Five For Friday

I love reading the posts from Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching!  And it has been a great way to chat with some bloggers I have not met.


1.   My Curious Firstie teammate, Maria, started our Mo Willems author study this week in her writing class.  I am so excited to be a part of it.  Our firsties are liking LOVING the pigeon books that we have started with!  We are focusing on reasons to recommend these books to others.  We are going to use these recommendations to graph their favorite pigeon books.

2. My little girl decided this week that she wants a "Pee Wee Playhouse" birthday party.  She cracks me up!

3. We read Frog and Toad this week from our Reading Street series.  I love Frog and Toad.  We were reviewing long vowel consonant e words and short vowels.  So I made a word sort with Frog and Toad cups.  This seemed to be very motivating...whatever works! :)

4. My husband read the "Skinny Rules" this week and decided he wanted to try this out.  So I will go along with it...but I am not looking forward to no carbs past lunch.  Oh, how I love candy, cookies, and just any sugar!

5. Mark Paul Gosselaar makes me smile.  He was on "Happy Endings" (I am a little behind on my shows...still catching up).  I am truly a sucker for any show he appears on.  It all stems back to "Saved By the Bell."

Hope you had a good week.  Here's for wishing that next week I can share we had a snow day (always wishing).

Em

Melted Snowmen with a FREEBIE!!!!

Prior to our Gingerbread Man read alouds and classroom workings, we were behind the curve and worked on Snowmen!  :)  Snow...... how I love thee only one day a year (Christmas) UNLESS it is a surprise gift from Mother Nature with a phone call before my alarm goes off.  Don't you just love waking up your coworkers with that great news?????  We had 0 snow days last year :( and I'm not sure if we'll even get one this year.  Which means our firsties will be 5 days smarter!  :) I guess that's the bright side of that. 

Anywhoo.....  back to snowmen.  I put together a packet inspired by First Grade Blue Skies . I decided that everyone focuses on How-To build a snowman, so I would focus on How-To Melt a Snowman!  :) 

We started the week with a little inquiry.  I put a bin of water, carrot, sticks, buttons, and a scarf (THANKS EM!)  and had each group investigate the items and talk about what it might have been. 
Here's what it looked like.....

After that, we talked about what Melted Snowman ARE and HAVE.  We made this not-so-cute chart.  :)  Post-its again...are my friend as I do this same lesson for three classes. 

Next, my friends filled out their own chart.      We read the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.  It worked AWESOME.  The great thing about teaching three classes the same lesson is you realize everything you do wrong grow and get better with each lesson.  Over the weekend, Em and I combined our girls jumped into child labor.  No laws were broken that we know of and our girls had an awesome time hanging out with each other and making these super cute and yummy melted snowman cookies!!!!!!   Em made a wonderful how-to PowerPoint to go along with our new unit.  :)  Our kiddos LOVED eating these guys as much as we LOVED making them! 

  What was so interesting to me was watching how each firstie ate his/her cookie.  Some... RIGHT for the marshmallow.  Others deconstructed (yes.. I watch Top Chef, that's where I learned that word) by taking all the parts off and eating those first, some ate completely around the marshmallow and then their last bite was that.  So funny! 

On day two we labeled a melted snowman. 

 We also began brainstorming ways we could melt our snowman.  Some of these little firsties are CRE-A-TIVE!  We had fire breathing dragons on our list, lava, mouth, hot lights, etc.....  So that's where we are now.  Writing our How-To Melt a Snowman writing pieces.  I can't wait to share them with you!  My high and middle firsties are writing their own pieces.  My low guys are doing it as a community writing. 

If you've made it this far.... THANKS for sticking with me!!!!!!  Here is a freebie for you!!!!  Let me know what you think!

Click the picture to get your FREE copy!!!! :)

GIANT Gingerbread Fun!

Sickness is going around and around.  As teachers, we try to brave it, but sometimes it gets us. :)  Monday, our Curious Friend Karen was out with no sub. Is that a problem in your district too?  For some reason or another, we can't get subs!  It's frustrating, but it also helps us pull out all kinds of creativeness.  :)

So... on Monday.... Natalie and I quick called each other on the way to school and came up with a Gingerbread Day!  After my two drop offs, I ran into this great store   and headed STRAIGHT to the after Christmas sale.  There I found these....

They are GIANT Gingerbread cookies.  At 70% off, I got them for $1.89 EACH!!!!!  At first they rang up as 6.82, but I quick asked the sweet self checkout lady and she disappeared for a little bit and came back with the new and improved price! :)  First... A FREEBIE for you!!!!

  Click on the pictures to grab your free copy.  :)

I found the gingerbread on Google Images.  The fonts were HelloSpot by Jen Jones and MTF Sweet Cheeks by Miss Tina Fonts.   Go check them out!

 

 

 This is what we found inside.  We split up our firsties into groups and set them to work.  First on the agenda was planning out where to place their gumdrops and peppermints.  They were so engaged!  :)  Next, they had to exhibit LOTS of self control while one person at a time placed their chosen candy.   When our firsties were finished, they had to sketch an accurate representation of their Gingerbread Man.  Most did an UH-Mazing job!   

After all this fun, we measured with our leftover gumdrops, graphed, and did a few math problems. 

Finally, our day ended with How-To Eat a Gingerbread Cookie.  We used parts of this packet from Lori over at Teaching with Love and Laughter.  Click on the picture to go to her FREEBIE packet. 

Here's what the end of our day looked like.

 

 

 

 

 It was a GREAT day of learning even though we were one of our best men down.

Can't Upload Pics. :(

Any ideas????  Blogger won't let me upload pictures, I'm so sad because I have several great pictures to share.  :( 
Thanks for your help sweet friends!

A New to You Post



So.... I started this post last weekend... UGH.... Life..... You. ALWAYS. get. in. the. way. So I hope you enjoy. I have lots more to chat about, but this will do for now. :)

This week was a short one for us, only three days, but felt like a normal 5 day week. :) Probably because I was at Urgent Care with our youngest on our first day back until midnight. :( Yes, you read that right... midnight. Poor girl... hacking her brains out and couldn't sleep. So... a breathing treatment, amoxicillin, and a steroid later, we were on our way home. She's MUCH better now! UPDATE... she wasn't better.  By Tuesday she was coughing again, by Thursday we were back at the Asthma Doc and put back on a steroid.   More breathing treatments. DOES.IT.EVER.END?

Back to business. :) Our kiddos came back super excited and ready to get learning! We had decided before break that I would teach prepositions because that was in our instructional calendars and my friend Karen, who teaches reading to all our firsties, had so many super fun Pete activities planned that she ran out of time to fit this in, so I gladly accepted the challenge. :) I knew that I wanted to use this great book. I L.O.V.E. this book! Do you use it in your classroom? BEAUTIFUL illustrations and many prepositions. I quickly made this not-so-beautiful chart below. It's in need of some SERIOUS color! I opted for the Post-Its so I wouldn't have to make three of these charts. :) I'm getting smarter as our year goes on. I will probably add the words directly onto the chart (and TONS of COLOR) a little bit of color when I go to work. UPDATE... this chart has color!!!!! :)

I used this chart and added a gesture for the words spacial relations. :) We said it often and used our WBT of Teach/OK, and Mirror. On Day 1, our firsties followed my instructions and drew a scene on their papers, then used a snowman and listened to the prepositions I said to move him around the scene. For example, "Walk your snowman THROUGH the woods TOWARD the house." "Place your snowman underneath the sun." The kids had a GREAT time and in the end were allowed to glue the snowman wherever he/she wanted.

On day 2, I have to admit I had one of those "teaching moments" when I was driving to work and in the midst of my autopilot being on, I had an idea! This turned out to be PERFECT for our firsties! What I love is that it was simple, kids were engaged, and I could use it for ALL THREE CLASSES!!!  Unfortunately.... blogger will not let me put an image of the directions, sorry!  Just click the link to grab a copy for yourself. 

Link for Snowman Preposition Directions

 

Here are a few pictures of how they turned out.  :)

 

   

 Next, we used this poem that Em found in a Highlights magazine.  :)  She's always looking out for us.  It was PERFECT and had lots of prepositions, so she drew the scene that you see below.  Then, we read the poem several times, practiced drawing the tracks, and finally used paint and our pinkies to make those great blue tracks! Our firsties were so excited that they dug their pinkies in up to the knuckle gently dabbed their pinkie into the paint.

 

How do you teach prepositions to your kiddos?

Catching Up

I have been absent from blog world for awhile.  The holidays just took over my life.  I think I am ready to jump back in. But I need to play some catch-up first.

My wonderful friend Maria posted about our amazing Pete the Cat week (so much fun!)  I had some pictures that she did not, so I thought I would share them.

1. I only have two days of our friend Karen dressing up for Pete the Cat week.  But the firsties loved
 comparing and contrasting her clothes.

2. I used a plate to make a cute Pete the Cat mask for the whole school to use for a picture.  The scarf and gloves helped the "Pete the Cat" effect in the picture.

3. These are some pins that I made for fun.  The four us wore them each day.  Then I gave four away to four lucky firsties.

We are starting a snowman unit this week.  Complete with poems, shape snowmen, graphs, prepositional snowman writing, snowman melting, and (my personal favorite) melted snowman cookies!

And finally...I could not pass up a chance to do a "Currently" this month from Oh'Boy Fourth Grade.

Happy New Year everyone!

Em