Election 2016

Today's post is all about the election.  WAAAITT!! Not THAT election!  Let's talk voting in first grade world!  We had today off of school, so yesterday was our "official" voting day in first grade!  We started off by reading Duck for President.  The class discussed the qualities of a good president (oh those sweet innocent minds), the job of a president, and whether or not Duck should/should not be president.  They voted and here is the result...

Then, came the REAL voting....Oreos or Chocolate Chip?!?!?!?!  We discussed the qualities of a good cookie, flavors that may/may not make it delicious, etc!!!  Each first grader received a cookie of each type...I mean, how could they vote without a taste test, right?!  After they taste tested and gave it some thought, ballots were given and a choice was selected.  The kiddos got to go up to a ballot box to drop off their vote and received an "I Voted" sticker!  The votes were carefully counted and recorded and the winner was.....OREOS!!! 

Well, here's to Election 2016 and the OREO!!  Hope everyone has a great rest of the week!  







Pete the Cat and Cause and Effect

Happy November!!  I wanted to type up a quick post on an activity I have done in my classroom to help understand cause and effect.  For first graders this can be tricky so I looked up ways to help increase the understanding of this on the internet  (probably Pinterest).  I don't remember where I found this idea, but wherever it came from, thank you!!!  What group of first graders don't like Pete the Cat? My class does, so this was perfect!  I read Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes.  In the story, Pete wears white shoes but when he steps in strawberries, the shoes turn red.  When he steps in blueberries, the shoes turn blue!  You can see in the picture, that the boys and girls wrote the word "WHY" over "cause" and "WHAT" over "effect."  They were able to pick which event to write about (strawberries, blueberries, mud, water) and then tell what happened.  Once they were done with the writing, they made a picture showing the cause and effect!

I think using this story and drawing Pete the Cat would be a great anchor chart to help teach the little ones about cause and effect! Leave me a comment letting me know how you teach cause and effect in your classroom!  I hope everyone has been having a great Monday!!!

Pumpkin Fun

The past several weeks have been more than busy! Oh, who am I kidding?  Yes, it's been busy hectic with parent-teacher conferences and all, but as any teacher knows the feeling, there have been many nights of coming home from work, barely having enough energy to make dinner, and vegging on the couch (umm, can you say, World Series?? GO CUBBIES!!!)  I'm finally getting a chance to post about the pumpkin themed activities we did over a week ago.  Several years ago I came across the Pumpkin Unit from Mrs. Ricca's store on TpT.  I was able to incorporate some activities with my first graders and added some of my own.  Depending on the availability of parent volunteers I can have for that day, I can have the kiddos move around to different centers.  This year, we were only able to complete three, but had a nice mix of science, math, and reading.   One of my fabulous parent volunteers read a book about the life cycle of the pumpkin and then the groups completed the cut and sort activity.

On this particular day, the groups rotated around to: The Life Cycle of the Pumpkin, Pumpkin Math Facts, and Pumpkin Investigations.  The plastic pumpkin cups are from the Dollar Tree.  Two dice were added to each pumpkin.  The kiddos had to shake their pumpkin and roll out the dice.  Then, they had to add up two addends.  I created the corresponding sheet for them to use and write down the number sentence and sum.

I was going to wait and post this later, but didn't want to wait too long!  There's still time for those who want to use some of these activities on Monday!  We haven't finished the pumpkin investigations just yet!  On Monday, we will estimate How Many Seeds (click on the title to get the book) are in our pumpkin, put the seeds in groups of five or ten, and then count to see how many seeds were inside.  We predicted how many cubes tall the pumpkin was, counted how many lines were around the pumpkin, described if the pumpkin was small, medium, or large.  Lastly, the kiddos predicted whether the pumpkin would sink or float in a bucket of water. 

I spent some time with the whole class and we used the different sized pumpkins to estimate how many cubes it would take to measure each pumpkin.  This was such a great pre-teaching activity for measurement.   In addition to counting our seeds, the kiddos will use the Halloween themed word cards to unscramble the sentences on Monday.

My firsties had so much fun working on all of these activities.  They stayed engaged and enjoyed tying together math, science, and literacy!  How much better could it get?!?!  I hope this post can give some primary teachers some last minute Halloween ideas for Monday! If you choose to do any of these activities, leave me a comment letting me know how they went!   Wishing you all a spookatuclar Halloween filled with many sweet treats!







Apples, Apples, Apples!

Hope everyone had a fun and relaxing weekend!  The weather this weekend made it hard to get anything done.  There were many clouds, rain, and that fall chill in the air!

This post is a fun one!  This past week, we spent a day working on some fun and engaging centers.  Our week started off by making our "apple people!"    We brainstormed a list of ways we like to eat apples: slice apples, carmel apples, applesauce, apple pie...you get the idea!  They filled in the sentence on how they like to eat apples and then glued the sentence in order on the apple.

The next day, the firsties had the chance to graph their favorite way to eat apples.  

Thanks to Fun in First, the firsties had so much fun sequencing the life cycle of the apple tree AND putting together the apple facts puzzles!  Time was a factor, so we weren't able to create the book from Fun in First or some of the other activities from the bundle.  Click here if you want to check out the apple centers from Fun in First

The last center we did was using adjectives to describe apples.  The adjectives went along with the five senses...let's say we had some "interesting" adjectives.  

Now, we are on to PUMPKINS!!!!  

Mystery Student

It's officially fall!  I can't believe that we are almost at the end of September already!  All of FIRST GRADE LAND from our school took a field trip to an apple orchard today and I think FUN was had by all!  Thanks to a great group of teachers, parent volunteers, and the staff of the orchard, everything went pretty smoothly!

One reason why I think everything went pretty well was because my kiddos knew the expectations for their behavior!  Classroom management is so incredibly important in and OUT of the classroom!

I wanted to show a small "system" I started a long time ago that is used in both settings: Mystery Student. There are variations of this floating around! 

Each student is given a number at the beginning of the year and that number is written on a stick.  I can pick one, sometimes two, sometimes even three students in the morning when our day starts. The students don't know yet who the mystery student is but find out at the end of the day!  In reality I'm watching all students, but the firsties think I'm watching only the "mystery students" during the day. I watch to see if good choices are being made, manners are being used, hard work is put forth, and rules are being followed,  At the end of the day, the mystery student(s) is/are announced and they are awarded 10 tickets each.  We have special tickets at our school that the students can save and use to buy something at the monthly school store.  In the picture, you can see that as a "reward" you can give raffle tickets, a certificate, sticker, etc. to say "AWESOME JOB" or how proud you are of them for having a great day!  What's even better is, the rest of the class ALWAYS cheers for the mystery students.  This has been such a positive way for students to work extra hard throughout the day and a way for the class to be a team and cheer their friends on!  

Let me know if you have put something like this to use in your classroom or what you do to create positivity and how you set clear expectations in your classroom!

Are they getting it?

I spoke with my assistant principal last year about making sure teachers were checking in with their students to make sure there was an understanding of what concepts were being taught.  There are always the same students who consistently raise their hands, while the others tend to sit back and daydream observe.  After speaking with my A.P., I tried to come up with a way that all students would participate without having feelings of anxiousness of having to being called on or the nervousness of getting the "wrong" answer.  So, the THUMBS UP, THUMBS DOWN, SIDEWAYS THUMB came to be!

As you may see in the picture, my firsties were learning about "turnaround facts." Those are number sentences where the addends change order: 4+5=9 and 5+4=9.  Unifix cubes were used and during our discussion I had asked a question and wanted to see if the boys and girls agreed with their friend's answer choice.  They had to take a minute to solve it, then give their signal: thumbs up= I agree, thumbs down=I disagree, sideways thumb=I'm not sure!  I saw many thumbs up around the room!  I observed how they were problem solving and noticed they didn't pay attention to how everyone else was responding!  We do this quite often for a variety of lessons and activities and not only do the kids love it, but I can do a quick scan to check for understanding, participation, and attention!

Here's hoping this small tip can be an addition to your classroom routines!  Thanks for checking in and have a wonderful weekend!!  

Motivating Monday/Class Decor

Happy Labor Day!  I hope everyone has been enjoying the time off!  I spent some time helping my mom and running errands!  When I got home, I got in the spirit of fall...who is this person? I love the 80-ish degree weather and do not want summer to end.  But, I wanted to burn a new candle, so a fall scent it is!  Anywho, I got to thinking this weekend about spicing up my classroom.  Although we have already started our new school year, I felt a change was needed.  As many of you know, it takes a long LONG time to set up a room and can also take a lot of $$$ in some cases too!  I've slowly changed the color decor/theme over the past couple of years.  After 15 years, a change is needed!  I headed over to the best way (in my opinion) for any teacher to get inspired ("pinspired") or a way that we SHOULD earn professional development hours: Pinterest.  Pinterest is an addictive awesome way to get inspired for sure! After searching around, I decided to start small.  So, for the motivation part!  I needed some motivation to head into the classroom everyday.  I love my room for sure, but needed something "else" to keep me inspired.  I think my classroom should be an inviting place that I feel happy to be in as well as others when they come to visit.  For that "small" idea...tissue paper pom-poms, flowers, whatever you'd like to call them!  This brought back a ton of memories making those small tissue paper flowers with the pipe cleaners when I was leading a summer camp.  Seemed easy enough...now I just have to figure out how I'll hang them on my bulletin board tomorrow.  I plan on putting them where I display the kids work.  Afterall, I want the kids to feel proud of their work and it should be displayed in a fun way!

Quick ideas for a Monday

Happy Monday!  Mondays can be rough and when you add in the "Back to School" factor, it can be extra rough.  My firsties are doing so well at learning their routines and getting used to being here all day!  My district does not offer full day kindergarten, so most of the little babes are not used to being here ALLLL DAY!  I don't want them to know that their teacher is not used to being there all day either (yet!)  I thought I'd add two quick tips that may help when managing the classroom and to help teachers stay organized throughout the week.  

First, you'll see the picture of two pencil buckets.  This is a common trick in many classrooms, but it is one that I will NEVER stop using.  To help decrease the amount of interrupting of little firsties asking for a new pencil or the ever so annoying sound of a pencil sharpener grinding while you're teaching, the pencil buckets are here to save the day!  One is marked "Sharp" and the other is marked "Not Sharp."  While the labels may not seem like a big deal, I really liked that they had the thumbs up/down picture to help those firsties learn how to read the words by using the picture to help.  When they break a pencil or it becomes dull, without a making a sound, they can get up and put the dull pencil in the "Not Sharp" bucket and take a new one out of other!

Now onto an organizational tip!  I am a list maker.  I am one of those who can have five different lists and can have the same items on three of them...something I have to work on!  But, this "to do" list has definitely helped me in the classroom.  Sometimes we find ourselves doing the same tasks the same day of every week.  I found myself writing things over and over.  I found something online but changed it to fit my own needs. I'd love to thank that person for the "idea" but can't seem to remember where, so THANK YOU!  I still need to update it for this school year, but you can see what I use.  I make one copy and sometimes just use one sheet for the entire week.  Depending on the week  day I may need to switch to a new one!  You know, when there a million and ONE things to do!  The techy part isn't strong yet, so sorry!  I can give you a picture and will work on being able to link it so you can customize to your own desire!  

Hope this helps for some of you out there!  There are many AMAZING teachers out there who have blogs and give some Motivational Monday tips or Management Monday ideas...I'll try again soon to see if I can help out in some way!  

So much for those updates!

Like most people say when something doesn't work out, "life got in the way!"  Such an understatement these days!  In the midst of all that has been going on, I decided that today was the day that I would push forward and try to get this blog stuff up and running.  A year and some time later here's my second post! HA!  I'm not quite sure how this will all unfold, but it's worth a shot, right?!  So, after some changes of names and such, I came up with the title of the blog and have been thinking of the purpose of this...Just a little more background and I'll be moving on here shortly.  Some life events took place towards the beginning of summer vacation that took me and shook me upside down!  Somehow through those emotional days, I have now entered another school year...the 15th one as a first grade teacher!  (And) this has been one to write down in the book so far!

Being inspired by so many that have shared such great ideas and knowledge with me, I want to do the same and hope this blog can provide that for others!  Once again, I hope to give some ideas on either classroom management (that will probably be the first real tip I can give soon), organization, student grouping, and more.  If I can improve on my techy skills, then I hope to link some resources along the way that could be helpful too!  Another goal is to make this blog much more pleasant to look at also....one goal at a time I guess!

If you are still here reading this and haven't been too bored, thank you!!! I promise to include some pictures of my classroom this year, things that are being put in place and more!

Thank you, thank you for sticking around and I hope you enjoy your weekend!
Much love from that exhausted first grade teacher who will try to do better at this blog thing,
Kim