The 100th Day of School

Our 100th day of school was this week! Confession: The 100th day ALWAYS sneaks up on me. ALWAYS. I like the IDEA of the 100th day and I want to celebrate it well, but it is a lot of work! A couple of years ago I put together some LOW-PREP 100th day activities and it saved me this year.  Here are some pics of what we did:

First, in the morning we made this class book. We brainstormed a whole bunch of foods that we LOVE and could eat 100 of. I heard some really interesting things...M&Ms, hot Taki chips, gummy bears, ice cream cones, pieces of popcorn...they had some great ideas. Then we brainstormed the things we would NOT want to eat 100 of...some of my favorite answers were hot wings, brussel sprouts, and rotten pumpkins. (Bless!) Then they did their writing and drew pictures. It turned out really cute and this will be a great addition to our classroom library!

After lunch we did our 100th day math stations. Some years we are able to stretch out our 100th day stuff a little longer, but we are CRUNCHED for time right now with our pacing guide so we did alllll of our 100th day things in the same day. I have made a bunch of the stations from my 100th day packet and used them in the past, but since we didn't have time to explain a lot of games or practice them I had them practice their skills with some of the printables instead. 

At my table, we worked on tallying (still a hard concept!) with this printable:

At another station, they used highlighters (which they LOVED!) to find all of the 100s:

In the cut and paste station, they practiced skip counting by 5s to 100:

And in my para's station, they made their 100th day necklaces to wear for the rest of the day:

That's it...nothing too fancy! We had a good time, though, and the best part is we are 100 days into the school year! My mind is definitely pre-occupied with prepping for maternity leave and getting everything squared away to be out from Spring Break until the end of the year. It was soooo nice to have these print-and-go activities at my fingertips! If you are looking for low-prep stuff for the 100th day, everything in this post is available in this 100th Day packet here in my TPT shop! 

Farmhouse Classroom Theme

I have been super hard at work this week wrapping up another classroom theme set. I start this last summer for my own classroom, but I didn't get around to finishing it because my grade level decided to go with a first-grade-wide camping theme. I finally found a few minutes as my break was winding down to take a look at it again and it's now DONE! I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone that farmhouse anything is a hot decor trend right now...shiplap, Rae Dunn, shabby chic, Fixer Upper...it's one of my favorite classroom themes that I've made so far.

Let me show you my favorite piece of the whole set: the quote posters! I am OBSESSED with how these turned out.

Some of these are based on things I say all the time in my own classroom! "Have a great day...or not! The choice is yours!" is a quote that our school does on the announcements every single day.

What else? Well, of course ABC posters! This time around I went with super simple black and white clip art for the primary versions of the posters. I included them with both Zaner-Bloser font and D'Nealian with the phonetically accurate clip art. I also made a set with cursive letters. I love the chalkboard with the pops of greenery on these!

I like this style of number poster, too. This is actually the same way I display my own number posters in my classroom: numeral, number word, and ten frame. They are SO useful and the kids reference them all the time. For shapes, I used sweet little farmhouse birdies to model the colors!

Shape posters are up next. These are also often referenced in my own classroom! Kids look at them all the time to check the spelling of shape words.

One of the reasons I love making these classroom decor sets is that I hear from teachers that having coordinating, ready-to-print classroom management tools helps them start the year off right! I personally LOVE to decorate and organize my classroom at the beginning of the year. Hanging up pocket charts, adding posters to my collection, thinking about how I'm going to use various displays to make the classroom run smoother this year...that's some of my favorite work at the beginning!

It's all here...word wall headers, clock numbers, welcome/word wall pennants, calendar printables, schedule cards, classroom jobs display, "Where Are We?" display, behavior/clip chart, hall passes, "How Do We Get Home?" display, and LABELS galore! I adore the Rae Dunn font, but for most things I also included a simpler primary-style font. I've heard from primary teachers that they prefer for things that the students are going to use to be very readable for the little ones and I totally get it!

Lastly...the teacher binder. I LOVE my own teacher binder. It keeps me soooo organized and there are dividers for everything. I really do use these forms, too, in my own classroom! I have been sending home that student info sheet now for YEARS.

As with my other decor sets, I included blanks of every single poster, label, card, divider, binder spine...every single one! There are blank printables in the .PDF as well as editable PowerPoint files (pre-loaded with text boxes) so that you can create anything extra that you need. When I've purchased decor items on TPT in the past, there have often been specific things that I wanted/needed. Editable templates fix that problem!

Do you want this set for your own classroom? Then hop over to my TPT store to check it out! You can click on any of the pictures to take you there or just click here.

Thanks for checking out my blog! Make something wonderful happen today!

Happy 2019!

Happy New Year! Was it just me or did this Winter Break fly by SOOOO fast? Just around the time that I got used to being on break it was time to get back into the groove of an everyday routine again. Teachers in my district went back to work on January 3rd and kids came back yesterday. Yes, on a Friday! It was kind of weird but in a way I appreciated the chance to ease back into the routine for a day before having to hit the ground running for a full week.

I have been teaching lower grades for a long time but it still never ceases to amaze me how much the little ones change in just a couple of weeks. We had a very sweet day on our first day back, although I was very happy to exit the classroom at quitting time and head home for 2 days of rest and recharging! Today I'm popping in to share some of the New Year's activities we did on our first day back.

One of my favorite things to do on the first day of the new semester is some goal-setting. We talk about how we have half a year to work on mastering the things we know are important. For the last 3 or 4 years I've read the book Squirrel's New Year's Resolution. It is just the cutest little book to explain what a resolution is and to jump-start a conversation about our own goals for the New Year!

We brainstormed some things that might be good goals for first graders here at the beginning of 2nd semester. I asked them to think about 3 kinds of goals: reading goals, math goals, and "just-for-fun" goals. For reading and math, this year's class came up with things like "meet my AR goals," "learn all my sight words," "get really good at sounding out words," "finish learning my letter sounds," "learn my math facts," and "learn my numbers to 120." I always love reading their "just-for-fun" goals! This year a lot of kids said they want to learn to ride a bike without training wheels. I also had some kids who said they want to learn to cross the monkey bars or how to tie their shoes.

Now, we are a Leader In Me school so we actually have a goal-setting template in the kids' leadership notebooks. (Leadership notebooks are a new thing for my classroom this year and worth a separate blog post...I'm putting it on my to-do list!) As it so happens, the kids are supposed to set both academic and personal goals for themselves. They are called WIGS (Wildly Important Goals) and we have them at the school level, grade level, and individual student level. Since we already had that template in our notebooks, I let the kids do their initial thinking/brainstorming on that template.

Then we did something a little crafty and fun. We rewrote our goals on some bright colored paper and decorated New Year's hats...these are now on my door and out in the hall!

If you want the templates for these, they are in a FREEBIE download in my TPT store! There's also a free coloring sheet, easy reader, and read the room/write the room center.

Click any of the pics or the link to snag your free copy!

For math yesterday we didn't do math stations or some of our usual things...not on a Friday after break, haha! Instead we reviewed addition & subtraction and worked on some problem solving. Then we made some cute snowmen to add to our word problems and they are all also hanging in the hall! Didn't they turn out cute?!

The face on the last one just cracks me up. Bless first graders! They are so fun!

This was SUCH an easy activity to do on our first day back. It's up in my TPT shop, too! I included both the word problems that I used with my own kids as well as editable versions.

You can click on the picture above or click here to check it out in my TPT shop!

Next week we will jump back in to our regular routine. I am really looking forward to second semester...for more than a few reasons! One, I LOVE how independent first graders are the second half of the year. The fall semester to me always feels like a little bit of an uphill struggle. After Christmas, though, they come back ready with longer attention spans and with more skills, so we can really rock and roll in reading and math! Some of my favorite units come up in the winter months, too-penguins, Jan Brett, black history, groundhogs....so much good content to teach! And on a personal note, I am going out on maternity leave in March and I'm excited about the changes for our little family. 

Hope everyone had a great holiday season and feels well rested as they head back into their normal routine!