Aw, yeah!! It's finally THANKSGIVING BREAK! I always feel a little guilty saying this. I truly LOVE teaching and seeing my students every day! They make me laugh & just make my day.  This year has been incredibly busy as I am working on getting my National Board certification as well as holding many leadership roles at my campus & of course have a life out side of work...so I am really excited to have the TIME to get check off many things that are on my to-do list so I can remain present with my students when I get back!

When things get crazy and our emotions get the best of us it's then that we must remember what we are truly thankful for.  There are so many things to be thankful for!

Originally, I wanted to make wreaths with my students and so I made the example above and everything; but then decided that since the first graders had already done the Thankful place mats, that it was too much of the same thing.

THEN I decided that I wanted my students to think a little deeper about what they were thankful for. So, instead of making the wreaths this year (although I plan to make them next year instead of the place mats), the students made turkey bags!

Then, the students wrote about what they were thankful for and why.  They then put the thankful notes in their bags. They also had to fill out a thankful pilgrim hat for each of their table mates (they wrote their name on the backs of those hats so the recipient child would know who it was from). But instead of putting those hats in their bag, they put them in the bag of the child they wrote about!

My dream would be that the students all open the bag with their families sometime during Thanksgiving dinner and read to their families what they wrote down that they were thankful for. I just think that would be such a wonderful experience for everyone involved!

We had a couple of random times today for some short Thanksgiving themed activities.

The first graders practiced their fine motor skills by cutting out these words & gluing them in a ABC order. Then they drew illustrations that matched the words.

Then, I needed some math/Thanksgiving activities and these ones I found were perfectly thematic, quick, & super easy to prep!! 

I didn't have the students roll the dice though or use the bingo dots. They just came up with an addition fact that equals 10 & then colored in one of the numbers in the 10 frame & used the cut outs for the other number.

It's November!!

This November I had to go ahead and restructure my plans...normally I do election stuff around President's Day but with the election happening I decided to rearrange and talk about elections in November.  Also, we have a full off for Thanksgiving rather than 3 days...ughhh.  Anyone else have this happening this year?? How do you feel?? I'm feeling like those 2 days before are also a nice time with my students and also that no one else in my family is taking the whole week off so I'm just hanging around for 2 days until we are all ready to go on our family trip on Wednesday.  But may be that's just me...    

Anyway, so I restructured my November plans...

Week 1: Past/Present: Mayflower, Pilgrims & Wampanoags   

Week 2: The forming of America & Elections

Week 3: Thanksgiving Traditions

We started off this week by reviewing the past and present by doing a past and present sorting activity. We did a lot of Past/Present work when we learned about Christopher Columbus so this is just a continuation of that & America's history.

We started by learning about the Mayflower today.  We began by picking up & [[skim]]  reading one of our favorite book series!!

As we read a section of the book, we would jot down fact onto our "Life on the Mayflower" anchor chart.

After we had researched about the Mayflower, what life was like on the Mayflower, and why the Pilgrims went on the Mayflower I told the students it was time for them to pack their chests because they were about to go on their own Mayflower voyage.  They were SO EXCITED!  We reviewed what things the Pilgrims were allowed to take with them & then they were each handed their own chest to pack with things that they would have had in the Pilgrim era.  

Click on the pic above for a free copy of the template.

Once they all had packed their chests, they were told to meet at the carpet.  We happened to do this entire lesson in one day; however, it can easily be split into 2).  We talked about how we were going to pretend the carpet was the Mayflower.  As we sat aboard the Mayflower, we watched the 1st 10 minutes of "Charlie Brown - Mayflower Voyage" - while I do not watch video often, there are so many benefits of using this one!! 

1) It is pretty historically correct

2) Charlie Brown is pretending he was on the Mayflower Voyage - just as the students were

3) The sounds within the media often changed based on the emotions happening - so we paused & talked about what the purpose of the sound was (TEK #16B)

Note: Before we watched, we did talk about how this is a tool to enable us to learn more about long ago & reiterated that they did not have technology back then.

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.

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)! 

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! 

Today was a day my firsties have been waiting for since the first week of school - Reading Buddies!! Finally we got to meet our 4th grade reading buddies! Both the 4th graders & 1st graders have been begging to meet their buddies so it was a happy day for all. 

In the past, my first graders meet with their reading buddies every other week.  However, this year schedules were hard so we are meeting once a month.  

If you have never done reading buddies before I would HIGHLY encourage you to reach out to another teacher at your school!! Not only do reading buddies promote a love for reading & practice read aloud skills, it also fosters an amazing community and helps bring the students of all grade levels, and school as a whole together! In fact, today one of my firsties was a little sad because his reading buddy from Kinder was in the class and he didn't get paired with him.  When he realized that he could still go up to his old buddy and say "Hi, it is nice to see you! How are you?" AND he could now get the opportunity to meet another person - he was so excited! Learning the social skill of being able to interact with people who you may not have seen in a while is so important!  

Today for our 1st reading buddies day, we made miniature versions of ourselves.  Since I have only taught 1st I was a little nervous that the 4th graders would finish super quickly or not be into the activity - they were SO excited! It even worked out perfectly because some of them had to make 2 (more 1st graders than 4th graders = some 4th graders having 2 buddies)  in the  (something that both the 1st graders & 4th graders really enjoyed!!). Thank goodness ;)

Finally - I have been itching to put some fall decor into our classroom but have contained myself until this week.  

Place value is so challenging so we dive into learning about place value very slowly. 

We started the week by learning about representing numbers with 10s and 1s.  The big goal is things are grouped by 10s or 1s.

I wanted to make some fall decor and these scarecrows were PERFECT!

You can get this freebie here.

#allthehearteyes

Today was the day my group of firsties have been waiting for! Class Jobs day! We spent the day filling out applications to see if we can get "approved" for these jobs.  The room let out cheers when we were all approved to help with our class jobs.

You can get the free printable by clicking on the picture above! Enjoy :)

This week, we've been learning all about digits.  

We started by learning about digits vs numbers. We filled out a venn diagram and connected this to how letters form words & some letters are words (a, I) - digits are numbers too! 

We then spent each day working on forming two of the digits correctly.  We really worked on starting from the TOP and not making backwards digits.

We did a couple of quick practice sheets to practice recognizing digits and different digit numbers (2 digit, 3 digit, etc).

Click on any of the above pictures to get the craftivities and printables!

Back to school season is literally flying by! Last week was so busy I ran out of time to take pictures of all the fun things we were doing.

Since I kept a lot of what I was doing the same as last year, I thought I would share that post...