Motivational Monday: September 12 and Anyone Can Be an Artist!

Happy Tuesday! For a little bit longer anyway. It's a good thing we don't need a whole lot of sleep anymore.

So, as it was for most of you, yesterday was a rough day for us. We remembered back to where we were on September 11th, and mourned for our country all over again. But then today, we woke up, and everything was still ok. It's much like what kids went through ten years ago. Only a handful of our students knew much about September 11th, and of course they are too young to really comprehend it. So today in class we talked about what happened in first grade terms. Then we read this WONDERFUL book written by a class of first graders after September 11th.

Not only is this a great tool to use to talk about what happened with our kids, but it's also a great example to show our first graders kids really are authors. So we read this book, and really talked about who the true heroes of the day were. We talked about fireman, policeman, and all of the rescue workers who gave their lives to help save others. So we decided that this would be a good time to thank our own community fire fighters who help keep us safe everyday. The kids were of course more able to relate to this, than anything else. So we used this template to write thank you notes to our firemen, which we will put in the mail tomorrow.

Get your copy of our Fireman Thank You HERE.

How precious are these?

Now for some motivation for all ya'll! We fell in LOVE with these posters from First Grade Parade and The Inspired Apple. But, like many of you I'm sure, we have no amazing drawing talent. We are both quite crafty, and can definitely hold our own in that department, but darn it, we just can't draw. But those posters are absolutely to die for! We loved the why writers write, and what they can write about. We also really fell in love with Cara's Peacemakers and Peacebreakers activity, and just had to incorporate those into our rooms. But again, can't draw worth beans. So, here's what we did!


We just got out our trusty MacBooks, and went to work. We were quite happy with how cute our posters turned out! So you see, even if you don't have great artistic talent, we do have computers and clipart! It's {almost} just as good! We figure that we spend enough time in our classrooms, we'd like to like the way our anchor charts look. And the kids really had a great time helping us out! We first did our rough draft with our students, printed everything out, and then came back together to make our final drafts to hang up. What a fun lesson!

Update: You asked, and we answered! Our clipart and words are now on TpT so you can make your own charts. Check it out HERE!


Now for these posters, we not only had to print out the words, but had to figure out the pictures of David. So we just printed out a cover of the book covers, and then cut them out. To make the final drafts for these posters, we did a sorting activity of all of the different behaviors. We figured out which they belonged with, Peacemakers or Peacebreakers. The we wrapped our discussion with talking about who we want to be.
If you'd like a copy of these words, grab it HERE.
And thanks a bunch to Mrs. Lee's Kindergarten for her idea on Peacemakers and Peacebrakers. Hope this motivates you to make your own cute posters! And really Cara and Abby, if you'd like to come to our classes and make our anchor charts for us, we'd love it!!! :)
Have a great week!

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