Cloudy and the 50th Day

So, my plans to post last week were thwarted when I was thrust into becoming a CSI detective. Let me just tell y’all that I would make an EXCELLENT investigator should anyone ever need a private eye. For real. I successfully caught someone impersonating someone else & TOTALLY trying to scam one of my friends on Facebook! I SO felt like I was living in a Lifetime movie last week!! I had NO time for anything other than sleuthing. Now that that whole saga is over…*I think for now anyway*…I’m ready to play catch-up.

We learned all about clouds and the kids had a BLAST!!! Actually, I think I might’ve had a *little* more fun than them :) I don’t know why, but I LOVE teaching about clouds and the weather! SO fun!!

I was inspired by my sweet friend, Abby, to make these fun little cloud guys. These were such a great visual to get my kids to understand what kind of clouds are high/low in the sky.

We also made little cloud anchor charts that my kids used throughout the week for writing.

We described clouds…

And we even made little cloud flip books…inspired by the fabulous Anna Brantley over at Crazy for First Grade …and practiced labeled them, too.

For word work, we practiced writing our popcorn & spelling words in the clouds :) This was definitely a class FAVORITE!! I thought of my grandpa ALL day…the classroom smelled JUST like him ;)

The activity that had the class talkin’ for DAYS after it was over was this great little craftivity we did after we read the book, “It Looked Like Spilt Milk”. The kids did a little writing… “Sometimes clouds can look like...” and then we followed it up with a little “get-your-hands-dirty” kinda craft. We just mixed equal parts glue and shaving cream together and painted it in the shape that we wrote about. When the mixture dries, the cloud stays puffy and it gives a little when you touch it. It was the COOLEST thing!!!!

This was the cloud my sweet student teacher made…

And this is one from one of my sweeties…

We made our “Very Busy First Graders” spiders and hung them from the ceilings. Last year we put them on the door, but I’ve yet to touch the door since the school year started :)

We also learned about bats!!! I didn’t take pictures of most of our work, but here’s our little “bat cave”. I made a big giant bat full of bat facts we collected as we read several different non-fiction bat books. I had the kids make little paper bag bats and then write two facts on the pink strip {we did this for writing one day}.

We’ve definitely kept ourselves busy these last few weeks! Now we’re getting SUPER excited about the 50th day next week!!! Woo hoo!!!! I’m pretty sure I lived in the fifties in my former life {ha!!} because I SOOOO love anything and everything poodle skirts and cuffed jeans. We’re excited about celebrating our halfway to the 100th day! I’m getting all my fun stuff ready for next week when we enjoy the 50th day festivities!!! Here’s just a little sneak peek…

If you’re interested in incorporating some of these craftivities into your 50th day plans, you can check out my newest little mini unit on TpT… “Cruisin’ Through the 50 First Days of School”. I included the templates and directions and several other fun little activities…

It’s usually $5, but you can grab it for $4 until Thursday! EVERYTHING in my little shop is 20% off ‘til Thursday. I’m giving away this little mini unit to the first person who leaves me a comment and correctly guesses my favorite 1950’s artist and/or song. WOW…that covers A LOT of ground ;)

Alright now…time to watch my boys WIN!!!!! GO RANGERS!!!!!!

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…”. I had them complete the sentence with the words of things they like to get when they go to the movies! And these little writing templates turned out so dang cute! It took me FOREVER to figure out how I wanted to display their writing, but the idea of a festive little Christmas mouse and a clapboard won out in the end! I LOVE how different each of them look! {Just incase you’re wondering…I precut all of the big pieces…clapboard pieces, head, hands, hat, ears} AFTER they were finished writing…and after I double checked it…I let the kids grab their materials to start assembling their little mice. They cut their own eyes & nose & drew the whiskers, too!

I pretty much died when I saw that this sweetie wrote, “popcorn and a cup of iced tea.” HA!!!

For our Daily 5 stations, I had the kids work on a few little mouse themed activities.

Here the kids are sorting chunk words {-oke, –ose, –ore} on popcorn into the corresponding popcorn tubs. After they sorted the words, the kids had to write them onto a large popcorn tub template and label it accordingly.

I also had the kids make CVC words using little clapboards and flimstrip letters.

The first slide/page in this download are hand drawn pictures {by yours truly ;)} that I used when I taught Kindergarten. I made rebus sentences out of them. {He will ask you for some…} The kids had to match the words to the pics.

Of course, I didn’t get around to everything I wanted to do. No shocker there. But some other ideas I had were to…

**have the kids create popcorn garland for the class tree. Cut out construction paper popcorn pieces {or print some off} and have the kids make words/fact families/etc. on each template, hole punch the top, and then string them together with yarn.

**make filmstrip sentences. I thought it would be fun to have large, premade filmstrip pieces and on each strip, write a different word. The kids would have to work together to put the sentence in order.

Do you guys do anything fun with this book?!? I’d love for you to share if you do!

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 the kids thinking about non-material gifts. I used to read the book, Crispin The Pig Who Had It All {I ADORE this book!!!}, but unless you have $189 to shell out on a new version of this story, GOOD LUCK finding it!! HA!!! This year I read this book…

For a little reader’s response, I had the kids write about the best gift of all…and it couldn’t be anything store bought! I love, love, LOVE reading their responses!! One of my little guys wrote, The best gift of all is my family and the LORD. Melt. my. heart.

{I cut a class set of red rectangles….don’t know the dimensions…for the gift boxes and pre-cut the white gift wrap as well. I cut a white piece of paper just a touch smaller than the red and told the kids to write their responses and draw their illustrations on that. Then the kids assembled everything else themselves, making sure that the gift box lifted up so that we could peek underneath and read their writing.}

We’ve been working on a few little Gingerbread activities as well, but this is all I have pictures of so far! We’re learning about long vowels and this week’s chunks were –ike, –ide, & –ine. I programmed a bunch of little gingerbread men with the chunk words, cut them out, and placed them on a little cookie sheet. I labeled three paper plates with the chunks and the kids got to use a spatula to move the Gingerbread from the baking sheet to the corresponding paper plate. They are LOVING this activity! They also had to record the chunk words on a recording sheet as they sorted.

You can download your copy of this fun little activity right HERE!!!! {I included a sheet of blank Gingerbread men so you could write your own words inside their bellies!}

Here are a few little Gingerbread activities you can download as well! Just click on the pictures for your copy!!

This could be used as a perimeter/estimation activity. I used buttons for it! I had the kids estimate the perimeter of each Gingerbread and then use buttons to make an accurate count. We also talked about factors that would have made our counts different {using big/small buttons, etc.} Click on the picture for your copy.

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 included…drank beer?!?! Ummmm…yeah. That interesting tidbit of info was definitely in the book and you should’ve heard the conversations that transpired after reading that fun little fact :) Wow.

After brainstorming, I had the kids choose 5 facts to write about for their Mayflower books. Y’all. These books are DARLING. A few of the girls on our team have been making these “bag boats” for a few years and I LOVE them!!! They’re PERFECT for a little Mayflower fun!!

We compiled all their facts into this little book…

I used pencils to hold up the sails…just incase you’re wondering :)

There were a couple of extra “pages” left in the book, so we filled them in with a thinking map & a survey/graph. We made a Mayflower brace map to show the parts of the whole…

And I also had the kids survey their classmates asking them whether or not they would have liked to travel on the Mayflower if they were pilgrims. Not surprisingly, they all said NO!!!! The kids graphed their classmates responses and wrote about their data as well.

You can download the Mayflower brace map & graph HERE.

Next up….TURKEY FUN!!!

What’s The Weather?!

We’ve been studying the weather the last few weeks in Science and it’s been FUN to say the least! I love hearing the kids talk about the clouds when we’re outside… “Look Mrs. Carroll! That’s a stratus cloud!!” They’ve become such awesome little weather watchers, SO very interested in anything and everything weather!! Here are a few little things we did for this fun little unit!

We watched a really neat video about the different types of weather and read some pretty cool non-fiction books, too! We made a little word web to show what we learned…

We added weather poems to our poetry journals {no pics, but you can download them below.}

We also learned about the water cycle and how it affects our weather.

We made water cycle bracelets using little beads and yarn. Each bead stood for a different phase of the water cycle: dark blue-condensation, light blue-precipitation, yellow-evaporation. I also had the kids label a diagram of the water cycle to keep in their science journals.

We also updated our science journals with weather graphs to help us observe and record the daily weather.

We read this book about clouds…

and then we brainstormed adjectives to describe the different types.

We read this book…

And made our own little class book adapted from this story. They made their own tear paper cloud shaped like an object and used the sentence prompt, “My little cloud changed into a …”

We graphed our favorite types of clouds…

and interpreted the data…

Speaking of observations, we also observed changes over an extended period of time…changes that occur due to weather…and we used trees to illustrate this concept. I had the kids choose between several different mediums to show the seasons of a tree. I LOVE how different they all turned out!!

We also talked about the wind. We brought in hair dryers to show how wind moves and the kids got to be little wind makers using a straw and cotton balls. They also got to make wind socks to take home and observe wind direction and movement.

For a little bit of fun, we read this book…

and pretended, “what if?!” We used the sentence prompt, “I wish it would rain…” to add another entry to our Reader’s Response journals.

We’re about to send home a really cool MOON project, so stay tuned!!