Five for Friday Again

I'm loving Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five for Friday linky parties... I can't seem to get it together enough to blog during the week, so these Friday postings are perfect for me! I also like randomness, so throwing together five ideas from our week is a lot of fun for me! :)

1. We finished our mini bear unit with some bear fact writing and Eric Carle inspired bears (directions for free on TpT). They turned out pretty cute I think! And you have to love first grade listening/observing skills... check out the little guy on the bottom left on the green... he's standing up straight and has buttons. What a goof!

2. We have been playing a lot of card games in math lately. I have a lot of different types of decks, but there are a few doubles... so I used Renee's (from The Reading Corner) idea to write a letter on the back of the cards. Makes sorting a lot easier!!

3. Here's the weather I left school in yesterday. Cold, snowy, and windy. Yuck. I laugh when I read some of my southern friends' blogs.... you have no idea what winter truly is until you have spent one in Manitoba, Canada!! Let me give you the low down of this week... At our school we go outside for recess unless it is -30°C (-22°F) or colder with the wind chill. It has been around -40°C (-40°F) with the wind chill every day this week... -40!!!! Five days of inside recesses.... I almost couldn't take it today. It has been the longest. week. EVER! Thank goodness for Mr. Harry's Kindergarten and his fun, active songs. We have been doing a lot of action songs to get our bodies moving!

4. Pencils have been a big issue this year. I think my kids may eat them. They just constantly disappear! I started the year with my sharp/not sharp cups... But as soon as I put new pencils in the shapr cup, they would disappear! No matter how many conversations we had about proper pencil procedures, there would be no pencils left in either cup! So I hit the end of my rope yesterday when a student said they couldn't find their pencil and there were no pencils left in either sharp/not sharp cup and no one would admit to having an extra pencil in their desk (admittedly my patience may have been worn thin due to a full week of frigid temperatures and inside recesses as mentioned above). I decided it was time for a pencil talk. I got out 24 brand new pencils. Sharpened them. And LABELLED them. I brought out the bundle of pencils like I was holding a brick of gold. I made a HUGE deal about these brand new, perfectly sharpened, full erasered pencils! I showed how to take care of it. I showed how to sharpen it correctly. I showed how to treat the pencil like it was their baby. I showed how Ms. T would cry if a poor baby pencil was left uncared for on the floor. So far so good. No lost pencils, no crying teacher, no pencil nubs the size of my finger nail. Let's hope we keep it up!

5. I decided to skip penguins this year. It makes me sad. I love penguins. They are my favourite animal to teach about. I just don't have time this year... So we skipped right on over to the senses! I made this poster of my "friend" Bob. The kids were quite impressed with my drawing skills, although apparently the eye lashes make Bob look a little girly. Although one my little guys told me Bob had very pretty eyes like he did. That made me laugh.
 

Well that's it for tonight. I've got a few new units in the works, but have been feeling pretty unmotivated lately. I should have my Valentine's Day Word Work Centres up shortly. We'll see! But for now I'm going to leave you with this little math equation...

27 - 1 + 1 - 4 + 1 - 1 + 3 = 26

That is what my class has looked like so far this year. I have had six kids leave throughout the year and gained five new students. I just found out this afternoon that I am getting two new students on Monday. Well, technically one new student and one returning student. A returning student who was on an IEP, who had a lot of behaviour problems, and who has been out of school for three weeks. Let's just say today was a pretty stressful day. Thank goodness for Mexican restaurants and margaritas! :) Night all!

Five for Friday!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday linky party. I get to choose five random happenings from this week and blog about it! This is perfect for me because I'm feeling pretty random this week anyway! Click the picture below to check out the other fabulous blogs involed in this week's linky...

1. Our first two weeks back were all about winter, hibernation, and bears! Here is our partially completed bear chart. I think we'll do some bear art and writing next week, instead of starting our penguin unit right away! Although I can't wait to read Tacky! He is my favourite little penguin. I just bought "Tacky Goes to Camp".... It was the only one I didn't have yet! Oh, and did you hear there's a new one coming out?? "Happy Birdday, Tacky!" will be released May 14, 2013! Fun!

2. My class is finally starting to settle down behaviour wise, but the biggest problem I am having is blurting out! They are all in the "I-am-the-most-important-person-in-the-room-and-I-have-something-important-to-say-so-I'll-just-blurt-it-out" stage. No matter how much discussion and modelling and practicing we did, they just kept blurting out! So I brought out my whole brain teaching scoreboard from First Grade Fever (I used this for Class? Yes! at the beginning of the year) for a week long friendly competition. We wrote the goal in the middle and I started giving the kids a tally mark for each (yes, each!) time a hand was raised properly. Each time someone blurted, I got a tally mark. The first day I would reinforce why I was giving myself a tally or praising someone for raising their hand, but by the second day I would just silently write the tally on whichever side. It was AMAZING! It worked so well. Then today at the end of the day we counted all the tallies by 5 (hello math practice!) and saw that the students had won so we played a little game to celebrate! Next week we are going to focus on a different skill (maybe coming to the carpet quickly and quietly).

3. I've got my Winter Math Stations all set up. The kids really enjoy them! They are sad if I skip them to do a whole group lesson! :)

4. We are practicing our tens partners in addition right now, so we played this easy card game. It is an individual game and the kids really enjoyed it!! All you need is a deck of cards from ace to ten. Students place nine cards face up in a 3x3 grid and keep the other cards in a stack. Students look to see if they have two cards that are tens partners (A-9, 2-8, etc.) and remove those cards and place them in a pairs pile. Then they replace those two cards with two new cards from the stack. The goal is to get all the cards partnered up and removed. If there is a ten, they get to just remove it by itself! I have also seen some people use kings as zeros though, so 10 and 0 (king) would be tens partners. I thought this might be confusing for my guys though, so I just left the ten by itself.

5. In Writer's Workshop we are working on writing personal narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. I read the story "My Trip to the Hospital" by Mercer Mayer and we practiced retelling the story in beginning/middle/end format. Then we orally told stories about a time we got hurt. Finally we wrote our stories out. They turned out pretty cute. We made our good copies into large bandaids. I forgot to give them a real bandaid to stick onto the cover! We'll do that on Monday! :)

That's it for tonight! I need some cuddle time with my puppies before bed. Good night, all!

Camping Fun!

My favourite thing to do during the summer is go camping. I love sitting around a bonfire, curled up in a blanket, making s'mores. We've gone once so far this season and have many more trips planned! Many of my students have been talking about their camping trips already, so I thought it would be nice to end the year with a fun camping theme. Here's some of the fun books we have been reading...

We loved sitting around our "campfire" to listen to stories! We took a poll to see who had been camping before. Only 3 out of 21 students had never been camping before!

We finished up our Summer Math Centres, so I looked around and found some fabulous camping math activities to do during our last week and a half of school! {7 more days with kids!} Here's a peek at the activities we've been doing...

I fell in love with Cara's "Camping Capers" unit from The First Grade Parade. We have been doing a lot of the writing and science activities in it. I am also using a few of her math activities as stations. They are great review and a lot of fun for this time of the year. Here is a count and graph activity from her unit:

She also has this cute fishing for facts sort. I added paper clips and a dollar store fishing rod and *voila*! Best. centre. ever! {According to the kiddos!}

Another fun centre I found was this "Smores Roll and Graph" from Kelli over at Castles and Crayons. {And it's free!!}

Here's another freebie from Kelli.... "Marshmallow Measurement!" I think this is the second favourite centre, because they get to eat their marshmallows after! :)

Another fun {and free} review centre I found is this "Odd and Even Roast" from Hope at 2nd Grade Shenanigans. Hope has a whole unit of fun camping themed math centres.

Here's a quick and easy game of "Let's Go Camping" addition cover up from Ms. Arnold.

And lastly, here is another yummy s'more centre. "Doubles Plus One S'mores" from The Lesson Plan Diva.

Today we talked about animals that we would see camping and brainstormed a giant list. I'm not sure if we would want to camp where we could see bison or polar bears, but I guess it's possible! We also read a book about skunks and made a cute skunk head (from Cara's unit) that we will make into headbands tomorrow. I'll try and remember to snap a picture! They look really cute so far!

Combining our camping unit with our summer countdown, tomorrow is "T for Teddy Bear". I plan to do some fun sorting activities with the stuffed animals. We will also compare teddy bears to real bears. And we will write some stories about what would happen if our teddy bears were real. I can't wait to hear what kind of crazy adventures we would go on with our teddy bears :)

Click either picture to download. For the story page, I made a "teddy bear" page and a "stuffed animal" page. I know for a fact I have some giraffe and orca whale stuffies coming tomorrow!

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer vacation or the last wee bits of school!

More Bears!

This week was our bear/hibernation theme. Lots of fun! If you have not read this book, you must! It is HILARIOUS! (Especially the ending... loved it! haha)

Here are some of the nonfiction books we read this week to help us fill in our bear chart.

We looked at these four types of bears: brown, black, polar, and panda. Here is the chart we created:

When we talked about what bears ate, we did this fun little taste test/graphing activity that came from Rachelle over at What the Teacher Wants! Check out her bear unit here... super cute! I wish I had more time to do all of the activities. We tasted strawberry jam, tuna fish, and honey on crackers. We graphed our favourite bear food. Also included in Rachelle's unit, students coloured in their own graph and then answered questions about it.

During our reading/writing time, we read the book "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". We compared it to the book "Growl!" and did a little T-chart about real vs. fantasy.

The next day we read "The Three Snow Bears" and compared it with Goldilocks in a Venn Diagram. You can download the student version by clicking the picture below.

We have been working on addition and just started talking about "Tens Partners". We created this rainbow anchor chart to help us remember them!

In Rachelle's bear unit, she has this cute activity called "Bears in a Cave". One partner closes their eyes, the other partner uses bear counters (I used Teddy Graham crackers) and puts some in each circle. They write the total in the square at the end and then covers up one of the circles with a "cave" (paper cup or bowl). The other partner guesses how many bears are in the cave. You can use any number of bears. I had mine use all ten bears, so the sum always stayed 10. This was great practice for the "Tens Partners".

When we started talking about hibernation, we read a book called "All About Hibernation".

Then we created a large poster called "Where do animals go in the winter?". I got this idea from the very creative Amy over at Fun 4 Kids. See all of her winter animal ideas here! My students coloured the large background poster. Then they coloured the animals, cut them out with the labels, and glued them into the correct winter home. Then we added some cotton balls for snow! Super cute!

If you would like a copy of the poster, click the pictures below. I print the background on white 11 x 17" paper. The animals/labels are on half of an 8.5 x 11".

Amy also had a poem on her blog called "Winter Animals". It has some cute actions to go with it. We practiced the poem all week, then today we glued it into our poetry journals and illustrated it.

Click above to download the poem.

And last, but not least, we read the Bill Martin Jr. / Eric Carle books, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear", "Polar Bear, Polar Bear", and "Panda Bear, Panda Bear". Kids love the fun rhythm of these books. If you haven't checked out Mrs. Kacey @ Doodle Bugs Teaching, go there now! She has some amazing "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" centres and activities for FREE. Check here and here.

I created an art lesson to go with these books. There is a simple pattern to use and you can create any of the four bears: brown, black, polar, or panda. Students use plastic combs (or a piece of cardboard) to create different paint techniques. Click on the picture below to download the full directions and patterns for free from TpT.

These are the samples I created. I let the students choose any colour background.

Here are my students working hard on their artwork. It was actually a pretty easy project to get all together. We did the painting one day and the assembly the next day.

Here is the finally picture of them all together. (Our class is called 1T by the way, so the bulletin board makes sense....) They did such a good job! Although I don't know why a few of my bunnies thought that a blue marker was a good choice to use to draw the whole face.... hehe

Have a great weekend, everybody!