Detective Day

Wednesdays are shortened days for us, so we don't have reading interventions in the morning. Because of this, I use it as my day I squeeze in most of my whole group literacy instruction. I was trying to think of a way to make it a little more fun and exciting today, and I came up with the idea of having a detective day! We started off the day "warming up our brains" by partner reading the I Spy phonics books I ordered from Scholastic last year. Each book highlights a few letters from the alphabet and my students LOVED them! 

Next we practiced our spelling words by doing Secret Code spelling! I found a link on pinterest to a secret code (simple pictures to represent each letter) and wrote out our spelling words for the week in code! The students' job was to decode each of the words, and then come up with their own word (or sentence for my high students) for their neighbor to decode. They had a great time!

Here is the printable I made up for that.

 Next we played "Mystery Sight Words." This was super easy to prepare and the kids also loved this activity! I chose a few words from our word wall and wrote clues for each one. For example, for the word "what" I had the clues: starts with the letter "w", if you took off the first letter it would say "hat." Or for the word "have" I used the clues: starts with the letter that comes after "g", has a "v" in it, and the last letter is an "e". When the students figured out what word I was describing I had them point to their brain, and after all (or most) of them had figured it out I had them give me the answer in a choral response. It was fun!

Our basal reader for the week is "How To Be A Nature Detective" so we read that as a class and then decided to be nature detectives noticing signs of spring. I had planned on letting the kids bring these printables on clipboards as we went on a nature walk around the school and record the signs they saw.

Unfortunately the weather today was horrible! We had wind, rain, hail....so no nature walk! I let them peek out the windows instead. After recording and discussing the different signs, we began writing information texts about Spring.
Our graphic organizer is a flower (found on edhelper) with the topic in the center and the supporting details on the petals. We finished the prewrite and begin our rough drafts. Hopefully by Friday we will be ready to publish and I think it would be fun to find some sort of art project to go with it!

Horton and feeling special!

Also during Dr. Seuss week, my neighbor teacher invited us over to watch Horton Hears A Who. The next day we discussed the quote "A person's a person no matter how small!" and brainstormed ways we can help others feel special. We then did this writing craftivity with a peekover elephant. I saw the idea for the elephant somewhere online. Sorry I can't remember to give credit! We have also been looking for speech bubbles in our reading, so this was the perfect addition!

Dr. Seuss

We had so much fun reading Dr. Seuss books and doing fun activities getting ready for his birthday and Read Across America day. I found a million cute ideas on pinterest! We read The Foot Book then traced our feet and wrote antonyms on each foot, including a picture. We read The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and did some sequencing and venn diagram comparisons. One of the biggest hits of the week was definitely the day we read Green Eggs and Ham. We made predictions about whether or not we would like it, tasted it, and then graphed the results! Only half said they liked it on our graph, but most of the kids were getting seconds and thirds so I'm pretty sure they were enjoying it quite a bit!

On Friday, to wrap things up, we had "Seuss Juice" (recipe and how-to writing found on thefirstgradeparade) and starting an opinion writing piece about what our favorite Dr. Suess book was. It was a fun week!

Popcorn Adjectives

To kick off our study of adjectives, I found some cute ideas online using popcorn so I took the idea and rolled with it! First I explained what adjectives are (words that describe nouns) and then gave each student a small bag of popcorn to eat.

While they were eating, the students were thinking of words they could use to describe popcorn. What it tastes like, feels like, looks like, sounds like, etc. We then wrote those adjectives on the kernels of our popcorn anchor chart.

In the following days we did a few practice sheets where the students highlighted the adjectives they found in the sentences (they LOVE highlighters!!), wrote in their own adjectives, circled the describing words, etc.  I tried to upload these to google docs and it wasn't working. Too much frustration and work...sorry! Here's a picture so you get an idea.

Then we did an opinion writing piece on popcorn. The students started by brainstorming what to write about, their topic and three details to support their opinion. We use the idea of an oreo to help us remember we start with the topic (the top cookie), then put at least three supporting sentences with details to support the topic (the cream), and then a closing sentence that restates our topic in different words (the bottom cookie).

This was the graphic organizer we used for our prewrite.

Next we did our rough draft and used "rainbow editing" to fix our draft. First we use a yellow crayon to put a dot under each word. This helps the students make sure their sentences make sense and that they remembered a space between each word. Next they use a green crayon to capitalize the first letter of each sentence. Then they use a red crayon to put a period at the end of each. Finally, they use a blue crayon to circle words they need help spelling. After completing editing I go through their papers with them and finally they publish!
For this piece, after they finished I had them highlight the adjectives they used in their writing and they mounted it on a red popcorn bucket paper. They turned out really cute!

100th Day

Wow. Have I been a slacker or what?! Let's just say my first year of teaching was a little too overwhelming in itself to keep up with a blog of it all! Now that I'm in second year, I really want to document some of the fun things that I'm doing, so I'm going to try really hard to keep  up with it better.
To start off my blogging rejuvenation, some things I did on the 100th day of school! Yeah, we're on the downward slope!! It kind of snuck up on me, so it really wasn't too spectacular this year. We started the celebration off with some doughnuts (treats are always a hit)!

And then we did just a few activities. First, the students wrote their numbers to 100 to put in their portfolios. Then they did a writing activity, "If I had $100 I would buy a ________" and finished off by drawing a picture of what they think they will look like in 100 years. Should've taken some pictures of those beauties! One student drew himself with a halo and wings. He said he doesn't think he'll last quite that long. :)

Last year we had a 100 parade and each student brought a collection of 100 small things from their house (e.g. pennies, cereal, paper clips, etc.). It was so fun and would be a great opportunity to practice counting large amounts by grouping in 10's. We didn't get to it this year because, like I said, it just snuck right up on me!

Fun with Fluency

As part of the basal program our district has adopted, there are phonics lessons each day and part of the lesson plan involves reading a chart full of words that contain the phonic rule we are studying for the week. Nothing too exciting right?

That is until you spice things up a bit by using your voice. I made these little puppet type things using clip art I googled. The student of the day gets to choose two of them and we read the words on the chart changing our voices according to the sign they hold up.

For example, lion=loud and mouse=quiet (and also usually a little squeeky). :)

hare=fast and turtle=slow

For some reason my students find it a lot more appealing to read when there voices are funky. It keeps them involved and entertained, which means they are engaged in learning and I am a happy camper!

Tis the Season for some Art!

Who doesn't love an art activity?! I know when I was in school, my favorite thing to do was art. And I have to admit, one of my favorite things to teach is art! My class is by far the most engaged in the learning process when participating in some sort of hands-on, artistic project. Unfortunately, there really isn't any time to teach art....unless you attach it to something else! Oh the beauty of integration.

These last few weeks we have been studying the seasons of the year as part of our social studies curriculum. There are thousands of ways to integrate art and seasons. Here are just a few ideas that I did with my class and they loved them.

First we studied Spring (simply because that is what we are experiencing right now!). I read a few picture books, we talked about spring and the different things we see, smell, touch, etc. as the season unfolds. Of course flowers came up and this is the art activity we did to represent spring.

I taught them about mosaics and showed them some examples of amazing mosaics I found on google images. Believe me, they were inspired! To make their own they first used an assortment of small green squares of different shades to make the grass, stem, and leaves. I gave them each a cupcake liner for the head of the flower. They colored theirs (mine was just a basic example) then each put a small picture of themselves in the center of the cupcake liner. They also decorated theirs with clouds, sunshine, rain, etc. to make it their own personal creation. They turned out adorable!

For another project, as we discussed all the different seasons and how the trees change in each season, we made this flip-book. I have seen a lot of different variations of this idea.
For mine I started with a blank sheet of paper and drew an outline of a tree with branches. I copied that paper as a base for each student, then copied just the top half of the tree (3 for each student for each of the other seasons.  We started by decorating the full sheet of the paper for fall/autumn. They colored the trunk, branches, grass, and sky, then we tore of pieces of orange, red, yellow, and brown paper for the leaves.

For summer, we took one of the half sheets (that just had the branches) and simply colored the branches, colored green leaves and the blue sky.

For spring, we again colored the sky and branches, then used pink, red, and violet ink pads to stamp blossoms on the branches using our fingertips.

The top page was the winter tree. For this page we of course colored the branches and sky, then gently pulled apart cotton balls and glued them onto the branches of the tree to look like snow.

After each page was decorated and dried, we laid them on top of each other in order and put two staples at the top so they can be turned to see how the tree looks in each of the seasons.

So there you have it!