Hello 2014!

There has been so much going on over the past few months!  I've had a great year so far with my firsties (I have a wonderful group of kids again this year) and my first year of marriage has been wonderful (everyone said the first year is rough...I don't know what they experienced??!)  I had emergency surgery last week and I'm hoping to finally return to my classroom on Monday after three full weeks out.

I have a lot of new items on my TPT page...please go check them out!! (most are on sale right now, too!)  

Looking forward to the winter Olympics starting next week, I created a Winter Olympics Data Journal to correlate with first and second grade math standards for measurement and data.  I'm looking forward to checking in on the medal count every day, discussing different countries and events, and recording using tallies and a bar graph the countries that have the highest medal count.  

You can purchase the journal by clicking here -- pssst it's on sale! (And...if you are the first one to comment with your e-mail address, I will send it to you for free).  

Hope 2014 is treating you all well! Cheers!

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.

Math Stations Start Tomorrow!

I'm so excited to start math stations tomorrow because it is the first time that I am trying it out!  I'm going to be implementing the B.U.I.L.D. math stations, but I changed the names around a little.
B = Buddy Games
U = Understanding Manipulatives
I = Independent Work (journals & books)
L = Learn with Me! (guided math work with teacher)
D = Do it Yourself! 

I created a math journal page that students will get to put into their math journals each day that they are in the "I" station.  

You can pick up the math journal page here!

This week we are learning about number lines and number grids so here is what I'm planning on doing in our BUILD centers:

B = Top It (we did comparing numbers last week, so students will practice this skill) and Monster Squeeze (comparing numbers); Roll to 100 (introduced at the end of the week)

U = Students will roll a dice and hop on the number line forwards and backwards

I = Number of the Day and Numbers Before and After worksheet

L = Guided practice with me

D = Students will make their own number lines (on a sentence strip) and 100 grid.  

I'll post pictures of the work at the end of the week!

Here are two freebies for rolling and hopping on the number line and number grid...just click on the pictures!