We're Thankful For Freebies

Hi all!  Hope you're having a great start to the week.  Our week has been filled with assessment after assessment and we're almost done!  Amongst all of our assessing we've found time to also incorporate some First Thanksgiving activities and since we just LOVE freebies ourselves, we thought we'd share a few freebies with you all! 

Here's a little fill in the blank First Thanksgiving mini book that we created.  It incorporates facts about The First Thanksgiving in a format easy for first graders to follow.  We also included a word search that includes the words used to fill in the blanks. 

Just click the picture below for your own copy!

We've read several Thanksgiving books, and have also incorporated Scholastic's online First Thanksgiving interactive videos and tools which we LOVE!  Tomorrow we're ending out First Thanksgiving unit and we'll be making these books with our kiddos!

Another freebie that we'd love to share with you all is our Reading Focus Wall labels.  Our new reading program, Treasures, encourages creating a focus wall.  We've now added this to our reading instruction and are really loving it!  Each week, we change the cards below the labels to match the weekly focus.  This focus wall provides our kiddos with our weekly focus and we refer to it often throughout our while group lessons.  We hang ours right next to our SMART Boards so they are easily accessible and our first graders can constantly view it.

If you'd like a copy of our labels, just click the picture below!

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!  

We are looking forward to spending some much needed family time with our kids and families.  We'll be back in  a few days with some new products and freebies!

Leaves, Turkeys and Sub Kits!

Happy Veterans Day! We've been busy, busy, busy welcoming fall into our rooms, and we've got a few things to share with you! Here's a great little activity that we did last week with our first graders. We've been talking lately about story retells, and thought this would be a great time to read the story There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves. The kids just LOVE these books, and they work pretty well for practicing retelling a story. But the best part about this wonderful little gem? It's free for all of you! Just click {HERE} for your free copy.

This year we've really had to cut back on our craftivities and art projects, due to time restraints. Our schedules are so tight, we don't get to do much fun stuff anymore, unfortunately. But we are getting in at least 1 themed project each month. We shared our apples back in September, we made these cute little pumpkins for October, and for November, we made these great little turkeys.

The kids also wrote something they were thankful for on each feather, and they turned out really cute. They aren't completely finished yet, but we'll try to add pics later. If you'd like the patterns for the turkeys, click {HERE}.

We've also gotten several emails asking us about our First Grade Sub Kit. We realized that we never blogged about it, so we'd love to share it with you now. How annoying is it when you are home late at night, you end up with a sick kid, and need to get a sub for the next day. For us, that means either a super late trip to school to do sub plans, or getting up WAY too early to go school to get ready. Boo! So this year we came up with our sub kit. It may be one of our favorite things ever. It is designed to be a full day's worth of activities that can be taught at any point in the year, no matter what you are teaching.  It is a very easy kit to put together, and included only things that would already be found in your classroom, or around you house. Check out our product description:

In a pinch, and need a great days worth of plans for a sub? Or, want to be ready just in case? This kit provides you with a days worth of activities perfect for any sub! Have materials copied ahead of time, and you are ready to go! These activities include direction pages for any substitute, and use only materials already in your classroom or home.
All activities are created to be easily adapted to your time schedule and your students needs. Each lesson is divided into chunks that can be completed in pieces if necessary. 

*Writing: Arthur Writes a Story lesson with 3 activities
*Reading: “When I grow up” mini book lesson, with 6 activities
*Math: Math Facts Graph with 6 activities
*Social Studies: Playground Map Activity with 3 activities
*Science: Magnet Lesson with 3 activities

A great label for any tote for your sub kit is also included!

Now, take a look at a few pictures of how our kit is organized.

Our finished kit

We've copied everything so that it is all ready to go. The books are in here as well as the materials used for the science lesson.

These three books are used in our lesson, although they can be substituted by other books as well

A great label is included in the kit as well.

A few other things that we've filed in our own kits include a class list, daily and weekly schedules, school procedures, student information and anything else a sub may need for the day. If the hanging file tote is not a good fit for you, you could also use a large binder to store everything. This kit includes enough lessons to fill a day, but realistically you've got enough for more than that. If you end up purchasing this, we'd love to see you you organize it. Make sure to check it out at our store! We hope to do a kindergarten version at some point as well.

FIRST GRADE SUB KIT

We hope you all enjoy your 3 day weekend!