March Madness!

We are almost to Spring Break! Our first few weeks of March were filled with shamrocks, leprechauns, and a Lucky Day!

“NO LION” we are learning in first grade!

Our centers were filled with gold coins, leprechauns, and shamrocks. Our skills were Gold Coin Patterning, an addition game to 20 called Race to the Pot of Gold, sorting pictures into Long Vowel Pots of Gold using all the long vowel patterns, Shamrock Place Value Sort and counting tens and ones, sorting gold coins with words on them and deciding if they had a long or short vowel sound.

LUCKY LEPRECHAUNS!!

We read several stories about those clever leprechauns and wrote about the leprechaun that came to our school and all the silly, mischievous things the leprechaun did. Here are a few samples:

We also made a leprechaun sentence wheel and brainstormed adjectives to describe a leprechaun then created sentences using our wheels.

We finished up our week with a LUCKY DAY!! We read several “lucky” books, played lucky numbers, and wrote stories about being “lucky kids”.

I was so impressed with their writing! I feel like a very LUCKY teacher seeing their progress!

Ok, after an evening of watching my KU team get beat…not feeling so lucky and I am having trouble with the layout of this blog post!!! Time for bed!

Flashback to February!

Parents I am so sorry that I have gotten so far behind in posting our classroom happenings!

So tonight as I watched the Jayhawks fall in the Big 12 tournament I decided to catch up and get you up to date.

Here is a look at our Valentine Fun! Love was in the air as we decorated our room for our valentine party!

 

We did some really cute crafts. One of the kids favorites was making Splat the Cat after reading the book Love, Splat by Rob Scotton.

Cara at the First Grade Parade shared this fun activity with us. We also decorated our valentine sacks for our party.

 

We loved sharing our party fun with all of our parents!

 

 

Next up… studying PRESIDENTS!

We spent a week learning about our Presidents. We used this theme to do our centers also. The kids worked on these skills at center time: Eagle Eye Editing-fixing sentences with incorrect grammar usage/mechanics/spelling , Presidential Top It-using numbers to see who could make the largest tens and ones number playing like “war”, Stars and Stripes Syllable Sort-sorting words with 1/2/3 syllables, President Sentence Scramble-sorting words to make complete sentences and facts, All Star Order- ordering numbers using a hundreds chart  to show 1 more, 10 more, 1 less, 10 less and seeing those patterns, President ABC Order-putting a group of president’s names into abc order, Tally Up the Votes-work on counting tally marks and compare votes for presidents to see who wins, Presidents on the Coins-matching up amounts of coins with their values.

 

We also read several stories about Abe and George and did some cute crafts. I only got a picture of Abe and his famous hat!

We finished up February with

TEETH FOR KEEPS!

Learning how to care for our teeth and problems kids have with their loose teeth and what does the tooth fairy do with all those teeth! We wrote these  Teeth for Keeps  tips of how we can make sure we keep our teeth healthy.

I didn’t get very many pictures this week but all of our centers also were “tooth” related.

 

We loved reading Arthur’s Tooth and making this adorable art project that my friend Mrs. G shared with me a long time ago! Thanks Mrs. G…the kids loved making Arthur!

Now we can get on to

March Madness!!!

There’s No Place Like Kansas!! Celebrating Kansas’ Birthday!

 

Special thanks to Abby from the Inspired Apple for sharing her darling art project of the ruby slippers/sneakers. We used this idea for our creative writing project. We took a tour of our school and visited all the places: music, PE, library, counselor, computer lab, nurse, office, cafeteria, etc…
When we got back to the room we talked about how all the people that worked in our building help us out and how they are important to our learning. They then wrote about our school and why it is such a special place. They were so creative and really brightened up our hallways at conference time!! We had a lot of compliments. I am so proud of their efforts with the writing process!!

 

100 Days Smarter!

It has been a few weeks since our 100th day of school…so we are 100+ days smarter by now! Here is a look at what we did on our 100th day of school.

 

A few thought we were done after 100 days of school. But, we have a lot of learning left to do!

“Freezin Season”? Not “Snow” Much-But a bit “Tacky”

Last week we finished up our “Freezin Season” centers and winter theme, but it was a bit difficult to do without snow! We tried to cheer up the room with a few snowmen “craftivities” but it was difficult to get in the mood when we didn’t even need a coat at most of our recess days! So we decided that we would just have to “pretend” and travel south to Antarctica and learn about our favorite winter friend-TACKY the Penguin! We just finished up our Penguin theme this week and they amazed me with all the facts they learned and applied to their penguin writing. We had a “parade of penguin” centers and activities that we did this week.

 

After reading and researching information on penguins we used our KWL chart and wrote what we had learned about penguins. We made these cute covers (thanks to something found on pinterest!) for our penguin information.

Tacky Thursday!

We finished up our study of penguins with our favorite penguin character “Tacky”! We read several different Tacky stories and then made these cute Tacky the Penguin art projects. We also did a story map to discuss character, setting, problem, resolution, and events from the story to recall information. The kids dressed “tacky” on Thursday too! They were sooooooo cute! We were so busy all day that I didn’t get pictures of them dressed up…but they were “tacky”!

Martin Luther King, Jr.

What an inspiration these stories were to my students. They were really intrigued with Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, and ML King’s Dreams. They just couldn’t believe those things happened to Rosa, Ruby, and Martin! After reading several biographies about MLK we made these pictures of him and then wrote about our own dreams to make the world a better place. Wow, 6 and 7 year olds really do understand that we need to work together! They did an amazing job telling about their dreams!!!

This group of students did a shared reading of Robin Hill School Martin Luther King Jr. Day with the class. After reading all these books here is MLK and a few of our DREAMS! I was soooo impressed!

Let’s hope our dreams come true!!! Our world WILL be a better place!