Five for Friday - March 11th

Look at me blogging. Must mean one thing... I'm avoiding my report cards!! They're due Monday, so that means Sunday will be a late night for me! lol. Well, I thought I would link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

We finished up our senses unit with a popcorn party! We compared popcorn seeds and popped popcorn, then wrote about popcorn using our five senses. Of course we had to taste it too!! (I will be adding this to my Five Senses Interactive Journal unit soon.)

At one point in the last few weeks, we celebrate the 100th day of school. It's a pretty big deal to firsties. We made some sweet hats. You can get the freebie {here}. One of my teammates had her students make 100 tally marks on their crowns--I'm going to save that idea for next year!

I always have my students bring in collections of 100 and we sort and count them on my counting mats. This little guy gets the genius award for bringing in 100 marshmallows--he had groups of five on tooth picks. Made it super easy for counting!!

I had my students make a picture with the number 100. I was originally planning on cutting out a bunch of 1's and 0's with my Cricut, but I could not find my cord for the life of me!! It's still missing in action. Instead I printed them out on labels. The kids could just stick the numbers anywhere on the page and draw/colour right over top. They turned out pretty cute!

We made gumball machines and filled them in with 100 dot stickers. I found the pattern in Ashley Reed's 100th Day Hoopla Freebie Pack.

We practiced putting the numbers 1-100 in order on the learning carpet.

And we did these fun (but time consuming) 100 Chart Puzzles. You can download this for free {here}. I printed them on 11x17" paper.

We also learned about why we have Leap Year. This Veggie Tales video is the absolute cutest and explains it really well for the littles. Then we made these adorable little frogs and wrote some facts about Leap Year underneath his belly! We thought it was really neat that when the next Leap Year comes, we will be in Grade 5! You can download this freebie {here}. 

My division has been encouraging Play-Based Learning this year in K and 1, so after a few inservices I decided to give it ago. I've done it a few time now, a couple times a week, for about an hour or so. I put out about 5 or 6 centres at a time; each one has a question or "provocation" to entice and engage students. They are free to move about the centres as they wish. Some stay at one the whole time, others visit each centre. It's pretty neat to watch them work and play together; you get a lot of insight into their little personalities! Here's a few of the activities I've put out lately:

What can you do with only 3 colours? 

Inspiring Books: Mouse Paint. Little Blue and Little Yellow, 

White Rabbit's Color Book, Mix It Up!

Can you make a pattern?

Can you retell a story using the puppets?

Favourite Stories: Gingerbread Man, 3 Little Pigs, 3 Billy Goats Gruff, 

Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Pete the Cat, The Mitten

Can you pay for your pizza using addition and subtraction?

I am obsessed with thematic dramatic play centres. I kind of want to make one for each month. This Pizza Dramatic Play pack comes from Jamie at Play to Learn Preschool. Love her stuff! Maybe I should move to Kindergarten... hehe

Felt Pizza Set by Melissa & Doug

Pizza Shakers by Melissa & Doug

What can you build with Lego?

Can you make a 3D shape structure?

Can you make your own stick puppet and tell a story with it?

And lastly.... the reason I am exhausted all the time and why I've been pretty absent from this blog. We're expecting!! I'm due in August with baby number two. Zoe is going to be a big sister! We just found out last weekend that it's a boy. We are beyond thrilled!

My class was so excited to find out if the baby was a boy or girl, so I threw in a little math before I would tell them. I also had them give me some name suggestions. However, I don't think we'll be naming our boy Fluffy, Hockey, or Totem Pole.

Well that's it for me tonight! It's past midnight. How did I even stay up this late?? Night everyone!

Five for Friday

It is the last day of February. Can you believe it?? I only have four more teaching weeks until I am off on maternity leave. I can’t believe how quick it is coming. I still have report cards and parent teacher to get through though!
It has been FOREVER since I linked up with Doodle Bugs Teaching, but here I am with my Five for Friday. It’s a quiet house right now… dogs and cats are sleeping, the fiancé is at work, and I’m just watching some Twilight. Who doesn’t love some teenage vampire love story??


February was a crazy month. First we had Valentine’s Day. I didn’t do anything too crazy. We made simple brown bag card holders… gave the kids construction paper scraps and foam stickers and just let them go to town. We did some candy heart graphing and had a little party at the end of the day. It was actually a pretty calm day, especially for a Friday!

Next up, 100 day! It was a crazy-filled day. We made crazy 100 day hats (using colourful dot stickers) and of course fruit loop necklaces. I think that was the quietest my class has ever been this year. Of course we threw on some Olympics while we were stringing our fruit loops together. We watched the end of the Women’s gold medal hockey game. Sorry USA readers, but go Canada go!!! :)

We also did the adorable writing and craft to go with “When I am 100 years old…” Some of them were super funny. My favourite was: “I will be a grandma. I will give grandpa some coffee. I will love being 100.” Bah ha ha!

We also did four fun, math centres: Roll and Tally to 100 (from Mathwire), What’s Missing? (freebie from First Grade Blue Skies), Hop by 10s (brilliant skip counting hop scotch by Kinder-Craze), and 100 chart puzzles.

Then we ended the day with some delicious, gluten-free cupcakes made by yours truly. Yum! Definitely a fun, but exhausting day.

I don’t know if you were big into the Olympics at your school, but it was craziness at ours! February is I Love to Read month, so we went with an Olympic theme. Each morning some older students read some Canadian athlete bios during the announcements. We had a dress like an athlete day and a read with a torch (flashlight) day. We even had our own Winter Olympics activity afternoon with broomball, floor hockey, luge, and snowboarding! We read medal winning books. We set reading goals each week and could earn our own gold medals. Here’s the fun display we made. Like the Olympic athlete I made? I used some adorable winter Melonheadz clipart as my inspiration! Turned out pretty cute if I do say so myself!

We did a few fun Olympic crafts. The athlete with flag came from here and the moose (the Canadian Olympic team mascot Komak… go here if you have never even heard of him!!) was designed by a kindergarten teacher at my mom’s school. So cute! I actually left that for a sub one afternoon and they had a great time putting it together!

    

The neat thing about the Olympics this year was that in January I had a new student arrive. He actually just moved to Canada in October from Russia (somewhere near Moscow). In our Social Studies curriculum one of our units is about “Connecting with Others” and talking about diversity and similar needs of people all across the world. So we are learning a little bit about Russia. It’s so fun to connect our students’ real lives to our curriculum. They love learning about other places!

Before I left school today, I got my room already for March! I took down the Valentine’s Day stuff and put up my March decorations. The March calendar looks a lot less busy than February did…

Lastly and totally un-school related…. the baby room is complete!! 5 weeks until my due date. The room is done, the car seat is bought (but not installed yet), the hospital bag is packed… now just to finish report cards and I will be ready for her to come! (Ignore the ugly insulation in the window…. we live in a trailer and it’s to save heating costs in the winter… lol… it will be removed when spring finally comes!)

   

   

That’s it for me tonight! Have a great weekend.