Is it just me or does this little ghosty crack you up? I adore him! 

Building a sense of community is one of the most important things to do in the classroom.  It is such a focal point at the beginning of the year and I feel like it needs to continue through the rest of the year too.  

Letting students share about themselves and learn about others is one of the best ways to do this! 

Each Wednesday morning after the announcements (starting about the 3rd week of school) we have an All About Me presentation.  I remember having All About Me presentations growing up and loving them so I wanted to make sure to incorporate them into my classroom as a teacher.

Each child has a week assigned to them.  The students LOVE this time! The presentation lasts about 5-15 minutes and during this time the student's family members come and watch the student tell the class about themselves - from what their favorite food it to what their favorite color is to their favorite sports team to introducing the class to their family members, etc.  The student creates a poster at home with all of these favorites on them and the students use this poster to guide his/her presentation.

After this presentation, the class creates a book for the student. The book consists of a page (or more) from each classmate about what he/she learned about the week's presenter.  The students love writing all about their classmate! 

 It is also great because it is a time the students are often using common words like "like," "favorite," "color," "is," & "has."

After we finish the book, I read it to the class.

You can grab this freebie here.

October is such a fun month because of the unlimited amounts of festive craftivities that are possible! 

We have been spending this week talking all about timelines and chronological order.  

I've been searching for what feels like forever for a good timeline activity that my first graders could do and I have finally found the perfect one! 

After talking about past, present, & future and sequencing Columbus' voyage, we created our own timelines.

How cute are these?! Perfect for first graders!! 

Today we started learning all about syllables.  It is an important topic when teaching what sounds "y" can make.  

I teach them to put their hand under their chin and every time their chin moves down when they are saying a word = ones syllable.  So in butterfly their chin/hand moves down 3 times when saying that word which means butterfly has 3 syllables. 

We then practiced this strategy for counting syllables by doing a whole group syllable sort.  I showed them many pictures and then as a class they should me with their fingers how many syllables was in the word.

Tomorrow is game day - we are going to start practicing the syllables by playing different games and hands-on activities! First, each child will complete the syllable zoo activity.  After they finish that activity, they will race each other.

Happy Sunday!

Is it just me or do these weekends FLY by??

Every Monday my First Graders always come in with so much that they want to tell me about theiir weekend! Between students wanting to share and parents telling me things about heweek, I often found Monday mornings a bit overwhelming. 

I wanted to be sure to have a chance to listen to what my first graders had to tell me in a way where there wasn't a line first thing Monday morning...

This is my FAVORITE way to kick off the week with my group of Firsties...

I just love this time when my students practice writing about what they did over the weekend and my first graders love being able to share after writing what it is that they did.  

Here is how it works: when the students come in on Monday morning, they spend the first 15-20 minutes (with morning announcements at some point during that time) writing in their "Weekend News Journal" all about their weekend! Then, all of the students come to the carpet and we take turns sharing what they each did during the weekend. 

Tip: I have the students write the date at the top of the paper to help with organization.

Here's to a great week! 

A lot of our comparing numbers activities came from this packet.

One of my favorite activities we do is our character projects!

After spending the week learning all about character traits we spent today outlining and then creating our own characters from our own imagination.

The characters that the first graders come up with are so great! I love them! 

They then wrote about their characters.  They were so engaged and excited that many wrote numerous pages! 

Today I spent time setting up for our Columbus Day fun on Friday.

Here is what we did last year...

Y'all, today was an ABSOLUTE BLAST!

Here is what led up to our fun for today...this week we have been learning about explores!

We began by learning all about explorers, creating an anchor chart, and writing about where we would like to explore as an explorer.

I found the cute templates for the boy and girl templates here and made the paper to fit the writing prompt.

We then learned all about Christopher Columbus.  The students were amazed that this happened over 500 years ago!  After reading the books, we made these great sequencing boats. 

Tip: After having the students cut out all of the sails, have the students find a spot in the room and lay out all the sails.  Then teach them how to sequence them (put one behind the other) and read each sail many times until they are able to sequence them.

Our morning work.

Finally, TODAY, we packed our bags, created a map/telescope, and put our hats on for a journey to a new land!  I found this idea from Jodi and isn't it the BEST?! My students absolutely LOVED IT!!!! They were so into it and many adults commented on how impressed they were with the deep understanding of facts that the students knew about the voyage! 

My goal was that the students understood the risks, sentiments, preparation, and trading that goes into exploring BUT the students were so into this Columbus Day voyage that they also were all about learning certain "Columbus trivia" facts - such as 1492, the 3 names of the ships, etc.

A couple of tips...

Happy Exploring & Happy Columbus Day (almost)! 

Q: Why do seagulls fly over the sea?

A: Because if they flew over the bay, they would be called bagels!

{Who doesn't love a good cheesy joke?}

I decided to incorporate a Classic Joke Tuesday into my classroom (based off of Ellen Degeneres' Classic Joke Wednesday) and the students LOVE it!

Each Tuesday morning I write a joke (with many grammatical mistakes) on the board.  During the morning meeting, we work as a class to correct the joke.  Once the joke it written on the board correctly, it stays there until the end of the day (rewritten in a small corner so it doesn't take up too much space).  

Before they leave for the day, we take a few minutes to guess what it could be and then I share with them the answer.  

Last week in math we began learning about Even and Odd numbers.  It was a very busy week though so we did not quite get to everything and will be finishing up this week - which is perfect because it is October and I love making our "Even Gleevens and Odd Blodds!"

In prepping for the rest of our Even & Odd unit, I thought I would share what we did last year since we are doing some of those activities again.

Back when we first learned about digits, we did learn about which were even and odd.  First I had my first graders find a partner and then I told them I had different food items.  If the items were even and they could share them fairly then they could eat them.  This brought a great concrete idea to the concept of even & odd.

Now onto learning about how to know if a number more than 10 is even or odd.

First we played a game called prove it.  The students created a game board and then passed their board to a partner and had to prove whether the numbers on the board were even or odd.

Short O PhOnics
My students have been LOVING our phonics crafts - from the bAgs to the vEsts to the mIttens to the "pet" Octopus (which can apparently also be worn as bracelets according to one of my sweet firsties)! Each week they make my teacher heart smile with how excited they get about the activities.  

We started with our word hunt Friday morning and then made our octopus to help us remember the short O sound.

This week we learned all about Fire Safety!

Even though Fire Safety isn't until "officially" for 2 more weeks, I have found that Fire Safety really hits home with the students when I plan these lessons during the same week as our 1st Fire Drill.

I did not have a chance to take pictures of the activities we did this year so I thought I would throw it back to the fun we had last year!

After reading a couple fire safety books and practicing our fire drill, we thought about our favorite fire safety tip and wrote about it!

We loved these asking & telling sentences from Alexandra! 

Some other activities we did this year included reading the book "Stop, Drop, and Roll," learning about the history of Dalmatians and firefighters, talking about how brave firefighters are and thinking about a time that we were brave like a firefighter, and of course a fire drill!