Happy Grinch Day, friends!! Here’s my sweet team all decked out in our Grinch Day duds. We celebrated “Grinch Day” today and the kids got in on all the fun, too!! They came dressed in green and some of our little cuties even painted their faces and sported Cindy Lou’s hairstyle. TOO cute! Of course, we started out the day by reading the book… Then we brainstormed a list of adjectives to describe the Grinch… {I tried my best to draw him, but not so sure I did him justice. And please excuse the handwriting!} Not so sure that “teethy” is a word, but my little sweetie who offered it up was just certain that it is!!! She INSISTED we ... Read More
If Take A Mouse To The Movies
One of my favorite holiday books… And there’s SO much you can do with it! We had a little “If You Take A Mouse To The Movies” day the other day and the kids had so much fun!! Of course, we started out reading the book. After reading, we talked about cause & effect and made a diagram to show the chain of reaction. I also assigned each kiddo to a story event and had them illustrate it. Then we came together as a whole group and I had the kids work together to sequence the events on a giant filmstrip! I really wanted a text to self writing activity, so I gave them the prompt, “If you take me to the movies, I will ask you for some…”. ... Read More
Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town
I have a thing for Santas. I really do. I have a HUGE collection here at the house and I just can’t get enough of him! He’s so dang cute! SO…it would only stand to reason that I’d want to include a few Santa activities in the classroom as well :) I know that a lot of kids don’t celebrate Christmas, but this year EVERY single one of my kiddos does…so that makes planning a little bit easier for me. However, this hasn’t always been the case! I guess you could say I’m taking advantage of it this year :) I read a book about Santa the other day…can’t remember which one…and had the kids make these cute little scrapbook Santas after we read ... Read More
Noun Town
Oh…I’m SO lovin’ all these fun little Christmas activities! There’s just something about this time of year, don’tcha think?! I’ve gotten SO many WONDERFUL ideas from blogland that I can’t wait to implement in my own room! Y’all are too dang much! Here are a few more things we worked on this week… I was so inspired by Sarah Cooley’s Noun Town that we made one of our own, too! Since it’s the holiday season, we decided to make a Gingerbread Noun Town. We did some “city planning” before we got started. We talked about people, places, and things that we might see in our town and brainstormed a list of each. After city planning, I had each ... Read More
Gingerbread & Christmas Stuff
Okay…still SO behind…but here are just a couple of things we’ve been working on! We’re still going strong with fact families, so I had my kids make fact family gifts. They rolled dice to get the numbers to add together for the sum. I also had them roll the dice twice and add those numbers together to practice working with higher numbers. As you can see, they made their own bows…but real bows would have been a great “addition” too! ;) Speaking of gifts, this is one of my most FAVORITE writing activities. I started doing this my third year of teaching and have been doing it ever since! I think it’s so precious and sweet and really gets ... Read More
Happy Thanksgiving, Y’all!
Celebrating Thanksgiving with my first graders has been, by far, my favorite thing yet! As a culminating activity to our Thanksgiving unit, we had a giant Thanksgiving feast to celebrate the season. We made pilgrim hats & bibs to wear for the occasion. The fun feast was catered by one of my favorites…Dickey’s!!!!…and the kids dined on turkey, ham, mac & cheese, green beans, rolls, and homemade cookies {one of the sweet first grade moms made peanut free chocolate chip cookies for the WHOLE grade level…and they were GOOD!} It was such a fun experience for both the kids and their parents…us too!! Can’t wait to celebrate ... Read More
If You Sailed On The Mayflower…
Today we celebrated “Mayflower Day”!! Okay…so I made that up…but I thought that sounded pretty fitting for our day today :) We started by reading a non-fiction book about the Mayflower. I can’t remember which one, but I checked it out from our school library and it was really good!! It was a great book to review Table of Contents also :) Each “chapter” was only a page or two long. After each page, we stopped to jot. During our stop to jot time, the kids gave me a few facts they learned from that chapter. We learned a lot of really cool facts!! Did you know that the water was so unsafe to drink that everyone on the Mayflower…children ... Read More
A Few More Math Ideas Before The Holidays
Here are a couple more ideas for you to *squeeze in* {HA!!!} before Thanksgiving break :) How funky is your turkey?! Here’s a little fact family activity your kids will love! Each kiddo gets a half circle {turkey body} and a triangle {turkey head}. The kids take two dice and roll. Let’s say they roll a 4 & 2. They have to add the numbers together to get the sum {third #}. They write these numbers in each corner of the turkey head with the sum sitting in the beak. Then the kiddos take 4 different feathers and write a different number sentence on each to match the fact family in the turkey ... Read More
Symmetrical Pattern Block Turkeys
This week we had a little fun with symmetry. To reinforce the concept, I had my cuties make these fun little pattern block turkeys. It was a great little assessment to see which of my kiddos were struggling with the concept :) I absolutely LOVE how different they all turned out! Can’t wait to do these again next year! ... Read More
Pilgrim Projects
Our kids are learning about Thanksgiving customs and traditions and we’ve REALLY gotten into learning all about the pilgrims. The kids are FASCINATED!! They just can’t imagine that little pilgrim boys and girls didn’t have DSI’s & American Girl dolls ;) We started learning about pilgrims reading a few realistic fiction & non-fiction books from our library. We really LOVE this one!!! It’s super informational and it’s got lots of great facts about the Mayflower, pilgrims, and the first Thanksgiving! We learned that life was different for pilgrim boys than girls. We learned a lot of neat facts about little pilgrim boys & ... Read More
