Alabama/Auburn Graphing

Thanksgiving weekend in Alabama is otherwise known as Iron Bowl weekend, so of course we had to complete some Iron Bowl activities before we got out for the holiday! :) The students got to choose which mascot they wanted to color and cut out, Aubie or Big Al, and then we taped them on our class chart. Sadly, Auburn won by one STINKIN vote! (But when I added my vote for Alabama, the score was tied! ;) ROLL TIDE!)

After we finished our chart, the students each completed this sheet based on our data. As you can see, this child said that Auburn is his favorite team, bless his heart. ;)

Thanksgiving Songs and Disguised Turkeys

So, November FLEW by! Since this was only a 2 day school week, it was JAM PACKED with Thanksgiving fun! I thought it would be fun to let the students write Thanksgiving songs to the tune of familiar songs, (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, etc.) and then perform them in front of the class.

First, the students brainstormed as a group all of the things that they knew about Thanksgiving. I found that it was getting to be mostly all about food so I read the students a book about the first Thanksgiving. After the story, the students added new things that they learned from the story to their brainstorming web.

They use salt to keep the fish fresh. :) A little fact that our students learned about Pilgrims from our story!

Afterbrainstorming, the students were given a familar tune and a word bank of Thanksgiving words that the students had to use in their song. I walked around and helped the students get started, and they worked together as a group to write their songs!

Here are the student's songs! They were SO good, and I was really impressed!

Please ignore my annoying voice. Haha!

Another Thanksgiving activity we completed was a book called Pilgrim, Pilgrim. We read a poem called Pilgrim, Pilgrim and then the students made a book using the lines of that poem. They illustrated each page, and I absolutely love their illustrations! Check out these sweet Indian girls and the Pilgrims on the Mayflower! Awesome!

 In our writing center this week, the students had to write three sentences explaining what they were thankful for and why. Not a very unique idea, I know, but I just wanted to post this student example.

"I am thankful for God because He made me happy. I am thankful for my mom because she let me go to school. I am thankful for Mrs. Newberry because she teaches us." When I first read it I thought it said Mrs. Newberry kicks us, and we got a nice laugh out of that in class! :)

Over the weekend I sent a paper turkey home with my students with a letter giving my parents instructions on what to do with it. They were to disguise the turkey--so that no one would try to catch him for Thanksgiving! :) Our Kindergarten and second grade classes also completed this activity and I thought it was too cute not to steal. ;) Here is a picture of some of our student turkeys! After they presented their turkeys to the class the students completed a writing assignment about their turkeys--what they are disguised as, where we would find them, and why they had fun disguising them!

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving! :)

Halloween Fun! :)

Halloween was SUPER fun in our classroom! We did a TON of activities that that students (and I) loved! This post might be really long, because I took 50 gazillion pictures this month. :)

We read many Halloween books this month! (The only one of these we didn't read was The Night Before Halloween) I bought Haunted House, Haunted Mouse when the bookfair came to our school, and all of the other books I bought at BAM on the sale shelf! My favorites were A Job for Wittilda and In a Dark, Dark House (We dimmed the lights to make it spooky for that story.. and there was a scary surprise at the end which made it that much more fun!).

After reading A Job or Wittilda, the students came back from PE to find this on the wall outside our classroom! We then had a creative writing assignment where the students had to answer the question, "Why did Wittilda the Witch crash into our wall?" In the story, she was flying to deliver pizzas--so that explains one of our student answers below.

Left: Wittilda the Witch crashed into our wall because she was about to see me and Elliana get hit. Me and Elliana had a broom. The end. :) Too funny!

Right: Wittilda the Witch crashed into our wall because she went to deliver pizzas so the can get money to feed her cats and her. :) Someone was paying attention to our story! Great job and what a great illustration!

 

Next let's move on to Math! Let me just say that all of our first grade classes did this activity--I can't take credit for inventing this cool one. We watched the book Dem Bones on Bookflix (Yes, I said we WATCHED a book! If you have not been introduced to Bookflix yet, please look it up. This website is amazing!) and then the students were given a bag of candy bones. When they opened their candy bones the students were instructed to group all of the same bones together, and then they graphed how many of each bone they had in their bag!

Check out what one of my students did with his bones after he graphed them! I thought it was too cool NOT to post! :)



 I found these itty-bitty pumpkins at Wal-Mart (for a DOLLAR a pack!) and these creepy haunted house plates at Dollar General and thought they would be perfect for Halloween Math! We used these for addition practice. For example, the addition problem shown below was 3+2. The students took three pumpkins and placed them in the first window, then took two pumpkins and placed them in the second window. To find the answer they took the pumpkins in the windows and placed them in the third section of the plate, then counted them all. We usually use snap cubes, bingo counters, or things like that as manipulatives so the students really enjoyed our change of manipulatives!

Ok so this isn't the prettiest data sheet ever, but this is where we recorded our Halloween Data. The students came one by one to record their name under each category if it applied to them. They used their results to create the Frankenstein glyphs that you see below. I let them decorate the faces however they wanted--as you can see they were very creative! :)

 



Classroom Behavior

Having behavior problems with your students? Now, my little first year teacher self is NOT trying to sound like the poster child for classroom discipline--(I've DEFINITELY got a lot to learn!) but one thing that I truly believe is that students respond better when acknowledged for doing the RIGHT thing than to only hear their name called out for breaking rules! I believe it's important to establish that discipline in my classroom and yes there are consequences for those rule-breakers--but I also want to reward students for following my rules! :)

Here's one thing that I do each week with my students:

The tables that my students sit in are the Baseball Table, Basketball Table, Volleyball Table, and Football Table. Each week the students of each table must work together to earn tally marks. They can earn a tally mark if every member of the table is on task completing their work, and has their voice level under control! The winning table gets to take their shoes off during reading station time on Friday. :) They get really into this, and it really makes them stay on task during class! SIDE NOTE: If you do this in your classroom, make sure that you inform the students at the winning table that if they have to go to the bathroom they have to put their shoes back on to go in the hallway! :) I failed to make this announcement the first time my students "learned without shoes" and I'm pretty sure some of my students got some funny looks from other teachers! Whoops!

The way that I keep the voice level down during station time is with my little friend named Carl the Cop. :) Carl tells the students what level their voice needs to be on. (If I have made an announcement that our class is to whisper, I have one student that never fails to remind me that Carl the Cop needs to be moved to 1. Too funny!)

These are just some of the things that I am attempting in my classroom, to go along with my regular behavior plan (the traffic light). Like I said before, I am a first year teacher so everything is an experiment at this point--but these things seem to be working well for me!

Sight Word Sorry

I was trying to think of a different way to practice sight words for Unit 2 in our Reading Series and after seeing a teacher create a sight word game with Candyland, I decided that I could do the same with MY favorite childhood board game... SORRY! Ok guys, I used to be obsessed with this game as a kid. I probably drove my mom and dad crazy asking them to play it with me all the time! I found this game at a thrift store for 2 dollars (as you can see by looking at the box!) and just doctored it up a little to make it appropriate for sight words.

Here's how you play: Turn over a sight word card. If you can read it correctly within 3 seconds, you get to roll the dice and move your pawn. If you land on a space with a star on it (which I drew on the game board) you get to draw a STAR card. These cards have either good or bad consequences! If you draw a BANG card, you lose your turn.

Sounds like fun, right? I feel like I would have loved to play Sight Word Sorry in my class! Parents, this is also a neat twist you can do to a board game you might have at home to help your child practice for our weekly sight word test. :)

Look What I Can Be If I Stay Drug Free!

Ok parents, your students outfits for Career Day during Red Ribbon Week were TOO CUTE so I decided to dedicate an entire post to them! Some were SO creative and I was extremely impressed! :)

 Nurse BabaT and Nurse Hannah
 Dr. Jaiden

Our Future Teachers of America: Ivory, Kimara, Demetri, Allie, (notice the 3D glasses) and Daniela

Crimson Tide Football Players: Brodie and Ashton (ROLL TIDE!)  

Auburn Cheerleader: Rayannua

Raven the Artist (TOO STINKIN CUTE!)

Brody the Zookeeper (What a cool job! I would have never thought of that at six years old!)

Savannah the Baker (Loving the little spatulas!)

Joshua the Soldier!

and last but not least... can you guess what Mackenzie is? :)

the FIRST woman President! :) Way to dream big, Miss Future President!

Brainstorming the /th/ Sound

This week we learned the /sh/ and /th/ chunks, which proved to be a bit of a challenge for some of my students. Since this was a totally new concept, (two letters that when put together.. make a totally new sound) I started off the week by letting the students brainstorm words that have the /th/ sound. I made this cute little buddy, and named him Therman the Thinker! Therman only likes to think about things that say /th/ and we discussed that the /th/ sound can sometimes come at the beginning of the word (THink), but sometimes it can come at the end of the word too (baTH).

To the right is an example of two students' /th/ words. I love allowing my students time to brainstorm things like this and seeing the way their minds work when I read what they've done!

Apple Week

Apple week was a BLAST! We learned so much about apples, and got to taste some pretty good food which was made with apples.
We began the week reading this book about Johnny Appleseed. We learned that most of the apple trees that we have in our country were planted by him, and because his birthday was during our week long study of apples, our students made birthday cards for Johnny Appleseed.

 Later on in the week, our class gathered some data about apples and we recorded it on this chart. 8 students said they had swallowed an apple seed before! Wow!

 After brainstorming things we already knew about apples, we wrote an acrostic poem to show things we know. We worked as a class to write it, and it turned out great!

The students favorite part of Apple Week was Friday, when we had a taste test! Each of our five first grade teachers had a different apple food in her classroom, with a different activity planned for the students. The students rotated to each teacher's classroom to taste the food and complete the activity. Here's the list of foods/drinks that each teacher had prepared in their class:

Mrs. Cochran - Apple Slices

Mrs. Brown - Apple Chips

Mrs. Robertson - Applesauce

Mrs. Henderson - Apple Butter

Mrs. Newberry - Apple Cider

After drinking apple cider, the students played "Pin the Parts on the Apple". I chose various students one at a time, blindfolded them, spun them around, and they attempted to tape the part in the correct place!

At the end of the day, each student voted on which food (or drink) they liked the best, and (drumroll please....)

MRS. NEWBERRY'S APPLE CIDER WON! Woohoo!

Special Visitors!

Ok parents, I'm SO sorry for waiting so long to update our blog! Fall break seemed to throw me off a little! ANYWAY, our first new post is about a special visitor our first graders had a few weeks ago.. JAMES SPANN! He was absolutely wonderful with the students and taught them a lot about clouds and weather (which they understood a little bit better because we have completed our weather unit). My favorite part of his presentation to the students was when he told a story about when he knew he was going to work with weather. Believe it or not, he was in the first grade! Here's a part of that story:

Here, Mr. Spann showed coverage of the April 27th tornado in Tuscaloosa. He told the students that many people's lives were saved because they turned on the TV and took shelter when weathermen told them to.

As you know, James Spann always has a KidCam that he shows on the news. This is one of our students, Kimara Parki, getting to hold the KidCam and videotape the first grade!

Right before he left, we presented him with a cookie cake from DES.

We had such a good time visiting with Mr. James Spann! :)

AND our second visitor was from someone who MOOves around a lot..... :) Butterbean the Mobile Dairy Cow! (She MOOves, get it? haha) In case you have never heard of this, the Mobile Dairy Cow travels around to stop at elementary schools. There is also a woman who travels with the cow who teaches the students interesting information about cows and the nutrients her milk makes. At the end of her speech, she milked Butterbean and the students got to see the milk travel through tubes and into a glass tank. It was pretty cool! Thanks to both of our visitors for speaking to our students!

Sight Word Pancakes

Parents--this is probably my most favorite game that we play in our classroom! To practice for our weekly sight word test, every Thursday during our Word Work station we play this game (that I THOUGHT I made up, but after talking to a teacher friend at another elementary school--apparantly I'm not the first to come up with it) called Sight Word Pancakes. I like this game because it forces the students to think FAST about what the word is, which increases their automaticity. I make new "pancakes" each week and add them to the stack so that each week they still are given opportunities to practice previously tested sight words.
How to play:
- Turn over all of the pancakes so that you can't see the words.
- One person begins as the chef, who uses the spatula to flip over the first pancake.
- The first person to say the sight word out loud becomes the next chef, who flips over a new pancake!
- The game continues until all pancakes have been flipped over.

 

It's crazy what something as simple and cheap as a spatula will do to excite a child! They WANT to be the first to say each word so that they can hold that spatula!