Back to School Night, Clouds, and Asking Sentences

So much has been going on outside of school that I haven't had time to post for a while!

 I've been hanging out with my beautiful niece Abby :)

We had back to school night which I previously mentioned and these are how the students desks came out...they looked great and all of the parents had to guess which one belonged to their child.

This week we learned about the different types of clouds and the students got to make a shape using paint for their cumulous clouds after reading It Looked Like Spilt Milk and they had to write about the shape in their cloud.  This was one of my favorites...a more literal approach...but great writing!

One of my favorite lessons from this past week was teaching about asking and telling sentences.  After talking about asking sentence words (like who, what, when, where, why, how, did, does, are) I asked the students what person has to ask a lot of questions for a living.  Their answer: reporters...bingo!  So then I told them that they would have to be reporters and they would be asking celebrities questions to get to know about the celebrity a bit more.  So then all of the students went back to their seats and I told them to close their eyes so I could put the picture of the celebrity on the board (they were all guessing who it was and were excited).  So our first celebrity that they wrote questions to this week was....
Justin Bieber!!

They loved it and they did such a great job of coming up with creating questions (Why did you break up with Selena Gomez?) and adding their question marks to the end!  I'm going to continue this activity every week by putting a picture of a celebrity on the file cabinet in the back and they have to write questions to them in a center and then if they finish their work early.  Next week will be...Harry Potter!

In math, we have been learning about pennies and nickels and counting combinations of coins.  I just created this file for our math BUILD centers where students have to count the coins in each piggy bank and record how much money there is.

You can pick it up here on google docs.

New Niece is here and back to school night!

Haven't posted in a while--things have been so hectic with school and my sis getting ready to have her baby and then finally...yesterday...at 6:01 PM...my little beautiful niece Abigail was born!!!!! She is absolutely precious and I'm in love!!!

I wish that I was able to spend some time with her tonight but I'm feeling a lil under the weather and I have to prepare for back to school night tomorrow.  

Speaking of back to school night--I'm so excited! I love to meet all of the parents and for them to come in to see where their children spend most of their day.  

I wanted my class to leave something fun for their parents on their desks, so we first talked about how we like and dislike certain things that make people know who we are when they hear it.  For example, my whole class knows that I DESPISE spiders because on the first day of school there was a spider and I was very frightened and I told them I didn't like spiders and so if they were to guess who a person was based on just knowing they don't like spiders, they would be able to guess it was me.  

Anyyyyways....so they came up with different clues that they can leave their parents and they did an awesome job with it!  I will take pictures of the work tomorrow to upload.

This is what the file looks like that I made: