Motivational Monday Vol. 9

This week our first graders are heading to the zoo for a field trip. We have created a zoo book for our students to write in before the zoo and after. Click HERE to get your copy. The first two pages can be copied back to back and pages 3 and 4 can also be copied back to back. After you have made your copies, simply place one page on top of the other, fold, and you’ve got a book ready to be stapled or you can just leave it folded. We haven’t been able to copy ours yet, but we will tomorrow. If we find glitches, we will be sure to let you know and make changes to the book if needed :) Are you planning a zoo trip too? Our, It's a Zoo Day! (math and literacy games) would be perfect to have your kids play. They can be found in our TpT store.

Summer break is just around the corner for us and we are going to spend most of the summer enjoying our time with our kids and family, but we will be sure to share our units and activities that are currently in the works! Stay tuned throughout the summer for lots of ideas, units, and lessons that we will be creating for the upcoming school year!

Motivational Monday Vol. 8

Happy Monday! Sorry it's so late tonight, but I had to watch Dancing With the Stars! I'm still trying to figure out how to become a star, just so I can go on that show! Who do you think is going to win? I'm up in the air still...

So, we've just finished another game unit for our TPT store. We don't know about ya'll but we are loving games lately to really keep the kiddos reviewing what we've learned this year. And who can't get enough ways to practice addition and subtraction? This Summer Fun Activity Pack includes 4 game boards that you can use interchangeably with any of our activity cards. Cards focus on addition, subtraction, first and second grade sight word, and include phrase cards as well. We use these both for fluency practice, and for sentence builders. And as usual, we've included activity card masters for you to create your own. This is a great activity pack for centers, or to send home for summer practice. Here's a preview of what you'll get:

So head on over to our teachers pay teachers store and check it out!

To begin my summer vacation I'm taking my own babies to spend three weeks at my parents house. If you are the first person to guess which state they live in, you'll get your own free copy of our Summer Fun Activity Pack. Good luck!

First Grade Awards/Certificates

In few weeks we will be giving our first graders certificates congratulating them on all of their hard work in first grade. We have made several award templates and want to share them with you all! One template is simple without decorations and could be printed on decorative stationary. Click HERE to get your copies. If there are any second grade teachers who would like these click HERE and kindergarten teachers can go HERE.

Have a great weekend!

Motivational Monday Vol. 8

Well we have 3 more Mondays left with our kiddos and we have so much to do! Along with all of our end of the year classroom and school wide activities, we are beginning our reading assessments this week. Math and writing are soon to follow. We are so proud of our first graders and all that they have accomplished this year! To celebrate our first graders accomplishments we will be passing out awards and goodies near the last day of school. Above are treat/goodie toppers we plan on using. We thought you might enjoy these too and we wanted to share them with you! These could be attached to erasers, pencils, fruit snacks, pretzel bags, etc...

Click HERE and get your toppers!

Enjoy & Happy Monday!

It's a Zoo Day!

Anyone going to the zoo anytime soon? We are going in the next few weeks, and let me tell ya, the kiddos are EXCITED! We don't have too much time left to do an entire zoo unit, so instead we came up with some fun zoo-themed math and literacy games. "It's a Zoo Day!" has great activities to reinforce addition and subtraction, fractions, place value, and even first grade sight words. These are great to use by themselves, or to compliment any zoo or animal unit. Please head on over to our Teachers Pay Teachers store and check it out! Here's a sneak peak...




Here's a freebie to go along with these games, or to use on your own! Click on the picture for your own copy.


The first one to comment with the correct date of our zoo field trip gets a free copy! Hope you all had a great weekend! Click on the picture below to see our Zoo Day packet!



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Shapes, Shapes, & More Shapes

Hi all! We are sharing the love some more with another freebie. Last week and this week we have been reviewing shapes and their characteristics. We began the week by reviewing our shape characteristic charts and doing a lot of shape review activities. We ended the week with looking at figures made out of several shapes. See below for an example. We used large die cut shapes and created figures which were projected from our document cameras for our students to view. Our students then told us what shapes were used in our designs. Here is an example of some of the figures we made:

Here is a worksheet to go along with the activity mentioned above. Click HERE and copy the two pages back to back:

And now for another freebie :) After introducing 3D shapes this week and comparing them with other 3D and 2D shapes, we are going to have have our first graders play a shape match game. This game could be played several ways:

1. Match same 2D to 2D shape

(students need to say the shape name in order to keep the cards)

2. Match two shapes with similar characteristics. For example if a student flips over a square and a rectangle they might say, "They both have 4 sides." or "They both have four corners." If the student's characteristics are correct, they have a match and can keep the cards.

3. Match a 2D shape to a similar 3D shape and explain why they are similar. For example, a student might flip over a sphere and a circle and they could state, "These two shapes are round."

*The student with the most cards at the end of the game

(or when there aren't any more matches left) is the winner.

Click HERE for a copy of the game cards!

And the winner is...

Thanks for entering our Memory Book give away! We've had a few people ask for the memory book for different grades, so we decided to make a kindergarten and 2nd grade version. Make sure to visit our Teachers Pay Teachers store to check them out!

Back to our give away......
Congratulations Jenn! Send us an email at firstgradefanatics@gmail.com and we'll send you your memory book! Thanks for visiting our blog!

And don't forget, all of our Memory Books are on sale 20% off through tomorrow!

PS: The winning comment was from the 2nd post about the give away (which we did due to Blogger being down) but comments from both posts were entered. We wanted to make sure you all knew everyone who commented had a chance to win! :)

Free Printable Friday!!!

We're kind of feeling like we haven't been sharing the love with ya'll as much lately, so we want to make it up to you! So for the next few days we will try to have a freebie everyday. Does anyone use this schedule pocket chart?

We love ours but when we got them they came with ugly white cards. Soooo, of course we had made our own. :) We want to work to work for all of you, so we tried to make sure you'd have anything you needed. Hope you find this useful!

Click here to head to our store to get your own copy:
Schedule Cards

And don't forget to re-enter our Memory Book giveaway. We'll combine the comments from both posts to draw from, so commenting on either is fine. Have a great weekend!

Memory Book Give Away Update

We are so sorry for the inconvenience of blogger being down! What a bummer! So, if you would like to enter the give away for our Memory Book, just comment again. When Blogger was down, it removed all of our comments. :( So, we will extend the give away until Saturday night, so comment quickly! And don't forget, if you just HAVE to have this book, it is on sale 20% off through Sunday at our TPT store.

Be watching tonight for a freebie to use in your calendar area!

TGIF!

First Grade Memory Book Give Away

Hello blogger friends! Anyone else getting excited (and nervous at the same time) about our school year coming to an end? We have less than a month, and yet so much to do! But guess what.... we've got the best activity to help you finish up the year!

Have you been looking for a memory book to help your students commemorate first grade? Then we’ve got the book for you! This is a 12 page first grade memory book that we’ve created to be both kid and teacher friendly. We’ve included both a color version, and a black and white version so that your students are able to personalize this just for them. Many pages include a place to add a wallet size picture (class, teacher, all about me) or space to draw their own. Our book included the following pages:

Title

Class

Teacher

All About Me

Family

Favorite things

After School Activity

Favorite Book

When I grow up

First grade memories

Friends

Autographs

At the end of our download you will find a few pages with blank dates so you can use our book over and over again. Please let us know if you need something changed, or have an idea. We want to make sure this works for you!

To make this even better, we are having a sale! Our First Grade Memory Book will be on sale 20% off through the weekend, so make sure to get yours soon!

Oh, and did we mention that we will give a copy away as well? (We love this book so much, that we want EVERYONE to have it!) So, enter our give away and we will draw a name Friday afternoon! Here's how to enter:

1. Follow our blog, and leave a comment

2. Follow our tpt store, and leave a comment

3. Blog about us, and leave 2 comments!

Here's a preview of our First Grade Memory Book!









So, if you like what you see and want to see more, then head on over to our TPT store and check it out!

Motivational Monday Vol. 7

Motivation for today, we have less than 1 month of school to go until summer! YIKES!!! As excited as I am to be a stay at home mama for the summer, I'm a bit nervous about all that we have yet to cover. Well get it done though, we always do!

We have a little unit on TPT called Creepy Crawlers I wanted to remind you about. May is such a fun time to learn about bugs, and this unit is packed! It's full of math, literacy, science, art, you name it! Head on over to our store to take a look! As a little incentive, here's an activity I did today with my reading group. Keep in mind these kiddos are all reading above grade level, so it's more difficult than I would do with my class. I also enlarge this on the copy machine 130%, which puts it on a 11x17 piece of paper, which gives them enough room to write. The Very Greedy Bee is a sweet little book, with a great message as well. Click on the picture for you very own copy. :)


We will also be sharing a memory book with you this week, so make sure to watch for it. It's one that we do every year with our first graders, and we are just putting the finishing touches on it so that we can share it. We will be uploading it to TPT in PowerPoint form, so that you are able to change things to make it fit your class, and school and such. Keep your eye out for it because it will be here this week. And don't miss the give away that will go along with it...

Happy Monday!

Happy Mothers Day- Something for you!

Happy Mother's Day to all of you teacher Mama's! We are constantly looking for ways to reinforce word concepts with our first graders. We loving having games for kids to play as part of word work, when they finish up early, or with parent volunteers. Here is a noun, verb and adjective word sort that we are using as the school year wraps up. Click on the picture for your copy! And try to spoil yourself today!

End of Year Assessment

We're getting down to assessment time and we've created a math assessment for our first graders that includes addition, subtraction, place value, number sense, number recognition, money, time, graphing, shapes, and shape characteristics. This is an assessment that could be used as a pre and post test for the year. We will be putting this in our student's portfolios for second grade teachers. It's for sale in our Teachers pay Teachers store just click the picture above to purchase! Here's a little preview of what you will get:

As usual we have also included masters for you to make this your own. If you like it, please leave us some feedback! If you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. :) Happy assessing!

We're Continuing Our Sale!!

Due to technical difficulties the Teachers Pay Teachers site was down at times throughout the day. They have decided to continue to honor their TAD11 coupon through tomorrow SO...we are also going to keep our sale going through tomorrow!! Visit our Teachers Pay Teachers store through tomorrow and save 20% off everything. Enter TAD11 at checkout for the additional 20% off!!

Thanks again for all that you do & we hope you had a FANTASTIC day!

Teacher Appreciation Day Sale is on!!!

Hurry and make sure to head over to our Teacher Pay Teachers Store and check out our Teacher Appreciation Day Sale. Everything in our store is 20% off today only! We've got lots of fun games, and just added our new Word Wiz Kids, so stop by and check us out! Thanks to all of the wonderful teachers out there who work so hard everyday!

Watch for a great end of the year math assessment to be up at the end of the week...

We're Having A Sale/Motivational Monday Vol. 6

Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions. ~Author Unknown

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day! In honor of all of you fabulous teachers we are having a 20% off sale at our entire Teachers Pay Teachers Store tomorrow only, plus Teachers Pay Teachers is also offering 20% off, so that is a total of 40% OFF!!!!. See below for details.

1. Visit our store and receive 20% off everything including our newest addition

2. Enter TAD11 at checkout for an additional 20% off


And just in time for our Teacher Appreciation sale, we have a new unit up on Teachers Pay Teachers! Meet our Word Wiz Kids! These kiddos are great for introducing and teaching all sorts of different words, including antonyms, synonyms, homographs, homophones, verbs, adjectives, and nouns! These posters help remind our students about the different kinds of words, and the word work activities help to reinforce ideas. We've also included worksheets for you to use. So head on over to Teachers Pay Teachers and check it out!

We Have a Winner!

And the winner of our Doubles and Race Car Games Giveaway is number...

Congratulations Ms. Martin. Let us know your email address and we will send both games to you! If you didn't win and still would like these games, you can purchase them at our TpT store by clicking HERE. Thanks so much for entering!