Another busy year!

Well, our team cannot believe it is already nearing the end of October!  The year is flying by! We have been so busy, as I am sure you all have, too.  Daily 5 is in full swing, and the kids are loving it.  We are so very fortunate to have 5 netbooks for the students to use this year, in addition to our new smartboards!  So much technology = so much fun!  One of the best activities we have done so far (besides our yearly Fairy Tale Ball!!) is the creation of "noun town."  We had the students all create something (person/place/thing) to place on our noun town.  See pics! :) 

The canoe is my favorite!  :)


Another fun activity that we are working on is our Vocabulary Rocks! wall.  Here, we are using our camping theme (hence the rocks reference....) and will be posting vocabulary that we are learning, especially for math/science/social studies. 





We add vocabulary words from our various themes and lessons.

Fairy Tale Ball

Once upon a time, there were 5 classroom QUEENS with many little royal "subjects!" They decided to celebrate their fairy tale unit with a BALL! :)

There are 5 first grade classrooms in our school, and what we do is rotate the students around to each classroom, with 20 minutes in each class. Here are the 5 fairy tale activities we do: prince and princess dancing, enchanted storytime, snacks of magic wands (pretzles dipped in chocolate), photo frames and a photo of each student, and bean planting after reading Jack and the Beanstalk. Each student wears a headpiece portraying their favorite fairy tale character. They have the BEST time on this special day! This year, we decorated the entrance to our hallway, too (see picture below...)

And, so, the 5 classroom queens and the little royal subject partied happily, ever after!

Hot, Hot Hot!

Boy, have we been busy so far this school year! We can't believe it is almost October! We have been working to establish the Daily 5 in our classroom...so far, so good. The "stamina" building seems to be ongoing (yikes!) but we are continuing to work at it! :) Our students' favorite daily seems to be "writing" and "word work." They absolutely LOVE writing about topics of their choice, and we have seen a lot of interesting stories. This week, we will work on descriptive writing, and we like to focus on creative words. So, to that end, we use....Hot Tamales! Yummy, yummy! We have the kids talk about "spicy" words and they are thinking about that while they eat their "spicy" treat. I like to make a giant "hot tamale" for all the students to share out "spicy" words that they used in their writing! More to come soon...Happy Fall!

At-home activities for reading time!

Part of our first grade homework is to have the students read for 60 minutes per week. Our team created this "bingo" card of ideas for follow-up activities after they have read their just-right book, library book, favorite book, etc. You could use this many ways; we would have the kiddos complete one activity from the board per week, totaling one whole grading period (we have 9 week grading periods.) We would count these activities as a reading grade. Both the kids and parents really had fun with these ideas! We tried to include a little something for each students' interest, whether it be typing, making a game, writing a new story, etc. Click on the link below to grab a copy (it is NOT a pdf, so that you can change the wording to fit your needs.) Happy summer!
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=1h0h3snln1mP9ISGXiQ6yH2ABqHHUE86MchTwG5ZjT2g&authkey=COuz1rwG

Yummy books!

Our first grade students finished off the school year presenting an *edible book report.* They LOVED working on this! Each student read a book of their choice and then thought of a food item that reminded them of their book. They brought the food to share with their classmates. We had such a great variety of books AND edibles! Everything from The Hobbit (tea and cakes) to the Happy Birthday Book by Dr. Seuss (birthday cake) to Popcorn by Frank Asch (you guessed it..popcorn!) Our team all did this activity differently: Suzanne had all of her students present their reports/food items on the last day of school, making it a fun last day of school project! Others of us divided the assignment up so that 4-5 students per day would present their food items. (I had the friends who brought a "healthy" snack present before lunch...the friends with lots of sweets presented towards the end of the day.) So, you can see that you can work it any way you'd like. I have included a link here for our example sheet, including a parent letter. This is NOT a pdf, so that you can make changes as needed. Happy reading! :)

Parent letter: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=14APZUDndPY3ElXx4XrlLwT58GTrb8i3Zrq5w76WejcI&authkey=CLa17fcD


Book report format: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=1iP29GwQ5ploXrG8UaFRL5QO3D5Xrkt2-_vpUK_3G5Hk&authkey=COT90rgL