Turkey Tuesday!

November 14, 2017
One of my favorite things is all of the turkey fun that happens during the days before Thanksgiving.



They remind me of the turkeys that are around in the Texas Hill Country during Thanksgiving, where I often celebrated Thanksgiving growing up. 


Above is a #throwback turkey activity that I put on my classroom door my first year that I taught. The students thought about something they were thankful for and wrote it on a feather. 

My 2nd or 3rd year teaching, a sweet student of mine introduced me to Albuquerque Turkey (the book). Everyone in the classroom fell in love with the song and we've been singing it in room 111 all turkey season long! 
We also had some fun hearing and sharing our own Turkey themed jokes throughout the day. 

Here are some fun Turkey projects we did this year...

These thankful turkeys were a great google search and are super cute. 
We read some wonderful turkey themed books! 

After reading some of our favorite books, we decided to disguise the turkeys so they wouldn't be eaten! Note to self: since I can never remember where I get the templates...This year I got the template here. Last year I got the template here.

This one is one of my favorite kid writing pieces from the year! It has made me laugh all day!  



The first graders made text-to-text connections.

We did these ADORABLE turkey directed drawings! 
Side notes: I was super bummed when something fell on the artwork right in the middle of the turkey body :/


Finally, one of my favorite activities that my first graders make are these turkey place mats. They turn out so great each year. In the past, I've always used painted handprints but think these are super cute & less messy too! 

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Calendars

December 21, 2016
Every year we make calendars to help bring in the New Year.  Depending on the year and things going on, I sometimes have my students make these calendars the week before Winter Break, sometimes the week after we've come back.

As a class, we fill out the dates and holidays for each month.  We do 2-3 months each day.  After we fill out each month, the students spend about 5-10 minutes getting started illustrating something that happens during that month. 


Then at the end of the week, I give the students some time to add details and complete the illustrations for each month. 

The students LOVE these and always talk about them hanging up in their homes.

If you want a copy, feel free to get it here.
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Life Of A Pilgrim Child

November 02, 2016
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.
Andrea Sign

Rocktober & More

October 29, 2016
Is it just me or does this little ghosty crack you up? I adore him! 




We spent the month of October learning all about rocks! 


We spent the last few days of our unit exploring all about caves - from how caves form to the parts of a cave to cave formations to animals that live in caves.  We then wrapped up our rocktober fun by taking a field trip to the Inner Space Caverns.  If there is a cavern near you - I would definitely suggest taking a trip there.  The students LOVED it! And totally connected it with their learning - a few things I heard during the field trip...

"Are we in the twilight zone?"
"Oh, look! We are entering the mouth of the cave!"
"I hope we see some bats!"
"Oh cool! A stalagmite, a stalagmite, a column!" 

It was so fun to see their learning being connected to a real life experience!!

We did some fun cave activities (which of course I did not take pictures of...whomp, whomp...)

Here a some fun bat/cave activities we did
Top left: Text to Self Connection.  We read a bat book and on the back of that craftivity we included our text to self connection written response.
Top right: We began our unit on addition by creating a visual, a math sentence, and a word sentence to show the addition that was happening.
Bottom left: After learning all about bats, we wrote about what it would be like if we were a bat.  Then we drew 3 pictures of different things that we wrote about.
Bottom right: BME activity after reading Stellaluna.

We then spent the remaining few days of October learning about the history of Halloween, themes of Halloweens - including pumpkins, and completing some "spooky" Halloween projects!

You can get this spider here.



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