Saturday, September 21, 2013

Some Randomness from this Full Moon of a Week

The effects of the full moon are real!  I'm serious!  So far my lils have been pretty good at following the rules, but this week, they were a bit crazy pants!!  I had some shouting out... coming up to me when they know they need to stay in their seats and raise their hands... getting wild during centers... and other such random (unique) things that happened haha!  They should be back to normal next week.  I'm probably overreacting anyway since they spoil me with their normally awesome behavior!  :)

Anywho, so far we have studied the short a and i vowels.  I love to make big visuals for the lils to use as resources or reminders when they are reading and writing.  First, we do some activities to review the vowel sound, such as the Scraggles activities from my last post.  Then, I have each of the kiddos give me a short vowel word (using the vowel sound we are working with) to go on an anchor chart that stays up all year.  Lastly, the kids will make a little craft to go on a BIG visual that stays up for about 2 months.

Okay!  So here is the short a anchor chart!  I added a lil Scraggle to the chart as another reminder of the vowel sound.  Again, all of the words on the chart were given to me by the kiddos.

And here is the BIG visual.  I have a wall full of windows in my room, and they face the main parking lot/ bus pickup and drop off area.  This is where the BIG visuals will be hung, so everyone will know what is going on in first grade (and see that we just flat out rock!).  I think I found these apple cutouts in the Michael's dollar section at the end of last year.  The kids each got one and wrote a short a word on it (in pencil first and then marker).  


To begin the short i activities, we read Gilbert Goldfish Wants a Pet by Kelly DiPucchio and illustrated by Bob Shea.  Such a cute book!  It has a bit of a surprise ending so this book would be great for predicting and making inferences as well.

After reading the book, we came up with as many short i words as we could to fill Gilbert's fish bowl.  This is the anchor chart that will stay up all year. 

Here is the BIG fish bowl on the window.  I used the Die-Cut to make orange ovals, and I used the 1/3 fraction circle template for the tails.  Again, they had to write a short i word on the fish body.

This week we will focus on the short o sound.  I plan on us making short o paper socks.  They will draw and cut these out on their own.  I will string yarn from one side of the window to the other and hang the socks from the yarn.  I think it will look super cute, especially from the parking lot.  ;)

This week we were busy, busy making posters and projects to display in the hallway for Open House on this coming Thursday (yikes!).  
In Science, we have been learning about weather and the four seasons.  We are lucky (?) to experience all four seasons in Pittsburgh, PA, so this lils had lots to tell me about the weather in each season when we made this anchor chart for our classroom.  The next day, I had a student from each of the five groups pick a poster topic out of our magic hat.  Now, since there are only 4 seasons, I added a "how clouds form" category since we have done a lot with clouds in this unit of study as well.
 Here are their awesome posters!! They worked pretty well together to make these posters.  :)

Since I teach in a Catholic school, we study religion.  To begin the year, we study the story of creation.  I have a really old but beautifully illustrated story of creation book for children.  We read it twice; they loved it so much!  Again, each group chose a day of creation (2-6) out of the magic hat and created a poster depicting what was created on their day.  I took care of day one and seven.  :)

Here is an up close and personal view of day 5.  This group had a tough day, depicting all of the animals, fish, birds, insects, etc, but they did really well with it!

Here is the Watermelon Math Sentence activity from Jennifer at First Grade Blue Skies.  I ADORE this activity.  It was the perfect thing to end our first math topic on understanding addition.  It was a crazy week, and I did not have time to pre-cut everything, but I actually like the fact that the lils did the entire project themselves.  To make the watermelon fruit, I told the kiddos to make a HUGE capital letter D using the edge of the paper as the edge of D.  I LOVE how each one is different.  Then, they used their planning sheet to figure out how many blue, yellow, and gray seeds they needed to draw and cut out to make 10 seeds in all.  Lastly, they wrote out their addition sentence on the paper.  (We fixed this lil one on the right once I realized there were 11 seeds... oopsie!)



So now our hallway is completely plastered to the max with first grade awesomeness!  

Alrighty, well that about does it for me tonight.  I'm going to close it up here and watch the iHeart Radio music concert!!  Can't wait til JT performs!! :)  I'll try to post tomorrow about our centers from this past week and the lil lesson I learned from our fishing game... I can't make any promises tho, because I'm setting aside tomorrow and Monday to type up the first chapter of my research paper for my grad class.  woohoo
Okay, goodnight!!

Samantha :)




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