A Throwback, A Look Forward, and A FREEBIE!

We spent the whole morning at the water park as the clouds loomed over us. I am ex..haust..ed!  So I just tried to make some coffee with my toaster!  Wow!  Talk about needing some coffee, for sure!
Moving on...I thought I would join the party...

This post is from August 2012.  It is a beginning of the year idea.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Portrait the Portrait

I have always loved those beginning of the year/get to know your students activities.  All the good conversations that help you get to know each one of them.  Well, this year looks a little different for us. (I think I will be saying this a lot!)  Since we will all be working with our curious firsties this year, we decided to do all of these lessons as a grade level. It is such a great time to see my amazing co-workers in action.  I learn so much from them.

Today we focused on self-portraits.

It started off with our new Whole Brain Teaching CHAMPS routine, of course.  Then onto the book:

Then Maria did an amazing job showing the students how they can use letters and numbers to create a self-portrait. (U for the face, 3 for the mouth, etc.)

On to the self-portraits...

Add a little outline...

And voila!  

After this...they did add color.  I was impressed with these portraits!

Once these wonderful pictures were made, colored, and displayed, I introduced the book "Cat the Cat Who Is That?" by Mo Willems.  Do you know this story?

  It could seem a little easy for first grade.  But I used it as a way to do two things: 1. introduce ourselves to one another and 2. introduce speech bubbles. 

They loved the story!  They thought it was funny and enjoyed looking for the speech bubbles. After the story we practiced introducing ourselves just like the author did.  "I am Em the Em." or "I am Mrs. Eshman the Mrs. Eshman."  The students thought this was funny and were laughing as they introduced themselves! :)

 Once the practicing was complete, students had to write their introduction.  We wanted to attach it to their self-portrait.  We decided to just use an large index card for this to ensure that they had enough room.

Each index card said: "I am____________the __________."

The students did a great job writing the sentence and it was a nice little assessment/observation tool for us (well, so was the self-portrait).

We used the same book to make speech bubbles later in the day for our monkey craftivity!  We even had some hidden speech bubbles around all three rooms that students had to search for!  Speech bubbles are so much fun!
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to today! As our summer continues on and the new school year gets closer, I am planning, making, and constantly texting my teammates ideas!  Here are two of those ideas:

1.  We were talking about doing an "All About Me" type of poster but make it all about reading.  So I played around with the idea and came up with a banner.  There is a color and black and white version.  There are two.  One is all about the student and reading.  The second is all about the student and math.  Click on picture!

2. FREEBIE--I got very bad about printing off my plans last  year.  I just wanted to write them so that I didn't have to waste my time running to the copier (although that exercise would be good).  So I made up some new planning sheets for this year.  You can click on them if you want a copy.  They are for guided reading and guided math groups.

Happy Thursday!