.

Hopefully this helps you in your journey to incorporate new and exciting ways to add purpose to what your students are learning! 

Happy Teaching!

Today was filled with so much pumpkin fun!

We started out by reading all about pumpkins! 

Then we spent time measuring how tall our pumpkin was, finding out it if would float or sink, measuring how wide it was, how many seeds were in it, and more! Unfortunately, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures! 

After reading, we talked about the pumpkin life cycle and created our own mini pumpkin life cycle booklet. 

We learned sequencing terms and did this pumpkin craftivitiy. 

Finally, we planted a pumpkin and are going to spend the next few weeks observing the life cycle of a pumpkin! We planted some seeds into a pumpkin and others into cups for each of the children. The pictures I took didn't turn out. I hope our pumpkins turn out as well as the one in the picture above!  

We also made a pumpkin volcano which the students thought was so fun to watch! 

It's the Roll Away Pumpkin! 

My sister surprised me & came to visit! 

Ahead of the Hurricane Harvey my sister decided to leave and come home. So she surprised me at my school! This was such a fun surprise & I am so happy she came!! Every year she makes a point to stop by, meet my group of firsties, & pretend she is the teacher for a minute by reading them a story. 

My other favorite was reading more of our Forever Books. On the first day of school, I share my forever book with my students and then they are given homework to bring theirs. The students then share why it's their favorite and we read it to the class. I also love it because I always learn about new books that the kids bring in.

Just Like Me!

During our morning meeting this morning, I LOVED our morning meeting activity. Some background: Yesterday, we made mini-versions of ourselves and learned that no 2 people are alike and that our differences make each of us special! So this morning during our meeting, I had the students go around in a circle and share something that made them special. For example: I have 1 sister. Then everyone who that statement was true for too would sit up, point to themselves, & say "Just Like Me!" Literally, such a sweet way to start the morning! 

My next favorite were these scientists we made. I always wish my science lessons had a craft to go with it to work on those fine motor skills.  Well after reading about sweet Ada Twist, we talked about what a scientist does. The students then made themselves as scientists and wrote a wondering they have. 

DISASTER MASTER

So after lunch, the students came into the classroom to a HUGE disaster. Tables were flipped over, books were knocked out everywhere, papers were just thrown about, all of our math materials were dumped over, etc. We soon discovered that our class mascot Stripes, had had some fun while we were at lunch.

We decided we needed to make some classroom agreements so that everyone would know what the expectations were and we wouldn't have this happen again.  The students were more than happy to do this as they did not want to pick up another mess left by Stripes, or anyone else for that matter. They even signed their names at the bottom of the agreement to make sure of it ;)  

Bonus: At some point today, one of my firsties raised his hand several times & asked several questions in a row. After asking them he commented loudly to himself "I sure ask a lot of questions." #selfawareness #bless

Favorite From Today #1

So last night, I had a spur of the moment "IDEA." My beginning of year lessons are so much "read book then do craft." I love this because the books all emphasize some type of life skill (persevering, working as a team) as so the students really get the foundation for starting the year but I just wanted something a little more exciting for our 2nd day. 

So, right after recess we headed to our campus IDEA lab (aka Makerspace lab)! Now, I typically do these types of lessons in my classroom but this space offers students the opportunity to use a green scree, drimel saw, 3-D printer, & more. So it is definitely a place we visit several times during the year and it's important they are introduced to the place. 

We began our lesson by reading this adorable book! It is absolutely PERFECT for these types of lessons! It talks about the entire process of creating a physical version of what you can imagine. After we came up with agreements about how people should behave in the idea lab, the students began to use materials such as paper towel rolls, tape, cups, pom-poms, etc. to make "The Most Magnificent Thing" they could think of!

I was SO IMPRESSED with their creativity & problem solving skills!! They made pom-pom bracelets, purses, baskets, pencil holders, binoculars, ships, and more! Just by trial and error, students learned that putting glue on one side of tape does not make tape stick to stuff but that rolling the tape allows both sides to be sticky! It was such a special day & definitely one of my favorites! Made me excited to go to teach that day! The students LOVED this too - the next day they all said "do we get to go back there today?!"

Favorite From Today #2

We also started our phonics unit by refreshing our knowledge of the alphabet. The students created this classroom alphabet - one of my favorite things to have up in my classroom! 

This might be one of my favorite years so far. I have LOVED how this school year has started and am super excited about the year to come!! 

Having such a great start to the year is definitely a group effort. A well prepared teacher, grateful parents, and responsive students are the keys to a spectacular year! Having such wonderful parents & students to engage with every day really makes me so even more thankful & excited to get to work with them for the next year! 

Starting this year with such a grateful heart makes me want to reflect on my favorite things from each day. 

My mom sending me flowers. This is a sweet tradition she does every year and every year I get so excited knowing they will come! 

Having one of my amazing teammates tell me about this adorable book at lunch and then reading it to my students right before we went to go look at the eclipse. Of course, we talked about what the eclipse really is & the students totally understood it - they were even able to show off to their parents what the words "umbra" & "punumbra" mean. What was adorable was when they all looked at the solar eclipse with their glasses on, they all said "Wow! It does look like something ate it!!" Is that the cutest thing or what?! 

Oh & having one of my sweet new firsties comment that he definitely did not think he was responsible enough to be able to be trusted to wear the glasses on his own. This was after he heard what can happen if the glasses were not worn correctly. Sweet thing. Having a student understand the idea of risk/reward on the first day of school makes me a grateful teacher! 

Having the students work on these puzzles. It really allowed for the 1st day to be very chill and let them have something sweet to take home at the end of the day to remember their 1st day by. 

Here's to 4 more posts this weekend because I just came up with the daily favorites idea...

Today we read a class favorite and as we were reading we were reminded of our own likes & dislikes. 

After reading, we talked about how Little Pea doesn't like to eat candy.  We then shared one thing we do not like.

We also thought about what Little Pea does like and what we like. 

Today we learned all about the Life of a Pilgrim Child.  The lessons we did happened to be an extension of the last post, BUT I have done these as stand-alone activities before.

We started off today by reading some of our favorite Pilgrim books.

If I had a copy, I would have also read the book "Samuel Eaton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy" by Kate Waters.

Then we added to our pilgrim boy and girl venn diagram.

We then went back into our character roles that we did as part of our Mayflower lesson which you can find here.  

To refresh your memory: we finished watching the first 10 minutes of Charlie Brown Mayflower Voyage and they are now at the part where they are about to get off the ship & explore the New World. 

I told the students that before they can get off the Mayflower and explore the New World (w/ Charlie Brown), they had to write an expert piece about children living in Pilgrim times.

After they finished their writing, they created themselves as a pilgrim boy/girl.   

You can get the pilgrim writing paper & templates here.

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.

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

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)!