Oh, hey blog!

Wow. My last post was in 2012?! That is crazy. So much has changed since that last post with even more changes on the horizon! Let's see...what's happened...

Well, after four years in first grade, I have moved to kindergarten! I felt like it was time for a change and I thought a grade level change would be exactly what I needed. I think moving grade levels has been really good for my teaching. Things are new and fresh and I'm excited about teaching new things. My kinders are so sweet and wonderful. I have a really awesome group of kids - my teammates are just a tiny bit jealous. ;)

I also really like that I moved down just one grade level. Moving from 1st to K, I came to kindergarten with a really solid understanding of where my students need to be at the end of the year and that has been so helpful in my planning and teaching. Also having all of my first grade materials has made differentiating for my higher kids super easy - I just pull out a 1st grade activity for that standard.

So that's where I am now. More about where I'm going later! For now, I want to know - do you change grade levels every few years? Or are you happy staying where you are? I've been debating trying an older grade in the next few years, but can't make up my mind! Pros and cons to staying or moving? Share!

Thankful

Day three of thankfulness - out of my funk already!

Today I am thankful for the right to vote (and the fact that we had a day off Tuesday to do it!). We had a little mock election in our classroom today. Our candidates were Duck (Duck for President), Grace (Grace for President) and Otto (Otto Runs for President by Rosemary Wells - lesser known, but I like it!). Otto was our winner, and my students were so excited about the voting process. I can only hope that that same excitement exists in 12 or so years when they are able to vote in our national elections.

Thankful

Today I am thankful for my working heat! I hear about my friends up north just now regaining heat in their homes and can't even imagine...I'm freezing down here in GA! Hoping that power and comfort are restored to those affected by this storm as quickly as possible.

Thankful

I'm kind of in a funk today. The weather is dreary, the negativity of the end of a major election is still fresh on my facebook feed, and with the time change it's dark by the time I leave school in the afternoon.

This is not the mood I want to be in. So I've decided to jump on the November thankfulness bandwagon. Every day I'm going to list something that I'm thankful for, and I thought this would be a good place to do it. Feel free to join me!


Today I am thankful for the 21 sweet faces that greet me each morning. I have such a great class this year, and I am lucky to get to spend my days with them. :)

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Charlotte's Web

As I plan my year I really like to look for themes that transition nicely into each other so that I'm not totally changing up everything when I move to a new theme. This year I knew I wanted to have a farm theme because we take our annual field trip to the farm. I also knew I wanted to do a spiders theme because I just think they are cool! I also always have at least one sweet kiddo whose family doesn't celebrate Halloween, so I have to be careful about choosing October themes. :)

I had these on my calendar, but with some space in between. What could I use to link these themes? Charlotte's Web! What a smooth transition from farm to spiders. So we started reading the book as a class and I started looking for resources to go along with the book.

Surprisingly, there really aren't a lot of first grade resources for this book. I found some CUTE things on TPT, but they all covered topics we haven't gotten to yet! I stumbled across some SUPER fantastic clip art by Melonheadz and decided to make some stuff of my own. If you are interested, feel free to check it out at my TPT store!

Ahoy!

Recently we had so much fun with a pirate theme! We were studying maps and continents, and what better guides to maps than our pirate friends? :)

Check out these adorable pirates we made using Deanna Jump's Pirates Math and Literacy Fun!

We also used her writing template paper, but changed the activity just a bit. We were learning about ed and ing and past and present tense, so we wrote journal entries as pirates telling what we did yesterday, what we are doing today, and what we will do tomorrow. We have just really introduced longer writing with introduction and conclusion sentences, so I was sure how it would go, but I thought they turned out great!