Five for Friday! (on a Saturday)

Hello Friends!

Well lucky Kacey's Five for Friday post is all about SUMMER, but we still have two weeks of school left!  We'll try to stay busy and start cleaning out the classroom at the same time!  I'm moving rooms next year so I'll be packing EVERYTHING!  :)

Here we go with my Five-

 If you follow me on Facebook, you've already seen this pic, but on Monday we got a visit from a mobile planetarium!!  It was so cool!!  We got to climb in the giant blue igloo and she showed us the sun, planets and constellations.  I was sitting on the floor with the kids oohing and ahhing right along with them! 

We also got a visit from the RIF people and everyone got a free book!!  Yay!  I was so excited that so many of my kids picked Jack and Annie books (Magic Tree House series) and that so many of them are actually on the level to read them independently!!

We did some tear art projects this week and created our own flowers.  After making their flowers, they had to label the parts and the jobs that each part do to help the plant.  They had a lot of fun!

I got this lovely present from one of my boys on Tuesday!  I wore it all day and even had it on when I went to HEB that night to pick up food for our potluck on Wednesday!  Gotta love those special presents!!  :)

We started our All About Me Math projects this week!  We filled in all the math facts about ourselves and started working on the poster pieces.  I actually shrunk the pieces down this year and we're going to put them onto sentence strips when we finish the project on Tuesday!  I love doing this project every year, it's a lot of fun and it makes for a super cute hallway display!  If you are interested in checking it out, please stop by my TPT store to see it!  Be sure to check out the preview to see some student examples!

Hope y'all had a great week and enjoy your three day weekend!  Unless you're already off for the summer, well then I'm jealous!  :)

Be sure to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

Five for Friday!

Hi Friends!!

It has been a Caa-rrrazy week this week!  Brief recap for ya- I was out Wed. and Thurs. of last week at TCEA, Friday was a "cold day" so Monday was already a major catch-up day for me!  Wednesday was the 100th Day of School, Thursday was Picture Day (both class AND individual) and then today was, of course, Valentine's Day!  Whew!  Thank goodness it's Friday!!!

And now it's time to link up with Kacey for Five for Friday!

 

Here are my cuties holding up their Word Clouds during the 100th Day of School Parade!!

And now a close up of some our our Word Clouds!  We wrote 100 words and then typed them all up in the computer lab!  Lots of fun.

We had SO MUCH FUN making these shape monsters today!  They all turned out awesome.

Texas weather is just insane this time of the year.  We had freezing temperatures overnight on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and almost had a late start two of those days.  Then today, we hit 83 degrees!  I'm not complaining, though- I'm ready for Spring!

Today's party was relatively painless and check out all my goodies!  I'm loaded up with chocolate for the next few months, at least!  Also got a Starbucks card so I can get some weekend chai teas!  Yum!

How was your Friday?

Be sure to link up with Doodlebugs Teaching!

Five for Fraturday!

To steal Kristin's words- it's time for Five for Fraturday!  If you don't know Kristin yet, you really must check out her blog- she cracks me up!

I'm excited to be linking up with Kacey this week and so I'll get on with my 5 pictures!

One of my sweeties wore this shirt on Tuesday and I love it!

We had a lot of fun this week comparing different versions of the Three Little Pigs stories!  The kids got really excited to find the similarities and differences and add them to our chart.  We read these this week, do you have any other favorites?

The Three Little Pigs by Gavin Bishop
Three Little Pigs by James Marshall
The Three Pigs by David Wiesner
The Three Little Gators by Helen Ketteman
The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas
The True Story of The Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

 We had a lot of fun using Shuna P's Cutting Up CVC Words pack!  We were reviewing short u words this week, so her pack was perfect!  I used one of the short u sheets in a Word Work center and used the one above in my some of my small groups.  Lots of fun!

We've been working on related addition subtraction facts and building fact families all week.  We had a little break from our normal routine of math journals and math centers to make some fact family turkeys!!  I had each student pick 2 numbers they wanted to add together and they built the facts in their fact family first, before transferring it all onto the turkey papers.  They did really well with it and only a few needed some small group help to get the facts done.  I had 5 or 6 of them on the carpet with me when 3 admin walked in for a surprise walk through!  They really liked the lesson and said my kids were doing great!  Whew!

Ok, so I stole that picture from Google, but I'm going to pretend that it's me and the other teachers at my school because we have all of next week off!!!  Woo hoo!!  My husband and I did early Thanksgiving with our families already so we're jumping on a plane to NYC tomorrow!  Two of our friends are getting married and we couldn't be more happy to celebrate with them!

How was your week?  What's your Thanksgiving break like?  Would love to hear from you in the comments!  And don't forget to link up over at Doodle Bugs Teaching!

Five for Friday!

Hello Friends!!!  Are you as excited as I am that it's FRIDAY?!?!  Woo hoo!

I hope you had a good week this week!  The weather is finally cooling off down here in Texas and our 1:35 recess was actually bearable and enjoyable this week.  We also had a training day on Monday with an hour and a half lunch- which we enjoyed on the patio of a local restaurant!  I'm loving this cooler weather!!

Anyway, I'm glad to be linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching again for Five for Friday...here are my random pictures from this week, and I really do mean random!!  :)

I love switching out my calendar at home each month (even though I'm always a few days late)!  I love this calendar from Dana Heacock and have used hers ever since college!  A family I nannied for had it in their kitchen and I just loved it, so now I get a new one every year!

This will give you a little clue about how busy everyone at our school is this year!!  In August, I made new alphabet cards to hang in my room and just now had the time to print and laminate them!!!  With trainings, meetings, huge class sizes and everything else thrown on a teacher's plate- I just haven't had two seconds to get these printed!  I still have my boring one up that came with our reading curriculum, we'll see how long it takes me to get these stapled up there!!

On Wednesday night we went to see ZZ Top!  They were so awesome!!  This is actually the second time we've seen them and they are just so energetic, it's crazy!  I hope I can move like that when I'm their age!! 

If you don't know those two faces on the screen- you are missing out!!!  It's Annie and Moby from Brain Pop Jr.!!!  I seriously love those videos and so do my students.  There are videos on a huge variety of topics- bullying...Pablo Picasso...washing your hands...colors...tally marks- anything!  There's also a version for older grades that is just called Brain Pop.  Luckily, our district pays for the subscription, but I really do use the videos on a weekly basis!

I plugged in my very first Scentsy warmer today and wow, my classroom smelled Ah-maz-ing!!  I used Autumn Sunset today and I also have Cinnamon Bear to try next!!  I loooove cinnamon and anything that smells like fall!!  And now it can smell like fall all year round!!  Yes!

I do hope everyone had a great week and has an even better weekend!  We don't get Monday off, so I don't have a three day weekend like a lot of you do!!  So sad...oh well!  And speaking of sad, I'm about to watch the Finn episode of Glee on my DVR.  I need to go get the tissues ready!!

Don't forget to link up with Kacey to share your pictures!!

Five For Friday- First Week of School!!

Whew!!!  The first week is over and I am exhausted!!!!

Our numbers are crazy high this year (which is unfortunately a reoccurring pattern at my school), so I've got 28 firsties squeezed into my room!  The other two general ed teachers are at 27 and 29, but our bilingual teachers are at 18 and 19!!  Soooo jealous!!  We're keeping our fingers crossed for a 6th teacher soon.  I've managed to get some teaching in, even though we don't even fit onto our carpet!  I'm linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching to share some pics from this week!!

Here we go! 

I shared this picture on my facebook page, but this was my mountain of school supplies on the first day of school!  I know a lot of you have wonderful systems for students sorting school supplies at Meet the Teacher, but it's rare that I have more than 2 or 3 families bring supplies to Meet the Teacher.  Most of them bring them on the first or second day of school, and with 28 firsties all piling in between 7:00 and 7:30 am, my hopes of organization flew out the window!  Can you see the green baskets buried under there??  That was my starting point for sorting, but they quickly were hidden by the mountain!  Luckily, I recruited a former student of mine to come help me sort after school!!

We all have our go-to First Week of School books and I know The Kissing Hand is definitely on that list for a lot of teachers!!  We read it and discussed all of our different feelings.  I was so happy when my little friends were raising their hands and telling me that they were feeling "ready" or "awesome" or "super" on the first day of school!  I love the excitement that first graders still have for school!  We picked 5 of those feelings and made a graph of how we each felt- look how excited my class is! 

We jumped right in this week with our math time!  We are integrating new standards this year, since the TEKS are changing next year, so our lesson plans are going to be very different this year!  We started off with ten frames, the concept of "10 and some more" and comparing numbers.  We used this freebie from Jessica Travis and had a lot of fun with it.

Does your school use Kelso's Choices?  Mine does, and while some teachers don't utilize it as much, I LOVE IT!  We always start with discussions about Big Problems vs. Small Problems and make charts and class books about each.  Then we learn about the choices we each can use when trying to solve a Small Problem.  We have a poster in our room and I encourage the students to "take them to the poster" if they have an issue they want to talk about with another student.  It's my go-to response for tattling and I love seeing them working out their problems together.  Here's the link to Kelso if you ever want to check him out!

On Friday, I had a lot of fun activities planned and we almost finished them all!!  We painted ten frames with Q tips (more about that in THIS post), made 'School is Cool' hats and read Chrysanthemum.  After we read Chrysanthemum, we took a few minutes to think about our names.  We talked about the number of letters in our names and went over the difference between vowels and consonants.  We made these pages to hang outside our classroom, each with information about our own names.  (I've been cutting letters off of cereal boxes, pop corn boxes and pizza boxes all summer and even got my teacher friends to save their boxes for me, too!)  A few friends are still missing a few letters, so I'll be cutting more this weekend so we can finish up on Tuesday!!  I've also got the animated version of Chrysanthemum from Weston Woods on United Streaming, and I know they'll love to watch that!  Click here to get the name pages for yourself.

Thanks for staying with me through this long First Week post!  Be sure to link up with Kacey and read all of the other great Five for Friday posts!!  Just click the image below to go to her blog.

(For my pictures, the background images are ©Ashley Hughes and number images are ©Blair Turner Click their names to visit their amazing blogs!)

Keep Teaching and Planning,

Katie :)