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!

Down on the Farm!

This week is one of my favorite weeks of the school year! This Friday we go on our annual field trip to the local dairy farm. Sometimes field trips are more stress than fun, but I really enjoy this one. :)

To prepare for our trip, we're doing a farm theme in our classroom this week. I made this little center activity to reinforce our recent study of nouns and adjectives. It's FREE at my TPT store, so feel free to go pick up a copy. If you like it, be sure to leave a rating and follow my store!

Flip Flop Addition

Last week our first grade team introduced the commutative property to our students. Now, I am a strong believer in teaching students the correct terminology for things, but I also know that at this age they sometimes need something a little more fun to help them remember. Because of this, the commutative property has always been known as "flip flop addition" in my classroom. I've found that this really helps the strategy "stick" and I FINALLY decided to create some activities to go along with the name we use. (Probably because I am really not digging our new math series...anyone else using Go Math? Not my favorite...)

I uploaded my activities to TPT, so if you're teaching your firsties (or seconds!) about the commutative property, too, feel free to check it out!

For a Friday bonus, I'll send a copy to the first three people to comment for FREE. :) Just leave a comment with your email address and I'll send it your way!

It's been too long!

Hello friends!

I can't believe it's been over a year since I last updated this blog! I miss the community of teachers here and have resolved to pick it back up for 2012-2013.

Question - This year I have three ESOL students in my class. I don't have any experience with ESOL and want to make sure I am doing the very best I can for these kids. Can anyone point me in the direction of any great blogs/websites on teaching ELLs?