the week before the week before Christmas Break...

Just a quick post about what we did this week in first grade! As I said in my last post I was gone for 3 days last week so it was kind of nice to get back to my first grade home away from home. :) As I suspected, the kiddos had some fun while I was gone, but I quickly got them back to rights. Or as much as possible since it's, ya know, just a few weeks before the jolly man shows up bearing presents.

So what did we do this week? Well, we continued our work with Christmas Around the World, which is turning out to be SO much fun! I'll have to remember to snap some pictures next week of their little suitcases with their minibooks and maps. I am surprised at how many connections this group has been able to make about the similarities and differences across countries-they're a bunch of smart cookies!

In math, we're tackling our fractions standard. I am SO not a fan of our math curriculum's way of teaching fractions so I'm pulling in a lot of stuff that I've made. I created some supplemental resources last year and that's been the big focus of my math block this week. It's got cut and paste activities for equal parts and halves/fourths, a vocabulary journal, anchor chart pieces, and some more engaging math tasks related to cookies, candy bars, and Play-Doh. If you want to take a peek you can find it here!

At the end of the week I was able to squeeze in a little bit of holiday crafting fun.

We made these stockings (thanks to A Cupcake for the Teacher for the freebie!) and they turned out so cute. On the back the kids wrote what they wanted their stockings to be stuffed with. Their responses cracked me up. One of my kiddoes said she wanted her stocking to be full of "perfume." Another one said "candy and DVDs" (hey, I wouldn't mind my stocking being stuffed with those things, either!).  We will be doing a lot more crafting next week and I can't wait!

while you were out...

I will be the first one to admit that I HATE being out. HATE it. Every teacher knows that it's double work to be out since you have to write sub plans and then play catch-up when you get back. It's the worst!

This past week I was gone for three whole days to a literacy research conference. It was a great experience and I learned a lot...but tomorrow it is BACK to reality. A little birdie (AKA my principal) gave me a heads-up that my sweet little angels were a hyper and rowdy bunch last week and there may have even been a trip to the principal's office involved for a couple of them. (This is a first for this group.) Tomorrow I will be very busy getting them back in line so we can have a productive last couple of weeks before the break. I thought I'd pop in to share a quick freebie about something I do when I return back after being out...I present to you my "Tattle to the Teacher" form! (I don't really call it that in front of the kids, but it's catchy, you gotta admit.)
Here's what it looks like:

And it's super easy to do. On the day I get back, I leave this on their desks for Morning Work. I tell them that if there's anything they think I should know about anything that happened while I was out, they can draw and write about it on their paper. I don't let them tell me anything verbally. The papers I get back are usually a HOOT. (I will say...although it's a little mortifying when they cut up like crazy, I can't take it too seriously...I mean, no one else can be ME and run my classroom quite like I can, you know?) I am very interested to see what all my sweeties have to tell me about last week's shenanigans!

If you want your copy, just click the pic! 

Living Museum fun!

Last week I posted about our Tall Tales Living Museum. I promised more pictures in my next post, so here they are! (If you missed the last post, you can find it here.)

The sign I had for our Museum. If you're a Georgia teacher, you know that Pecos Bill and Thunder Rose are not in our standard about tall tale heroes. I had to decide between having larger groups and adding in some extra tall tale people. I decided to go with extra people. Pecos Bill was an easy pick. Thunder Rose was a last minute decision. You are probably wondering who in the world Thunder Rose is because you've never heard of her, am I right?! I found the book in our school media center (you can see it here on Amazon) and thought it might work. Thunder Rose was a great addition because it was another female for our Living Museum.

Here are the kids' scripts, all typed up and laminated. They wrote their own text-I just helped them with conventions and getting it into the printer. 95% of the time we roll right along happily with invented spelling (as long as sight words are spelled correctly!), but for a project like this where multiple people need to be able to read the writing I do act as the "editor" alongside my writers.

Here is a pic of some of my groups hard at work practicing their scripts! My class this year consists of pretty great readers, so we were able to focus hard-core on prosody (reading with inflection).

The sweet little kiddoes in my Pecos Bill group really worked hard. Here is the poster they made:

 Their writing is so adorable! Here's the last little bit of their piece: "He fighted a half-gorilla. He squeezed all of the poison out of a snake." Check out their invented spelling-isn't it adorable?

 The day of the museum went off without a hitch. The cool thing was all of the first grade teachers were hosting their own Tall Tales museum so our students got to visit each class. They loved it! One teacher down the hall had a real beaver skin as the activator for her Davey Crockett group and that's ALL the students could talk about!

Our last little step in the process is to wrap up their individual pieces about their tall tale heroes. We are going to compile the pieces into a class book and then I will enhance the pages of the book with the app Aurasma. Aurasma allows you to attach a video to a print image. That means when students (or parents, or whomever) scans the pictures in the book with my i-Pad or i-Touch the videos will pop up on the device...they will get to see and hear the performances from the Living Museum as if they were there! Isn't that neat?

Next week I'll be going to LRA in Florida to present on the Living Museum. As if that weren't exciting enough, I just got an e-mail this week saying my colleagues' and my proposal for the International Literacy Association conference next summer got accepted! We will be presenting there again about the Living Museum. Looks like I need to start saving some money for an airplane ticket!

This week is all about some much-needed R&R. We went on a little mountain trip this past weekend and after the Thanksgiving festivites we will be celebrating Little Miss' 3rd birthday. I've also been working very hard on some things for my TpT shop. Yesterday I updated my Christmas Around the World set I made last year...

I added a souvenir suitcase to store all of the little readers from this book along with a world map and a passport stamp booklet: 

We will be using it when we get back from the break. I am super excited about incorporating some holiday fun into our ELA and Social Studies time!

Today I also uploaded some little readers I've been working on. They are holiday themed for the month of December...

I think all of them are cute, but the Rockin' Reindeer one is my favorite! I am going to use these for some easy-peasy sub work for when I'm out next week at LRA. I think these will be awesome Morning Work activities that the kids will enjoy and most importantly, can do independently! If you are interested click the picture to go to my TpT store!

That's it for tonight...now I need to make a grocery list for my pre-Thanksgivng shopping trip. Ugh. I am dreading going to the grocery store tomorrow...I'm going to have to reward myself with some coffee or something to make it through! Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

'Twas the week before Thanksgiving...

Can you believe we have a week before Thanksgiving break? I am so in awe of how this school year is FLYING by. I think a lot of it has to do with how genuinely happy I am this year-but it's still crazy! (Side note: Little Miss will be THREE soon-the day after Thanksgiving, as a matter of fact-and I don't know how that happened, either. Craziness!)

Next week will be pure madness in the classroom...the good kind. We are hosting a Living Museum next Thursday on our tall tale heroes. If you've never heard of a Living Museum before...well...don't feel bad, I hadn't either until about six months ago! For a Living Museum, you have the kids dress up as historical characters (or whatever-I mean, we're doing tall tales because that's one of our standards) and "come to life" as that person when the visitors come through the "museum." To prepare for the Living Museum, we've been doing a lot of research and writing over the past few weeks! To start the project, I hung half sheets of chart paper around the room with pictures of the tall tale heroes. (In case you're not savvy on the Georgia standard...we're supposed to learn about Davey Crockett, Annie Oakley, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Johnny Appleseed.  I added a couple of extras-Pecos Bill and Thunder Rose-so that my groups wouldn't get too big. I figure a little enrichment won't hurt!) The kids picked their tall tale hero knowing NOTHING about their person, which added to the fun!

Then the research began. I put out books about the people under the posters as well as simple passages from my good friend Bethany's Tall Tales unit. The kids read about their people and added facts on sticky notes to their poster. I walked around the room and provided extra support. (For example, for some groups I sat down with them and read their texts along with them. For other groups, we just chatted about what they learned and the facts that they put on their posters.) This past week we spent a lot of time crafting their scripts for the Museum...and I'm so impressed! They each have 5+ sentences about their tall tale hero. This weekend I'm going to laminate their final drafts for durability so next week they can practice with their groups during Read to Someone time.

Here's a couple of pictures I snapped...I need to take some more. Pecos Bill's group did an AMAZING job and have the cutest sentences...I'll try to remember to take some more pictures this week!

So much fun and what a great way to keep them actively engaged the week before a break. My friend Bethany and I (along with my favorite professor of all time at Georgia College) are going to present about the Living Museum at Literacy Research Association next month. We are so pumped! Just to give you an idea, we started working together LAST fall on informational writing and talked about how it would be amazing to present at LRA. Can't wait!

Aside from The Living Museum, next week I'm going to try to squeeze in some fun turkey time things around the madness. I did make another little reader for next week about Thanksgiving. It's a simple little book for some of my ELL kids who are going to experience their first Thanksgiving in America this year-isn't that awesome? Anyway, I posted the reader as a freebie in my TpT shop! I downloaded a bunch of other amazing Thanksgiving resources that other sellers are giving away as freebies so I thought I'd join in...you can find it here!

I will be back later this week with more pics from the Living Museum!

fall in first grade...and a freebie!

Don't be shocked...a blog update. :)

One of the things that I've had to adjust to in my new school is having a large population of English Language Learners. In my previous school, I had one student in five years that was bilingual (and he was truly bilingual). In my new school, more than a third of my class speaks another language in addition to English! It's really cool. However, for some of my students who are less proficient with English, I'm having to figure out ways to scaffold language for them so that they can access the curriculum as fully as possible. 

One of the things that I've been doing with a few of my kids is an interactive alphabet notebook. One of my newer students didn't attend kindergarten full-time last year and I have another student who is coming to us from a culture that uses a completely different alphabet. Plus, I have a few non ELL students who need some work with letter sounds and letter recognition. I bought this set from Color Me Kinder and we are loving it! The prep couldn't be easier and what I personally really like is that I get to introduce some vocabulary at the same time that the kids may not know. 

Another "ah-ha!" that I had was that for this particular group of students, providing them with familiar texts to read at home might be extra helpful for them. Our new reading series came with a set of vocabulary readers that I tried to use with these students, but what I'm finding is that the readers are not on their instructional level. So, I'm resorting to scavenging the Internet to find easy little readers that have appropriate vocabulary and controlled sight words to keep them from getting frustrated. This week I got extra crafty and made a little book for us to use during guided reading. I also included some vocabulary cards to use with them to preview and review the vocabulary words before we read. I uploaded it to my shop and it is free, so if you're interested head on over there and download! 

Tomorrow we're off for Veteran's Day but I'll be hard at work on a conference presentation! We are also up to grand things next week in first grade, but I'll save that for another blog post!

Back to School Potpourri

WARNING: Today's post has no real theme-it's a mish-mash of things from my classroom from the past couple of weeks!

So, the school year is underway! Today marked day 16. I stand by what I said in my last post-I have a class full of sweeties this year! I am up to 21 precious firsties and they are all SO smart. I've only made one cry so far, so that's something, too!

One of the first things we did this year was read Pete the Cat books. My favorite is Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes. (Funny side story: Little Miss loves ALL of the Pete books. Over the summer she discovered them and now knows them by heart...she has to take them all to bed with her now EVERY NIGHT. It's hysterical.) We did this adorable activity from The Bubbly Blonde . They came out so cute! We talked about the ways that we can "rock" this school year and then I gave them the sentence frame "I can rock first grade by..." Here is what the outside of my door looks like now, all decorated for our first PTO meeting next week:

I just love all the bright colors and the polka dots!

Next thing: math fun...we've been working on graphing. Most of our activies have originated from my graphing packet that is available on TpT, but I tried something a little different this year to introduce tallies. My group this year saw tallies in kindergarten, but I wasn't sure how comfortable they were with MAKING sets of tallies. In my experience what kids like to do is make a row of five parallel lines and THEN cross the fifth...sigh. So, this year I tried out the popsicle stick method that I have seen all over Pinterest. To put it concisely...WOW! Here are some pics of my little mathematicians in action:

Aren't they awesome? I just used a tally practice page freebie I found on TpT in Ms. Scmidt's shop. The kids paired up with a math buddy (because I didn't have enough sticks for everyone to have their own set) and traded off counting out popsicle sticks to match the number and arranging the set into groups of five with leftovers. It was a lot of fun and I was able to see pretty quickly who understood the concept (but had trouble making tallies), who understood the concept and could make tally marks correctly, and who didn't get the concept at all.

One last thing...today was Friday and my precious room mother sent in snacks for the kiddos. Here is the extra one she told me to bring home for Little Miss:

Isn't that precious?! And the snack featured animal crackers and gummy worms. (She put the giraffe on it because the kiddos are Mrs. Goggans' Giraffes...every class in the school has a banner with an alliterative name and that was the cutest thing I could come up with. There's not many cutesy animals for the letter "G," believe it or not! "Mrs. Goggans' Geckos" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?! Haha!)

That's all for this week...next week we're going to dig deep into our weather standard and wrap up graphing before the LONG WEEKEND!

2014 Classroom Tour

Hello, little blog! It's been a long time! I warned you last summer that blogging would be pretty sporadic until grad school was over. Well, guess what?! I'm DONE with grad school! That feels so good to type. I had my exit interview last week and I passed (with honors!). I have to take the state assessment to add Reading to my teaching certificate, but I can officially say I have my M.Ed now. :)

So, since that year-and-a-half-long journey is over...I can now turn my attention to other things...like my blog! And TpT store! You can expect to see and hear a lot more from me now...

A few updates since I haven't blogged since DECEMBER (ugh). First of all...in addition to having a shiny new degree...I moved schools this year. It's a big change in neighborhoods and size, but I am in heaven. You guys...my new school is SO nice. It's a lot smaller than my old school, and everyone is just as helpful as can be. And the parents are amazing...PTO came by with cash envelopes for the teachers last week to purchase supplies. I feel like I've been transplanted to an alternative universe! I will still be teaching first grade, but I won't have inclusion this year and I am not the grade level chair. Whew! I'm not going to know what to do with all this free time!

Now for the fun part...my classroom tour! I had a great time decorating my new space.

This is the view of my board. Ignore my to-do list on the left hand side. We have to do a lunch count every morning at our school, so that's what the taped-off boxes in the middle are for. Eventually kids will move their magnets into their designated lunch choice as part of their morning routine.

The view from my guided reading table. I chose not to claim a teacher desk this year. There was an enormous one in the room when I arrived, but it was beat-up and took up a crazy amount of space. I don't know yet how I will like only having my teacher table, but we'll see!

The view of my Word Wall and the clocks from last year. I was sad to let my magnetic word wall go...it was pretty awesome...but I think I will like this set-up okay. Since the meeting area pretty much needed to be here in the classroom, I thought the benefit of having the Word Wall close by outweighed the nifty-ness of words on magnets.

 My entryway table...same baskets from last year, new spot. One box is for tardy slips, one for hall passes, one for notes from home, and a basket for nametags.

The back of my classroom library. One neat thing about this classroom is that has an adjoining door to the classroom next door. The teacher next door is also new to the building, so we LOVE that we can stick our heads in each other's room to ask questions! The teacher who had my room before me painted the back of this bookcase with magnetic paint. I like how it is arranged now, but I am considering flipping it around to use the backside for our CAFE strategies. I don't know...thoughts?

View of the sink and counter area. This was BEFORE the kids and their mountain of supplies arrived...now those blue baskets are full of sanitizer and the counter is covered in Kleenex and copy paper! (At this school, almost everybody brings in supplies. This is SUCH a change for me!)

The view from the door. I re-painted my rocking chair this summer to match my new color scheme. Well, to be completely honest...I SUPERVISED my husband painting this chair...which means I picked out the color and he volunteered to do it. He's a keeper!

 The classroom library. It's a work in progress. I have several hundred more books at home, but we are searching high and low for the shelf clips to hold those last 2 shelves. Turns out they are very hard to find! My custodian repurposed a few from an old bookshelf for more but we are still looking for a few more. I will probably have to get another piece of furniture for the rest of my books at some point. I'm thinking a long low shelf along the back side of the rug would be good. (That means a trip to IKEA, though!)

Here are my cute signs for Open House! Like the rest of the teaching universe I got them at Michael's (along with the bowls) and I found cutesy signs on Pinterest that I liked.

We had an awesome first day on Friday. (Yes, our district started CRAZY early this year!) I have 18 kids as of right now, which is such a change from the class of 27 I had last year. I hope that number doesn't increase too much! They are a sweet, sweet bunch. I am so excited about going back to work tomorrow! I hope all of you that are headed back this week have a great first week!