Jungle Animal Day

Day 2 of our First Grade Fun Week was Jungle Animal Day!

(Our team does the jungle theme each school year.  Each teacher chooses a jungle animal then we decorate our rooms accordingly and do a lot of jungle activities at the beginning of the year.  We flexible group across the grade level for Reading and Math so this really helps the kids out at transition times, especially at the beginning of the school year.  We can say, "You go to the Monkey Room for Reading or you go to the Tiger Room for Math.")

Theme Day: This morning each class rotated to all four teachers for a jungle animal activity.  This afternoon we watched the Jungle Book and had animal crackers!  (While the teachers finished up DRAs and Math reassessments!)  The kids wore jungle animal print or shirts with animals on them.
Here are the 4 activities we did:

Elephant Room:  Played this fun trivia game in teams!!

Monkey Room:  Made monkey stick puppets while listening to Jack Hartman's Alphabet Zoo.

Crocodile Room:  Made jungle animal necklaces and learned about crocodiles!

Tiger Room:  Painted these super cute tigers!

Tomorrow is Luau Day!  We have lots of outdoor Hawaiian activities planned.  Let's hope the weather cooperates.  

Meredith

First Grade Fun Week

WOW!!  It has been FOREVER since my last post.  No excuses!  Okay....just one!  I bought my first house.  It is awesome, but I have been intentionally avoiding blogs because I just haven't had the time to get sucked in!  I now spend my time at Lowes instead of the teacher store.  Enough about that, on to the school stuff.........

It is our LAST WEEK OF SCHOOL. (Insert happy dance here.)  We do a "First Grade Fun Week" or theme week.   Each day has a different theme.  There are snacks, activities and decorations for each theme.   We asked for a $5 donation from parents to help with the costs of the week.   About half of our students brought money in this year and since we were very frugal shoppers, we didn't have to alter our plans much!

Today was American Day.  We wore red, white and blue.  (And amazingly almost all of the kids remembered even though it was a Monday.) My team decorates our outside hallway and inside our classrooms.  I don't have any pictures from outside, but we lined the hallway with flags and had a table for the picnic supplies all decked out with red, white and blue.  Our doors were covered with red, white and blue stars.  Here are a few of our activities:

• American Symbols Book (from a Mailbox or something similar)
• Marble Paint Fireworks
• Paper Chain Necklaces
• Make Flags
• Outdoor Play was Sidewalk Chalk, Basketball, Hula Hoops, Jump Ropes, Parachute
• Picnic (chips, lemonade, Little Debbie patriotic snack cakes, and red and blue jello stars) Mrs. Fischer's mom makes 8 boxes of jello stars for us every year. She is a retired teacher and understands!
• This year we bought bottled water and the individual Crystal Light lemonade packets.  The kids LOVED making their own lemonade and it saved us from pouring 80 cups of lemonade and many, many spills!
• We listened to a kids Patriotic Music CD the whole day.  (Yes, the whole day and that is all I am going to say about that.)

Here are a few pics!

Outside door.  He is wearing the paper chain necklace.  

Working on the American Symbols book while kids came back 2 at a time to marble paint.

Some of our indoor decorations.  We even used the red and blue markers for calendar math.  They loved making patterns while writing all of the ways to make 4.  (I promise to do a Calendar Math post this summer.)

Parachute FUN!

Marble Painted Fireworks

Only 1 marble hit the floor this year......a new record!!!!  

Flags made by gluing on red construction paper strips (already cut!)  The stars rectangle is colored, cut and glued on as well. 

I never seem to get through all of the activities, but the kids have a blast anyway!  

Tomorrow is Jungle Animal Day.  I will try to do a better job at taking pictures!

Do you do anything for the last week? 

Meredith

Plants

Last week the story in our reading series was about plants.  That happens to be what we are studying in science as well......that NEVER happens.  Since this week was a review week in reading, we extended our plant theme.  (I love review weeks.  I feel like I get to be so creative!)

Tops and Bottoms Character Venn Diagram.
This is not a center, it is just something we did in
whole group on Monday.

Centers

1:  Plant Needs Following Written Directions

Final Product!

2:  The Tiny Seed

I read The Tiny Seed by Eric Carl.  Students had to make a flip book that retold 6 different things that happened to a seed.  Sorry the picture isn't very good!

3:  Growing Correct Sentences

This came from Rebecca Sutton at Teachingfirst-abc.blogspot.com.  Students fix the mistakes.  I made a different recording sheet to adjust to our center.

4:  Parts of Plants Sunny Sunflower Book

Meredith

Tagged and Math Night

We have been tagged!! Not once, but TWICE.  It must be because I wear flip-flops daily.  (Side note: Contrary to popular belief I CAN chase and catch runaway kids in flip-flops.  I have already done it twice this week!)

Go check out the wonderful blogs of the ladies who tagged us!

I am not going to follow the rules.  (This is going to be very difficult for me as I am quite fond of rules and procedures, but I MUST!)  See, I was not only tagged in this fun game, but I was recently tagged for my ESOL certification!  Okay, our district calls it flagged, but tagged sounded much cuter for this post!  I have to comply by the end of April or it will effect my evaluation.  I am just going to say one thing:  I was recently tagged (like when it was cold out recently!) My last ESOL student is now in 6th grade......I teach 1st grade.......I am going to let you do the math since this post is also about practical real life math.  The district must have not played tag as a child.  My test is in a little over a week.  I have been neglecting my blogs and blog stalking so I can study every night.  Well, most nights!

Now for the fun stuff!  Last night was Publix Math Night.  Publix is our neighborhood grocery store chain.  Students come to the grocery store with their families and get to use their math skills IN REAL LIFE!  Sunshine, Sand and Scissors' very own Kim Fischer organized this popular event a few years ago and it is still going strong!  

When students arrive at Publix they come to our table and check in.  We give them the set of questions that were developed for their grade level by their teachers.   Then they run walk around the store to answer their questions.  It is great to see moms, dads, and big brothers and sisters helping them!   When finished, students return their questions to us, make a guess for the estimation jar and enter a raffle.   All winners are announced on the school news the next morning.  There is also a prize for the class with the highest percentage in attendance.  The store manager LOVES this event.  Almost every family has an arm load or cart full of groceries by the time they walk out!  The manager provided goodie bags for the kiddos as well.  We had about 100 students and their families attend last night.  Here are a few pictures!

 

By the way, there were more than just 1st graders who attended.  They are just the ones I have blog picture releases for!!

Do you have a Math Night?  What does your school do?

Meredith

Jack Hartmann

JaCk HaRtMaNn came to OUR school today for a CONCERT!  Yes, our little ole school!  He did a concert for our Ks and firsties.  Every year he comes to town for a public concert (for about 2,000 people) and we TRY to go.  One of our awesome K teachers started looking into how much it would be for him to do a "private concert" (doesn't that make us sound like VIP's?).  The cost ended up being very reasonable, especially since we didn't have to charge for a school bus.  We did invite the school up the road so we had enough students (our principal is in charge of both schools).  My school is very small and pretty low income, so any experiences are a BIG deal to our little ones.  (When we went to see The Lorax last month it was the first time quite a few had been to a movie theater.)

Jack was awesome.  The kids and teachers (and even the administrators) had a BLAST!  Thank goodness it was an early release day because we wanted to continue our singing and dancing for the rest of the day!  Jack even gave the teachers a discount on his CDs and DVDs today.  Since he had some new ones available I had to send a kid a responsible adult back to my classroom to get my purse!  I purchased a new one for Transition Times.  It even has 2 Zero the Hero songs on it!!!!  Okay, I am done bragging now.

Head on over to my class blog to see videos.

Meredith

SpRiNg CeNtErS

Here are our centers for the week!

Skills:  Easter Egg Antonyms

Reading Counts:  Still working on our Dr. Seuss Tic-Tac-Toe

Technology:  Take our Spelling Test, Read a Spring Story, and Watch a BrainPop about famous inventors.  

Independent Reading:  Read the Leveled Reader and then be a Reporter!  Last week they used old Scholastic Flyers to cut out and sort books according to Author's Purpose.  The kids loved it...sorry I forgot to take pictures!

Listening:  The Velveteen Rabbit....they LOVED this story!

Easter Egg Compound Words

Punctuation!  There are sentences on the flower "stems" that have to be sorted into the correct flower pot.  (Each flower pot has a period, question mark, or a question mark.)

Meredith 

Dr. Seuss Wrap Up....a little late!

I am sure you are OVER sad to say goodbye to Dr. Seuss for the year, but I wanted to post some of the activities we did to conclude our Dr. Seuss unit before we went on Spring Break.

Kathy created an adorable Cat in the Hat glyph that I doubled as a Growing Pattern.  Since we are way past all of the Dr. Seuss stuff, here is a sneak peak at what we will share with you next March.

 

We also went to see The Lorax the day before Spring Break.  I'm not going to get into the fact that we somehow managed to schedule the field trip.....during Bike Week......at the theater right on A1A.....in the middle of Daytona Beach.  Lets just say we might have experienced more than The Lorax but at lease we looked super cute!

The big "kid" in the back is my brother.  He was here on his college spring break.  He spent one of his days chaperoning our field trip.  He  gets the BEST LITTLE BROTHER IN THE WORLD award
hands down!

We read the story a couple of times before we saw the movie.
My truffula tree does not look as good as some I saw on other blogs (or rooms down the hall, KATHY;-)) but at least my kids thought it was perfect!




I promise post more later in the week.  No more slacking:-).

Meredith