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!

December Currently

My poor blog.  I have the best of intentions about updating it but...well...some things just take precedence when you're in grad school.  Once I am all graduated with this M.Ed maybe I can be a big girl blogger!

For now...December Currently is what's up!

1.) Self-explanatory.  Little Miss is still obsessed with Sesame Street and I don't see her Elmo/Abby fixation ending anytime soon.  I can't complain-I find Abby a lot less annoying than, say, Dora.  (Or Daniel Tiger from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood...or Caillou...but I digress.)

2.) We had a great week last week.  I SO enjoyed being on break.  There was a lot of lounging around in pajamas, but also a lot of holiday efficiency-Little Miss' birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year which meant we jam-packed birthday fun right along with Turkey Day festivities.  She got a lot of presents from sweet family, but our favorite at the moment is the Disney Princess Klip-Klop stable.  It is SOO cute...the horses actually move themselves down the ramps of the stable.  Adorbs.

3.) Also self-explanatory.  Tomorrow morning is gonna be ROUGH.  I will need loads of coffee.  And plus also, I am dreading it just a teeny tinsy bit because one of my little pumpkins was suspended the week before break...tomorrow will be his first day back with us and I am not sure how that's going to go.  (It's not been a good year so far, guys.  This class is TOUGH and I'm saying that as the teacher who has had more than her fair share of tough groups.  That's a whole 'nother post, though.)

4.) I am so excited about the TpT Cyber Monday sale...and not just because my shop is on sale (what little there is in it-making stuff for the shop will be high on my priority list once I'm done with grad school, promise) but because I have picked out a whole bunch of stuff that I want.  I may just stay up until midnight and do my shopping then...craziness, right?

5.) Ugh, I don't wanna.  I have a clinical report and a research plan to submit this week...and I've already done one big assignment that's due tomorrow.  Most of the work is done, but I have to synthesize it all and make it sound good...blah.

6.) Christmas Eve is my FAVORITE.  We go to church and there's candelight communion.  Shopping is all finished, the presents are all wrapped, and the excitement is still to come..I love Christmas Eve!  After candelight service we usually come home, put on jammies, and then cook breakfast food for dinner before watching holiday movies and hanging out as a family.  

Fall is here! (graphing freebie)

Well hello, little blog, long time no see!  I'm not going to make excuses-real life is SOOO busy between the teaching and the grad school-ing and the mommying-I barely have time to breathe at the moment, much less sit down to type out a blog entry.  The last month has been nuts...but I think we're getting into a groove, slowly but surely.

And it's FALL!  Don't you love fall?  It's probably my favorite season now.  So much good stuff happens in the fall-The Fair...the pumpkin patch...football (GOOO, Dawgs!)...beautiful weather (buh-bye, 90 degree temps)...hoodies and sweaters...and towards the end, Thanksgiving and Little Miss' birthday!  (Which fall on the same day this year.  I'm totally going to take the easy way out and just stick some birthday cake on the dessert table at Thanksgiving-no separate parties here.)  Oh-and a BEAUTIFUL little thing called Fall Break.  We get ours next week and I am so excited.  This is the first year our district has given us an actual Fall Break (versus a three-day weekend for the kids and a teacher work day for the grown-ups).  We are going to the beach for a few days.  I can't wait to see how Little Miss reacts to the ocean and the sand!  We haven't been since last summer and she was so little then she basically slept under the beach umbrella the whole time...I have a feeling that this trip will be a little more action-packed.

I do have a fall freebie for you guys.  Now, the idea is NOT mine, mkay?  I actually saw this over at Mrs. Plant's Kindergarten...go see how she graphed candy corn with her kids last year!  (And while you're there ooh and ahh over the Spookly pumpkins-Spookly is one of my FAVORITES!  I will be using him after Fall Break when we go into our shapes unit!)  I was all set to use her adorable little graphing sheet, but then we ran into a little problemo...my grocery store doesn't have green apple candy corn this year.  Man!  So I grabbed several bags of the generic autumn harvest mix and whipped up my own little graphing sheet.  It's a tad bit more first-grade oriented...I ask them to "Analyze their data" by writing some sentences for me.  They are getting so good at it!  This will be one of my math stations this week at the teachers' tables.  (And to differentiate, don't worry, I will give some of my little kiddos who need extra support sentence frames to help them with the analyze part.)  Click the pic to download!

And I'll wrap up with a little funny from first grade!  We did our big Johnny Appleseed stuff last week...all of the classic stuff: taste testing apples, graphing our results, reading books about Johnny, filling out a character web, and then some All About writing...(I am obsessed with writing across the curriculum right now, it is a Hot Topic in my grad classes).  Well, one of my little friends and I were conferencing over his All About Johnny Appleseed piece and he was doing an AMAZING job.  I was helping him stretch out some words and one of his friends from the table next to him was eavesdropping on our conference...and she started to tell my conferencing kiddo what the letters were.  He told her, "Hush!  My brain can tell me, I don't need you!"

I mean, what can you say to that?

Take-home Book Bags!

I have a fun project to show you tonight!  I am so excited because I have my homework set up for the rest of the school year.  That's right, the rest of the school year!  (Well, the next 25 weeks, anyway.)  Read on to find out what we're doing...

This summer as you all know I was a crazy grad student mama and took not one, not two, but THREE classes.  It was insane.  I learned a lot, though!  For one of my classes I did a research project on fostering a strong home-to-school literacy connection.  As part of the project, I read up a lot on take-home literacy kits.  (They're called all kinds of cute things.)  By the end of the project, I knew this was something I wanted to take on!  Why?  Well...for starters...let me vent about homework.  HOMEWORK, ugh!  It is a pain in my patootie.  I know, I know, it gives them a chance to practice at home the skills they are working on in school.  That SOUNDS good, doesn't it?  But, consider the following items:
1.) More than half of my students (that's a rough guesstimate) do not have strong parental support in the classroom.  Traditional homework-those lovely, neat packets that I so painstakingly put together on Monday-often are still in their agenda pockets on Friday morning.  Waste of paper, am I right?
2.)  If it's too hard for them in school with MY help, what are the poor strugglers to do at home without the certified teacher?
3.) (and this is really the heart of my argument) We have an extended school day.  My kiddos are with me from 8:15-4:15.  As a mama myself, I just don't have the heart to give them work to take home to do.  Their hours of daylight are already numbered.  By the time some of these babies get off the bus, it's 5:00.  That's dinnertime...and at our house, dinner is followed by bathtime and bedtime is not too far away.  Math worksheets?  Yeah, not a priority.

So...enter the take-home literacy bags.  How perfect, right?  You send home a little bag with a book in it.  Their only homework is to read the book with somebody else.  HOPEFULLY, the grown-up at home (Mom, Dad, Grandma, Auntie, whoever) will take a minute to do it...but if they can't, then an older sibling probably will.  (I hope.)  And if that doesn't happen, well, I see zero harm in that plucky little first grader looking through the book solo.  It's a win-win-win, pretty much!  (As long as the book makes it out of their bookbag...but the books I picked out are pretty interesting and I have faith in my first graders that they will!)

Tonight I put my baggies together.  This is what my dining room table looked like:

 Inside each bag I put a book (picked carefully from the classroom library) and a tip sheet for parents:

Tomorrow the kids are also getting a letter that explains Book Bags in greater detail as well as the "accountability" piece (AKA, what I could share with administrators if they are wondering why I am not doing homework the TRADITIONAL way)...a little bookmark.  I got the idea from Mrs. Wills Kindergarten.  She offers it up as a freebie! 

And speaking of freebies...if you want what I made for my book baggies...well, here ya go!  There are two pages...one is for the regular bags...but for some bags I actually had duplicate copies of texts so I'm sending them both home (twinsies!) for some partner-style reading.  There's a different little insert for those.  (I taped mine to the inside of the bags.  I am sure they will need replacing.  Ideally, I would have laminated them and put them in the books themselves...but I am ALL OUT of laminating sheets for my little Scotch laminator and I was in a hurry to get these in my kids' hands tomorrow!)

The parent letter is here.

I am so excited to let my kiddos pick their bags tomorrow!  I will let you know how this little project goes.  Also, if you are interested in take-home literacy bags, I created a Pinterest board of some of the fabulous things I see other teachers are doing.  Some teachers are really creative and make theirs very FANCY!  I am sticking to plain and simple for now, but we'll see how it goes!

September Currently

It's the beginning of the month, which means it's time for September's Currently!  This little linky is put on by the fabulous Farley at Oh'Boy 4th Grade...don't you love it?!

 Listening: Sesame Street...We LOVE Sesame Street in our house...it's taught Little Miss all of her letters and numbers, too.  She is OBSESSED with counting right now and her newest thing when she has a book is to point to the first letter on each page and name it.  Not gonna lie...that makes this reading teacher's heart PROUD! (She just turned 21 months last week.)

Thinking: When hubby bought me a Keurig for Mother's Day at first I wasn't sure I liked it.  He gave me a big sampler box to go with it and the first five or six K-Cups I tried were either too dark or too flavored.  When I discovered the Caribou K-Cups, though, it was like the clouds parted and the coffee angels sang...I get America's love affair with the Keurig now!  We ran out of the cups a few weeks ago and I've been drinking the cappuccino K-cups (also yummy, but not quite as powerful)...last week I found a good deal on Amazon and ordered some more.  Delish!

Wanting: I need want some new sneakers.  I went shopping yesterday and saw SEVERAL pairs that I loved, but I was already spending a small fortune on new school clothes for me so I didn't get any.  Hubby promised me a trip to Run Fit Sports so we both can get new kicks.  (He amazes me because he actually RUNS.  Sometimes on his lunch break.  And nobody's even chasing him.)  Can't wait!  I want some that are comfy but let's face it, the most important thing to me is that they are CUTE.

Needing...this is self-explanatory.  My group this year is something else.

Goals for ME:
1.) I need to get back on the work-out bandwagon BADLY.  I did okay this summer and even worked out for the first week of pre-planning but since school actually started I have been so mentally and physically exhausted at the end of the day that all I want to do is play with Little Miss, watch Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy, and call it a day.  That's going to change this week...I have an online workout buddy who's going to keep me accountable!
2.) My grad school program is a blended model, which means that 85% of our assignments are done outside of class and submitted online.  I like it because I only have to spend the amount of time that I NEED to working on schoolwork.  It's hard because I have to keep myself on track and it's easy for things to pile up until the last minute...trying not to let that happen this semester!
3.) We have an extended school day which means we can't leave until 4:15.  I am bad about staying an extra 15 or 20 (or 30) minutes after the last kid leaves to talk and/or do "one more thing."  I am trying very hard to NOT do that this year.  I get to work early (which doesn't take away from family time since hubby takes Little Miss to Nana's and she sleeps almost until it's time to go) so I should leave on time, especially since I only have a few hours with Little Miss before her bedtime!

Well, there ya have it...September's Currently.  I LOVE it when the calendar changes from August to September.  We've been in school for a month and although I have always (even as a kid) gone back to school in August it doesn't feel like we should be in school yet...but September is officially school time!

thank goodness for Labor Day

Well, hello, little bloggity blog, long time no see!

Are we glad it's Labor Day?!  I know I am.  I absolutely, positively had nothing left in me by the end of the day on Friday.  I'm not going to stretch the truth-this group of kiddos I have this year is giving us (my co-teacher and I) a run for our money.  I keep reminding myself that it starts off rough every year and I contemplate other career options and buying massive amounts of lottery tickets in hopes of striking it rich for a while but then sooner or later we get into a rhythm and we adapt to the new normal.  Aside from my class being...um...a challenging conglomeration of personalities (haha) we are a little off-kilter right now because we have a new math curriculum (yay? Even though we just started using the state's frameworks last year but okay...) and a new phonics program (still in boxes in my classroom) and oh, by the way, all of this random technology magically appeared in our classrooms last week (I got a cart-and a laptop-and an i-Pad) which is great but WHOO the learning curve is a little bit steeper than I can handle right now.  Especially since I am headed into week 3 of the semester at grad school and our professor expects us to, you know, do homework and stuff.

The sermon this morning at church was basically "we can do hard things" (if you are not familiar with Momastery's mantra, please run over there and spend a few hours reading all of Glennon's posts, especially this one and this one).  I am pretty sure that was one of those neon arrows sent from heaven to help me along on my way and NOT a coincidence.

To "unwind" (hahahahaha) I have been making fun things for my classroom that I've then been dropping into my TpT store.  I spent the better part of my week procrastinating from doing homework creating things for our data unit.  It's basically ALL of the graphs I do with my class here at the beginning of the year to introduce graphing (especially those pesky tally charts) and I threw in a pre and post assessment as well.

Then today for some reason I got a wild hair about the SS standard we're doing next week about some patriotic songs (America/My Country 'Tis of Thee & America The Beautiful) and created some stuff to go with THAT standard.  We share lesson plans as a grade level and one of my co-workers found some neat stuff out on the Interwebz but it wasn't exxxacctttlly what I wanted so...3 hours playing around on my laptop and here's what I came up with:

I made two cute little student booklets for students to put together while we're studying the songs (um, probably in a literacy station, because even though the district WANTS us to now teach science and social studies in their own neat little block of time we don't actually have time for that-oh yeah, and it's a best practice to integrate content areas with literacy instruction!) as well as some pocket chard cards and student versions of the songs.  Next week's social studies activities, check check!  

Speaking of Social Studies...I do have some exciting news to report.  A month or so ago I created a DonorsChoose proposal for some SS mentor texts about the specific American historical figures the kiddos are supposed to learn about in 1st grade: Ben Franklin, Harriet Tubman, Lewis & Clark, Sacagawea, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington Carver, Thomas Jefferson...(yes, it's the most random group of people EVER).  I created the proposal after doing an annotated bibliography of content area literacy resources...why not, I figured, since I already had a list of books?  My project didn't expire until October, but guess what...it's been funded ALREADY.  Some of the donations were from my fabulous family and friends, but a lot of them were from complete STRANGERS.  Isn't that awesome?  The books arrived this week...I gotta make some cute labels for them and then they are headed to the classroom library PRONTO!  Whoop whoop!

I think that's about it...I hope everyone has a fabulous Labor Day!  We are doing absolutely nothing, which sounds perfect to me!