWESOMENESS. I like to think of it as Khan Academy for the younger learner. I LOVE Khan academy too, but we will get into that in another post. (I am in no way connected with the company and am not reviewing it…
I am so excited to start my own blog. I was very hesitant at first because I get a lot of my ideas from other blogs. I figure I can feature some amazing bloggers at the very least. I am so excited to have you join me on this journey. Please come back often!
Lisa
