Five for Friday: Happy October!

Linking up with Doodlebugs for 5 for Friday!

My week started off with a Whole Brain Teaching Workshop that I hosted for any teachers in my district who were interested. Two amazing techies at school got my mac hooked up to my promethean so I wouldn't have to stress about technology snafus like I had at our parent night... It went surprisingly well... around 25 teachers showed up!!! And the thank you emails, stops in the hall to tell me what they've tried, requests to pick my brain, my kiddos from last year excited to be doing WBT again have made me excited for part 2 of the session later in October!!!

One of the excited first grade teachers in my building even got me make a frog themed super improver wall! Check it out - it's free!

This week we read If You Were a Compound Word and made compound word foldables - super easy, all you need is blank paper fold the sides in, draw lines on the folds then copy so the kiddos don't have to figure out where to make the fold. Some of the compound words my kiddos came up with were so cute!

I was so proud of my kiddos and their gestures this week. They are remembering our story gestures with ease & are able to identify character, setting, problem and solution in the stories we are reading together.

Character - walking our fingers along with both hands

Setting - Place - spreading hands out in front of body & Time - tapping wrist (where a watch would be)

Problem - arms crossed in front of body, angry face (sorry for the poor quality of this photo!

Solution - hands up, shrug shoulders

I've started using A LOT of sticky notes, especially during read alouds and strategy mini-lessons. We now have a sticky note parking lot in our class. I'm also working on a way to use these stickies as an assessment. Currently I have a simple template with the objective/standard at the top and a page for approaching, on and at target. If it becomes at all more complicated or awesome I will certainly share!

Addition (and subtraction when we start it) lends itself SO well to game after game after game... so that's pretty much been math for us this whole week... quick minilesson followed by addition game rotations and a little XtraMath too!

Double Facts - Double Trouble! - from The Bubblegum Tree's freebie

Doubles Plus One - Add One for Fun! - also from The Bubblegum Tree's freebie.

Addition Sentence Match Up  - from Amy Lemon's addition & subtraction stations.

10 Facts! - freebie from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits here.


Hope you have a great weekend :)

After School Fun!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Five for Friday...

This week has been busy, busy, busy and on Sunday the hubby and I leave for our honeymoon (6 months after the fact!) Yay for April Break, I really need it this year!

 

Last Friday (after I had already linked with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday, we had a writing celebration. My kiddos had worked very hard to write a non-fiction piece, researching, writing, typing and illustrating so we had to celebrate! Half the kiddos read a section of their piece, then we had a "gallery walk" where the students walked around and could read stories out of each others' published boxes, then the other half got to read a section of their piece.

Remember the Marcy Cook workshop I went to last month? Well, I finally introduced these number tile task cards to my kiddos. If they had started using these earlier in the year I think these cards would be way to easy, but a lot of my kids are finding these as an exciting challenge because there is only one correct space for each of their number tiles and if you put the wrong one in one place you have to practically start over. Some of the kiddos are picking up on putting the "have to" tiles down first (places where no other number would fit) and working from there. So glad I purchased the tiles and cards. I think I may order more cards for next year from her website.

We are working on place value to 1,000 so I went searching for place value games on Teachers Pay Teachers and found loads of FREE games to use for math centers. Here are a few my kiddos have loved and a link to where I found them...

The above picture show a mystery number game, available free from Love to Learn here.

This shows a penguin place value dice game. This game came bundled with a few other games as well. Get it for free from Stephanie Stewart here.

This picture shows a Place Value Go Fish game that can be played with or without recording matches on the recording sheet. Find it free from T is for Teaching here.

As a part of my grad class that I am currently in (Multicultural Literature) I had to do a community outreach project. So I recruited a high school teacher who happens to be a mom of one of my students and some of her high school juniors and seniors. The recruits came after school one day this week and helped as I read The Legend of Blue Bonnet by Tomie DePaola and then did a craft with BLUE popcorn. Find the craft idea here.

The kiddos and high school folks had so much fun, we already planned for another event in May! So excited :)

In celebration of the FINALLY feeling like Spring weather, here are a few pictures