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