Class Books!

As soon as the kids walk in the classroom, there is a journal prompt on the board ready for them to answer. Sometimes when the kids come up with really creative and thoughtful answers, we'll rewrite their journal entry and illustrate it on a large piece of construction paper. The kids LOVE reading them, especially because they have their own featured page! It takes some time, but it's well worth it! The students are able to take them home, and the parents are able to make comments on the last page of each book. Pretty neat!

Rainbow Fish!

We did a Marcus Pfister author study in January, early February. We LOVE the Rainbow Fish series! It has such a good moral to the story, and brings up great friendship topics! We used a web graphic organizer to help us write what friendship means and examples of what a good friend does. For an art project, I used an outline of a fish and asked the kids to draw scales and color them as hard as they could with crayon to get a lot of wax on the paper. Then, we went over the crayon with watery blue paint and let it dry. We cut a holographic gift bag to make individual rainbow scales. Some of the fish came out so good!

Center Activities!

Since I've been looking through Mailboxes lately, I've been finding awesome and simple center activities.

Cupcake Compound Eggs

I bought plastic eggs from the Dollar Tree and wrote the words on the eggs. The kids saw a glimpse of them and got excited. Of course, they thought there was candy inside and not a learning tool, but that's ok :)

Addition/Subtraction Clothespin Manipulatives

I wrapped a hanger in yarn to make it look cuter. The kids will clip on the amount of each addend to find the sum. Same for subtraction. Just something different for the kids to play around with and help them add or subtract!

Calendar Stories

I LOVE finding calendars for $.50 and buying tons of them to use for writing activities for the kids. When I taught the older kids, I loved using pictures and props to spur on their creative juices. It's a little more difficult to get the little ones to start thinking of ideas on their own, but I guess it's a perfect time to model, model, model!

Games

A fun idea and game that I played in my class is a student to student interactive game. Give students a question, or problem, etc. Count them off by 1's and 2's. Ask the ones to form a tight circle in the middle and the twos to form a circle on the outside. Have the students walk around in the circle (going opposite ways) while you play music. When you stop the music, the students will stop and ask their question or problem to the person standing in front of them. Well, the person that was supposed to be in front of them. Oh ya! I'm teaching FIRST grade and not FIFTH grade. They didn't understand how to scoot down and fix themselves so each person who had a partner. OH! So, every time I stopped the music I told them to freeze, fixed everyone, and then we shared! They loved it!

My favorite part was listening to them sing at the top of their lungs, "Baby you're a firework!" and watching their AWESOME dance moves! (We dance ALL the time and do lots of kinesthetic movements to help us learn!) And miraculously enough, they ACTUALLY asked each other the questions and weren't silly when I stopped the music. They FROZE! I guess I'm used to the fifth graders who always start gossiping.

Mailbox Ideas

I really enjoy looking through old Mailboxes! There are so many great ideas and little classroom management tips that get me excited to try something new! However, now I've bookmarked so many pages in about 10 of the books that I feel totally overwhelmed! I'll be posting some pics and ideas that I got from the Mailboxes as I create them! I made compound word Easter eggs today! Pictures to come!

Also, I feel like tons of great ideas come to mind when I'm in the shower, and of course I'll forget them by the time I get out because I have to jump back into my busy life. I just now remembered back to my college days around finals time, when my best friend gave me these AWESOME crayons that you can WRITE ON THE WALL!!!! I need to find these crayons and use them to write my ideas down! Also, I think that it would be a cool prize for kids to take home and practice their spelling words!

President's Day Activities!

Another President's Day activity! I got the idea from one of the other teacher blogs I've been following. The kids traced their hands to make the wings.

They turned out with their own personalities!

Challenging Question of the Day

You know those questions that a kid asks randomly that stops you in your tracks and leaves you speechless? I had one of those thrown at me today!

We're all working nicely on the carpet, practicing writing in a Venn Diagram comparing Abe Lincoln and George Washington, when suddenly out of the scritch-scratching of pencils comes a high pitched voice, "Ms. Riddle, are humans part animal?"

Ummm? What do you say to that? I could talk about evolution, but then I would have to talk about creation and that would ruin the awesome concentration of the class. That's some deep thinking right there.

I resorted in saying, "We are all living things. Just like plants are living, animals are living, so are we. Now get back to work :)" With a great big smile on my face.

What do you say to that?

Graphic Organizers

I finally finished some of the graphic organizers I planned to make! I decided to do themed shapes that can be used in all different ways!

Here is the Heart Web.

Egg-cellent Summary!

Bee Organized! Story Honeycomb

Happy Birthday, George Washington! President's Day Activities

Happy Birthday, George Washington! So many fun activities! Ms. Piatt (from iluvrecess.blogspot.com) and I mixed classes to do an activity that requires the children to listen to verbal directions. Cutting the paper requires lots of time, (thank you Mr. Piatt!) but the kids really enjoy it and the projects turn out so cute!

Spelling Patterns Cups

I totally got this idea from the Mailbox, so I can't take ANY credit! Basically, you will write the spelling patterns on cups with letters that will create words. The students will twist the cups to make real words or nonsense words. I have a little white board that the students will write the words on. They LOVE it! Just make sure to explain how to treat the cups...because holes were poked in mine!

Brain Bags!

So, this is my first year ever working with the little ones. At the beginning of the year, I tried several different ways to do "center time." I felt that nothing would work for me, and I didn't have the classroom management skills yet to handle it either (I had never seen a first grade room function). I didn't like having to stop my small group to tell the kids to switch, or keep up with who was in what center (I got lots of arguing and whining from the kids, argh!) However, I came up with a solution! Brain Bags! Basically Brain Bags are made up of activities that the students can do BY THEMSELVES! Hooray!

I use a tic-tac-toe organizer to fill out and let the kids know what they are allowed to do.

This way I can DIFFERENTIATE for each child, depending on where they are at in each subject. They mark off the number when they are finished with the activity. I explain new activities during our morning meeting, so that when they finish their work, they can walk over quietly to the brain bags, choose one, and work quietly without asking me, "What do I do now?" They have plenty to do! I found these books at Dollar tree, which are for my low, low kiddos and they love it!

And this is a cute felt barn I found in the dollar section at Target! I haven't decided if I should make it, "The Word Farm" where the kids will create words based on the patterns we're learning in LA. Or, if I should leave it for Bossy-R Practice. I'll figure it out by tomorrow!

Place Value Fishing!

One of the kindergarden teachers gave me the idea, so all the credit goes to Ms. Cone! She showed me the pattern of fish she was cutting out and explained that she was making a fishing game. I loved the idea, so I decided to make one of my own! They are di-cut fish with magnets on the back. I found little place value flash cards and used sticky-tac to attach the flash cards to the fish. Then, I tied some yarn to a dowel with some paper clips at the end for the fishing pole. I had just purchased an aquarium for my classroom and used the big box from it as the "fish tank" for our place value fishing game! You can put any sort of flash card on the fish which makes it a great center game. The kids love playing with it, and get lots of practice with math!

Go Away, Big Green Monster!

At the beginning of the school year, we read Go Away, Big Green Monster! The kids LOVED it, so we made little brown paper bag puppets of the Green Monster! At the time, we were just starting to read, se we used our puppets to help us read. We also read in "monster" voices, which the kids loved! As a reminder, I made a monster face bulletin board, taped all of their puppets to it, and hung it on the ceiling. At first the kids were a little scared of it, especially when it fell down on one of the students! She wasn't too happy, but we all ended up laughing. Now, I can't figure out how to keep it up on the ceiling. I'm guessing there is a bit of moisture in my room which makes things fall off my cinder block walls all the time!

Petroleum Engineering Explanations!

Well, my dad was in town for a few days, and I invited him to come watch me teach! Of course he said yes and he came on a Friday morning. He volunteered himself to explain to the kids what he does, petroleum engineering! The kids were mesmorized by his drawings and explanations, and he did a great job explaining things in non-technical terms! It was great to see my dad interacting with the kids :)

Graphic Organizers

Well, our TAP program goal for the week is to implement graphic organizers into our classes to help expose the kids to different kinds of ways to organize their information. When I taught 4th and 5th grade, I used them ALL the time. But I did not realize how important it was to start teaching the kids how to use them so young! So my goal this week is to implement them. And I've thought of a cute theme for my organizers. I saw a honeycomb organizer and it gave me the idea to "Bee Organized." I'm so excited! I'll post pictures of them when I finish! It'll have to be a weekend project!

Clouds!

Well, one of my good friends is getting her Masters in Atmospheric Sciences (So meteorology), and she mainly works with/studies clouds!! So, she was sweet enough to come in and present some information about the clouds and help explain the different kinds of clouds to the kids! She read a book to the kids first (It Looked Like Spilt Milk) and then we showed a clip of a tornado to get the kids excited! Then she showed us different kinds of clouds and we taught the kids the altitude of the clouds by comparing it to our bodies. We imagined we were giants and the cirrus clouds are by our heads, the cumulus clouds are by our chest and tummies, and stratus clouds are by our feet. Then we watched a video about tornado safety and the kids were intrigued and learned so much! As a culminating activity, we made cotton ball clouds and one of the other teachers made a rain cloud with the steps of a thundercloud. Here are some pictures!

Dollar Store Treasures!

So I went to the Dollar Tree and found AWESOME deals! I found some file folder games, tons of borders, and my favorite Easter chicks and carrots that are shaped like eggs!

Perfect little games to keep the kiddos busy! Although I feel that some of these games are for 4th or 5th grade, some are appropriate for 1st grade as well.

And here are the cute little eggs that I found. I'm brainstorming ideas about how I can use them in my centers!

More pics!

More Ideas from Classrooms!

Alright, other great ideas from wonderful teachers in our little school! I LOVE Ms. Cone's Bee Hive Reading Area! So cute! The Question Words Question Mark is a simple and cute idea that a teacher's student teacher made her.

My Classroom and Others

I want to remember and share some good ideas from my classroom and other rooms from around the school! The pictures of the peacock and little guy with the umbrella are some ideas that I took from the ilearntechnology blog. They have all levels of Blooms questions with verbs as well! Just a friendly reminder to ask the kids different varieties of questions! Also, I took a picture of some pointers that my fellow teacher from Kinder made. She bought dowels from Michael's and used toys from kids meals to put on top. Such a cute idea! I have my dowels, but haven't finished the rest of the project yet! There are pictures of the "Safe Zone"/Reading Area in my room and what is posted on the walls outside my classroom.

We made our own penguins and used a graphic organizer to write a fiction story about our penguin.

We are learning about Bossy -R this week.

We wrote our own Dark, Dark Tale. (We were inspired by the book A Dark, Dark Tale)