New Years Randomness

Well we're back and it's definitely been awhile!  We're just back to work with our first graders after a much needed break.  We spent time traveling with our families and enjoying extra cuddle time with our own kids.  It was so nice to see our first graders today, but boy are we TIRED!  We've got a few websites that we've recently discovered and we thought we'd share them with you.
We also thought we'd share a few resources from SMART Exchange for those of you that have SMART Boards.  One new website that has a free trial is Speakaboos.  We've just discovered it and are liking the stories that we've listened to so far.  We're thinking this would be perfect as an addition to our listening centers.    

Another new favorite that is free is an AOL kids site that has over 30 stories to listen to and 15 of them are Arthur stories which our first graders just love!

SMART Exchange is a wonderful resource for SMART Board users.  Just before vacation our kiddos were learning about fact families and we found this AWESOME fact family resource on SMART Exchange.  We were able to set it up as a center for students when they finished their daily math work.  They just loved the fact family houses!  

Here's a place value SMART Board activity that we're going to show our kiddos within the next few weeks.  It fits perfectly with our place value lessons and uses tens and ones sticks and cubes.   

Our last little website that we just found is an online number line creator.  Well, it actually creates worksheets with number lines, but we used it to create number lines for name tags.  Since it's a new year we decided to give our kiddos new name tags and let them take their old ones home.  The first name tags our students had included the alphabet, color and shape names, and a number line.  We surprised our kiddos with the cute monkey name tags shown below, but wanted to add a number line as well since many of our students use a number line as a resource while adding and subtracting.  We have the long number lines that come on a roll, but those are just too big to attach under name tags.  We decided to create a worksheet with number lines 0-20, copied them on card stock, cut, and added them below each name tag.  

Voila!

This name tag was pieced together quickly so we could snap a picture.  

Please ignore the crooked line :) 

Have a FABULOUS rest of your week!

We'll be back in a few days to share some freebies and activities!