Fun With Firsties, addition, grade one, math worksheets, noise level visual, classroom management

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, 1 2 3 magic, behaviour management

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, probability, math lesson, worksheets, assessment, activities

Fun With Firsties, Robert Munsch Pixar, Day and Night

Fun With Firsties, 3D geometry, end of year awards, certificates & medals

Howdy Freebie Peeps! I'm so excited to share a new freebie with you today! We have been studying pronouns for the last week or so and I finally came across a song my kids L-O-V-E singing to help them

This version is a class favorite because it's one of the few times my littles get to use the markers! They LOVE markers! :) Roll and ...

April is nearly here and we are geared up for some fun spring-filled learning! This month we are keeping it rigorous and FUN! The following April

Yum! Synonym Success!

Tomorrow is Friday…which is one day closer to the weekend….which is EVEN closer to that special day of endless amounts of FOOD and family time!! I LOVE Thanksgiving time! Tuesday evening, we had our small group {our Bible study group} Thanksgiving dinner and oh.my.larry friends….seriously why is food so dern good?!? A.D.D totally set in after I ate my way through tons of carbs and butter. :) ok..’nuff about food before I find myself sneaking into the kitchen for cookies and milk! Today, to kick into that Thankful spirit we made these little Thankful Turkey Hats. I used my turkey template from my Writing Through the Year unit, added a paper plate and we’ve got a super duper easy hat! To make the hat, just cut a slit in the back straight up to where the inner circle of the plate starts, cut along the inner circle, and leave a few inches of the circle uncut. This will be the part that flips up {the part with the turkey face}. When the hat is worn, the turkey will stand up like so… Easy peasy! We also threw in some synonym fun earlier this week. Thank you Cara Carroll! If you read my previous post, you have seen that we have been working super hard with fact families and antonyms. Tomorrow, my little loves will complete these pages for a little independent assessment. Quick and simple. {Click on the pics to download} Borders by Fancy Dog Studio (Etsy) I am hoping to get these done tomorrow. You can find the templates and writing prompts {here}. Ok, so….. I have a lil’ addiction right now….POLKA DOTS! Yep, I am currently a sucker for anything covered in dots!! Happy Thursday sweet friends!!

I am beyond EXCITED about our new Winter Math and Literacy Packet for 1st Grade! This packet is FILLED to the brim with tons of hands-on and interactive

One of my favorite language arts lesson to do in teaching students about synonyms. Using the idea of a "synonym roll," every year my students are extremely engaged by the lesson. Want a terrific synonym lesson complete with the outlines for the cinnamon rolls themselves? Here is my lesson plan typed up along with 36 words with synonym examples, 3 different sizes of rolls, and a synonym brainstorming page for students. Synonym Roll Lesson Plan You can also head over to my TPT store and download the outlines.

The pressure is on! I have my formal principal's evaluation on Tuesday. I don't know about you but these always make me soooooo nervous. I'v...

Do your young learners have poetry journals?! Mine do and we love them. The main question I have been asked in the past is what I put inside my journals and I created a resource to help answer that question. Most of the poems in our poetry journals are phonics poems, but I also […]

Hi, Friends! How’ve you been? Things have finally settled down some around here. I spent most of today in meetings, so my head is overflowing with information and ideas! What better way to unwind than by heading over to the blogosphere? Remember those binder labels I told you about? Notice my binders DO NOT have them yet? I think my printer is possessed! It has picked the absolute worst time to be temperamental! It keeps stopping in the middle of a print job to tell me to INSTALL A PRINTER!!!! What the what is wrong with that crazy thing?!? Ok, rant over….back to our regularly scheduled programming. Hehehe! My team met today for the first time! It was fun to sit and laugh and talk and share for a while. This is going to be a great year! See the vowels? We’ll use these to eliminate, the infamous… “that’s my seat”, “I was sitting there” conversations. Students will be seated at the table in front of the same vowel each time they come to small group. We can also use them for word play. Yep! Got the idea from Pinterest! =) Behavior clip chart is up! I’ll be labeling the clips with student numbers soon. I’ve decided to use numbers this year instead of their names. I am believing that the heavens will open up and rain down a class of sweet angels, BUT just in case a clip has to be moved down as a warning….there’ll be no negativity associated with having their name attached to the clip. Library station is coming together. I *LOVE* IKEA. I also *LOVE* putting things together, BUT putting those darn leaves took me 3 days, lol! The first one anyway…..after I finally “got it”, it took me 5 minutes to put the other one together! Hilarious! AAAAAAAAAND, the Easi Speak that I won from Lori at Teaching With Love and Laughter came in the mail today! It’s so tiny and cute! It looks super simple to use and I think its going to become quite the valuable tool! So, excited! Thanks, Lori! Now, how about a freebie for my fab 400? Click the picture of the student directions card to grab it. I hope you find it useful! Teacher directions are also included in the GoogleDoc. Thanks for hopping by! I’ve just added a couple, three……five things to tomorrow’s “to do” list, so this girlie is off to go get some shut eye! Bye bye, butterfly!

Kick off the new school year with the perfect project for a young crafter or adventurer.

15 fun and easy fluency practice activities to get your K-1 students reading at a just-right pace, with accuracy and expression!

How do you teach addition and subtraction? Do you teach one first and then the other? Do you teach them at the same time? Not sure what the right answer is. We have been touching on both this year and working hard to build that number sense. But we had not been explicit about the connections between addition and subtraction. But the time has come. Jess and I started with this: We introduced the "whole-part-part" with hula hoops by asking: "What do you see?" And guess what...? Our number talks must be working because they replied with: "Oh, I see two balloons and two more balloons. 2 and 2 make 4." "I see two small hula hoops and one big hula hoop. 2 and 1 make 3." Yep!! We love it!! Our lesson was ready to start! We explained the whole number and how it can be broken into parts. (Sorry, this example is with the whole number: 5.) We broke the number into two parts (subtraction) and showed how we can then put the numbers back together (addition). It was SO..MUCH..FUN! The kids were engaged and excited to help us break apart these numbers. We helped them transfer this learning to paper. This lesson is the foundation for our week of addition/subtraction lessons. Here are some activities we found (click on them for their original posts) and decided to use (with our own twists): 1. We want to make this anchor chart from "The Classroom Key" (one piece of it each day). Our week will start off with a review of our hula hoop activity....but with chenille sticks and beads. 2. We want to show "whole-part-part" with plates like Dr. Jean. 3. Just another way to show "whole-part-part" but with hangers (can't find original source.) 4. We also want to do an activity with cubes. Each kid will have two different colors to make a part-part-whole equation. I think it is going to be a fun week! But do you have any other suggestions? We are ALWAYS looking for more ideas!!

This week in my classroom it’s been all about SUFFIXES!! We started out with an anchor chart and some fun puzzles! Pinterest My students worked with partners to solve a set of puzzles… Pinterest I used the second set of puzzles as a center/literacy station. I printed on colored paper and laminated. I’m not going […]

 A full moon always calls for a crazy day... My Friday/end of the week sanity was saved by a professional development day.  Let's play catch up on some of the "wintery" things we did this week! I ventured out to introduce pronouns this week. I generated a list of pronouns (inside the bubble) that could essentially take the place of my list of nouns. I had my kiddos tell me which pronoun would work best and we recorded it on the chart. After discussing how interchangeable the two were, we chose one noun and wrote a sentence about it. We turned that noun into a proper noun using the same sentence. From there we chose a pronoun to replace the proper noun. This was a great way to show word choice in writing also. Making fact family houses was a great and easy way to assess my students without them even realizing it! I gave each a sticky note with 3 different numbers on it and they had to create a fact family using those numbers. Who would have guessed it would have got the reaction it did.... "This is SO much fun!" We also made snowmen out of our fact family numbers. Another hit! If you haven't read the book The Snowglobe Family, it is a must! It goes great paired with the snowglobe activity below or as you've probably seen on Instagram or Pinterest. We also read Snowmen at Night and revisited verbs with all the action the snowmen have going on in the book. They had to write what they would do if they were a snowman an night using one verb of their choice. ------------------------------------------ Enjoy your extra long weekend! Don't forget to head over to Doodlebugs Teaching and link up.

This summer, I read a great book about anchor charts. I make tons of anchor charts with my students each year, but there are times when I f...

If you're looking for a fun way to introduce common digraphs, you'll love these free dice and beginning and ending digraph posters.

Winter is just around the corner and I have been working hard on our Winter Math and Literacy Packet for Kindergarten! I am happy to say that it is

Read through our favorite classroom management hacks and then hop over and become a Plato Pack member for even more teaching tools, strategies and support.

Complete sentences and incomplete sentence sorting worksheets to practice complete vs incomplete sentences - 3 simple cut and paste worksheets for kids to practice complete sentences vs. incomplete sentences by sorting sentences...

Something big is happening at our school this year! We are becoming a 7 Habits Leadership School. If you're not sure what this is, don't worry, I wasn't either, lol. Stephen Covey wrote the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Leader in Me is essentially the school/kid version of that book. As a school we won't start implementing the 7 Habits until next month but we have started using Leadership Notebooks regularly in place of our Data Notebooks. If you use a Data Notebook in your class you'll notice that our Leadership Notebooks are not that much different... Just a few more things added. Now, I will be the first to say that I'm not 100% sure that this is how a Leadership Notebook should look/be set up, or if there even is a way to do it perfectly, but this one works fabulously for us! Here is an inside look at what we have in ours. FAIR WARNING: This is an insanely long post but full of freebies. Just click on the image to snag yours! Starting off, every student has a 1" white binder with a page view cover. You can have your students bring in tabs or make your own. We made our own using file folders that we cut in half and hole punched! The very first thing the students and parents see when you open the binder is a letter to the parents explaining what a Leadership Notebook is and the expectations for both the student and parents. Next up is a Parent Review and Comments page. We will send these notebooks home a few times every month. This page keeps parents updated on what has been added since the last time they saw it and has a section for them to sign or comment and ask questions if need be. Our tabs are as follows: My Self: This is where you can find everything personal about students. Their goals, behavior, homework tracker, contributions, etc. Every month students create an academic goal and a personal goal to work on. The first time I introduce this I only have them focus on their academic goal. The following month we will write a goal for each: academic and personal. More on this coming up with Leader in Me Mini-Series: SMART Goals. Academics is a huge focus in schools, obviously, but you also want to teach your students to be good people! We talk about contributing to our communities in different ways and keep a log of how they contribute to our school. We have many opportunities to do so through fundraisers and Kids Care Club and every time they contribute something (time or money) they get to color in a box. I will tell you that this is what my students gravitate to more than anything! They LOVE being a part of something and helping in any way they can. Since they have started filling out this form I have become inundated with contributions from my kids! Makes for one proud teacher :o) Reading Data: Here you can find their Lexile scores, fluency graph, graph for Unit Tests, and their Reading DE scores. You can also keep track of how many books they've read, Reading Genre Challenge, etc. Add whatever you want! Math Data: Very similar to the Reading Data section! Students keep their Multiplication Masters Fluency Tracking Chart, Math Chapter Tests, and Math DE scores here. Science/Social Studies Data: This holds their science and social studies tests so far... Maybe later on I will think of more things to add but that's about it for now! Writing Data: Samples of student writing and county writing scores are housed here. The back also has a special cover that we slide in! Together we made a Class Mission Statement and everyone's Leadership Notebook has their own copy of the statement so they can see it even when they go home. This was written word for word by them! If you want to know how to write your own class mission statement, keep your eyes open for Leader in Me Mini-Series: Mission Statements, coming soon! Whew!!! You made it! I told you it was a long post, but click on some of the photos and you can grab yourself a free copy of that document! Do you implement Leadership Notebooks in your class? How do you like it? Anything I should add to ours?

**Updated 7/7/15 - I put the 22 attention getters into 3 different table formats. You can choose which one (visually) works best for you.** I use these attention getters/grabbers on a daily basis with my ELL students. These attention getters are a great way to improve your classroom management. I usually pick one or two to teach the class at the beginning of the year. Then every month or every few weeks, I introduce a new attention getter, which my students can't wait for!! To get my students attention I simply say ‘Ready Set!’ and then they say ‘You Bet!’. Once the students say their part they are quietly looking at me for directions. It's as simple as that! The key is the students have to say their part the way you said yours. So if you whisper, they also have to whisper. If you said it like a robot, then they have to say it like a robot. Your students have to match your tone and intensity, which they love to do! If you like the fonts and background from this product, please check out my store! Make sure to follow me for more great resources! Thanks :)

We have been working on questioning for Nonfiction and Fiction Retell. I created these posters to hang in my classroom. After reading ...