Valentine's Day ♥

              Here are a few photos from some of our Valentine celebrations on Thursday. You can see the children working hard on the cards they took home for parents! We had so much fun making these in addition to exchanging our Valentines with each other. Such a fun (but stressful!) day! :) 

Reader's Theater

 

             In our most recent Learning Launch rotation, each of the classes has been focusing on reading fluency. What better way to enhance fluency that Reader's Theater?! I was so excited to get started on Reader's Theater with my group which was full of already great readers when they came to me. I split them into groups, assigned them scripts and parts, and let them get to practicing. I let them practice their scripts for about 3 days in Learning Launch before we began presenting them to the class. The groups did a wonderful job and really learned the importance of all aspects of fluency...not just reading quickly but with expression and intonation as well. This was my first experience using Reader's Theater in my own classroom, but I absolutely loved it and will certainly be using it again!

First Grade Performance

              This past Thursday night we had our annual First Grade Performance! The students sang several songs for Valentine's Day as their parents and families looked on. They did a wonderful job and the songs were so much fun! Here are a few photos taken from the performance!

Career Research Projects

         After studying about careers that provide goods to the community, we moved our focus to  service careers. I put the students into groups and assigned each group a career to research and find information on. The careers they researched were doctors, teachers, police officers, firemen, and postal workers. Each group had to read books about their assigned career, record information and facts that they learned, and draw a picture to illustrate the career. This took a couple of days to complete, and then the kids presented their careers to the class. Completing research projects in first grade? Absolutely!

Factory Workers & Assembly Lines

           We started talking about one of my favorite topics today in class: Economics! First grade economics focuses on basic concepts like goods and services and wants and needs. Today's introduction focused on goods and how they are made. We spotlighted factories as places that make the goods we buy at Target, Walmart, and various other stores. What better way to study factories than pretend we work in them! We did our own little factory simulation when we got into groups and created assembly lines to make bookmarks for each person in the group. Each member of the group was assigned a special job in creating the bookmarks. This activity was a lot of fun for the kids and was a perfect opportunity for them gain a better understanding of what goods are, why factories and assembly lines are important (and efficient), and even why teamwork is so important!  

Check out some of the photos below of some of our little factory workers!

     You can see from the photos that I put the students into groups of 4 and then assigned them each a job. The first person cut the bookmarks out from a template, the second person punched a hole in the top of the bookmark and cut a small piece of yarn to pass to the next person, the third person tied the yarn onto the bookmark for a marker, and the final person decorated it with stickers.

Literacy Centers

        Literacy Centers are an integral part of every day in our class. Not only do the children love them, but it gives me the opportunity to conduct my guided reading lessons as they work on skills either independently, with my awesome Parapro (who visits from Kindergarten at this time each day), or with the parent volunteer for the day. I am so very fortunate to have a parent volunteer each day of the week to help with one of my centers. They help so much with not only the managing of the centers, but in helping the children practice their skills as well! Here are a few photos from the literacy centers we are doing this week. I change most of them out each week to focus on different aspects of the curriculum we are covering at any given time. 

Two of my girls enjoy time reading to each other in the Reading Hut. They read aloud to one another to practice oral reading and fluency. They then complete a reading log answering questions about the books they read.

Mrs. Manning, my parapro, is playing a fun game one of our first grade teachers, Mrs. Smith, found on Pinterest with this group! They roll the dice (actually a Kleenex box with paper taped to each face) and it lands on a sentence that is written incorrectly. The group discusses the changes that need to be made to the sentence to make it correct and write it on their individual sentence logs. 

This photo shows one of my amazing Parent Volunteers reading with one of her groups. I love having them in my room each day, and the kids love it too!

Classroom Environment

One of the best things about being a new teacher is deciding how to decorate your first classroom. I decided to use a Beach/Hula theme in my room this year. Complete with a Tiki Hut where the students sit to read, grass skirts on the tables, and sand pails holding classroom materials, my students and I love how it all turned out in the end. Here are a few pictures from around the room: 

The Reading Hut where my students love to sit, relax, and read away.

Our Word Wall made from Hawaiian Flowers. It's full of words by now!

Group Work Fun

If you've ever been in my classroom, you know I love having the kids work together in groups! These are a few pictures of my students working together to read a book and complete story map illustrations about the book. They then presented their individual books to the class. They love group work because it means they get to socialize while learning, and I love it because I'm always amazed at how much they learn from each other!

Christmas Celebrations Continued..

A few of my students with their elves. The elves helped me make sure the students were on their best behavior around the holidays.

       Here are a few pictures from our class Christmas party this year. The kids' had a blast with all of the craft activities. We made ornaments, played games, and decorated cookies. Notice their cute Christmas tree shirts too! We all made these from our hand prints the week before our party so they could all wear them on the day of. They turned out adorable. 

      Once again, I have to thank all of my amazing parents for pulling this party off. I sat back and didn't have to do a thing! Also, I couldn't believe it, but every single child in my class had a parent or family member attend the party that day. It was packed, but we had so much fun! That just shows once again what involved and dedicated parents I have. My kids and their families rock, for sure!

        Oh! And while I'm speaking of my awesome kids and their parents, I have to show you what a lot of them pitched in to give me for Christmas: This "fashion tree" full of gift cards to my favorite stores! In addition to this, I got an adorable shirt, a scarf, lotions, and so much more! I definitely do not deserve all of this!!

Christmas Celebrations

I have to show off a little in this post.. These are the Christmas gifts I gave the kids in my classroom this year. I made them each an individual marker board with their names on them. I got the marker boards from Lowe's. It was a huge sheet of the board cut into 12' x 12' pieces. I literally paid about $13 for 30 marker boards! I then used my Cricut (a must have for all elementary school teachers) to put their names on the boards. Finally, I finished the board with an Expo marker attached with Velcro. I was so proud of the gift and the kids absolutely loved them! The best part is I only spent about $20 total for the entire class!

Sentence Superheroes

This week's ELA lessons focused on the different types of sentences in our language. To end our week long study of the types of sentences, I had the kids split into small groups and create their own "Sentence Superheroes". I assigned each group a type of sentence: command, question, statement, or exclamation. I then had them create a Superhero for that type of sentence. We ended up with Command Girl, Question Man, and many other creative characters, all adorned with a badge or belt buckle that indicated the type of sentence they were assigned! The children had to come up with sentences that matched what they were assigned to write on the outside of their superhero. We had so much fun creating these characters! I also have to brag about what wonderful artists I have in my room! 

A Happy Halloween Indeed

One of our favorite things to do in first grade is celebrate the holidays! Here are a few pictures of my precious students enjoying Halloween festivities. I'm so thankful to have such wonderful moms who organized all of these treats and fun activities! 

Wonderful Wizard of Oz

If you teach first grade this year, you know that the CCGPS has an entire unit devoted to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. My children absolutely loved reading this classic story over the course of several weeks. Here is a picture from the last day of our unit when we watched the movie in our pajamas! And of course our awesome first grade team went all out decorating the hall way in a Wizard of Oz theme, yellow brick road and all. 

Project Linus

One of the most rewarding experiences I have had so far in the classrooms was completing the Project Linus Service Project with my students. As one of our assignments at GC&SU, we had to come up with a unit that based around a service project that had students giving back to the community. My students at Vineville Academy and I decided to make blankets for children at the local Ronald McDonald House through the Project Linus Organization. We made 3 blankets of our own to donate to children and asked other classes in the school to donate blankets as well. The students wrote letters to all of the classroom teachers in the school to encourage them to help us out with this awesome cause, and many of them took part We ended up donating over twenty-five blankets by the time we finished! We had a blast making the blankets, learned about the importance of helping others in the community, and even covered some standards along the way!