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.

Valentine Word Work Centres

So glad I got these finished for next week! My students love when I add new centres and I know they will love these ones. Click the picture to check them out at TpT!

There are five word work centres included in this pack:

1. Valentine Stamping - Always a big hit! Students stamp Valentine words, using an optional word bank. (Just add alphabet stamps!)

2.  Word Building - Students make words using 10 different short vowel word families.

3. Roll, Read, Keep - A sight word game using Dolch Pre-Primer and Primer words. (A blank page of cards is included to add your own words.)

4. Mystery Words - Find the 20 hidden Dolch sight words in the Valentine Town picture. 

5. Long and Short E Sort - Students sort the picture cards into the correct categories. Cut and paste recording sheet to go with it.

These are up just in time for the sale tomorrow and Monday! Check out all the goodies at TpT.

Valentine's Day and 100th Day in the SAME WEEK!

This week has been CUH-RAZY! Monday I was away at a P.D. session which was awesome! It was all about proactive strategies for dealing with students with ODD, ADHD, and Autism. Tuesday was Valentine's Day! Yay! We were so hopped up on sugar, it was ridiculus! And yesterday was the 100th day of school for us! Wow! Here's a peek at a few things we did this week.

I love incorporating food into Math, so we started the day with a little conversation heart graph, from Erin Eberhart's new Valentine unit found here.

I went with super simple for our Valentine bags this year. Plain brown paper bags, large foam hearts from the dollar store, scrap construction paper, and a little imagination! I gave them a few ideas, but let them just go with it! They turned out super cute!

Can you tell the first bag is Sonic the Hedgehog? Haha. Love it!

For our party, we watched a Clifford valentine video, played pin the heart on the penguin, and had a few snacks. Of course nobody thinks about fresh veggies or fruit when it comes to Valentine's Day. Only sugar, sugar, and more sugar! ;)

I got so many hugs and so many "This is the best Valentine's Day ever!" Oh, I love that it is so simple to please first graders!

On to our one hundredth day of school yesterday... We started with our daily calendar. We filled in our hundreds chart and counted by 1's, 5's, and 10's. We bundled our 100 straws. We changed our money into one dollar--a loonie! :) And we added our 100th circle to our caterpillar.

We read this cute poem by Meish Goldish. We counted the number of words to double check there really were 100 words and glued it into our poetry journal (downloaded from Ms. Van Orman at The Sharpened Pencil).

Of course we had to make the adorable 100 year old portraits I have been seeing everywhere! Some wall paper scraps, pieces of lace, cotton balls, and yarn = super cute old people! The writing was hilarious too. "When I am 100 years old, I will ride my motorcycle." lol. Really??

We counted our 100 collections, by separating it into 10 groups of 10.

We also made fruit loop necalces. First we sorted out the fruit loops into groups of ten (thank you again, Erin Eberhart for the free mat--see her post here). Then we strung them onto colourful yarn to make cute neclaces!

We took a little break from all the work to complete 100 exercises! I made up 10 different exercise cards: 10 jump jacks, 10 sit ups, 10 leg kicks, etc. We did the exercises all together, but you could set up 10 stations and have groups rotate through them as well. If you would like to download the cards, click the picture below.

Then to end the day, I had already planned to do a hunt for 100 hugs and kisses {the chocolate kind}. I have seen this idea all over the web, but heard about it first from Andi over at Pencils, Glue, & Tying Shoes. Then I also saw Cara Carroll's adorable idea to graph which they liked better--hugs or kisses? So we combined both, for a fun chocolate-filled afternoon!

Each chocolate had a number on the bottom, so the kids had to practice matching the numbers on the hundreds chart. We actually ended up only finding 98 of them... so hopefully the missing two show up next week! :P

That's it for now! Have a funtastic weekend! I've got a three-day weekend, so yipee! :)