First Grade Fanatics: August 2013

Catching kindness Freebies and a Giveaway!

TGIF!!! After sitting in inservice for 3 days and then working in our classrooms, we are ready for a long weekend before the kiddos walk through the door on Wednesday. But before we both head off in different directions to camp over the long weekend with our families, we wanted to share a few things with you!

We just love this book as a great introduction to bucket filling! It's perfect for first grade and will help our kiddos understand the importance if showing kindness to others.

Have You Filled a Bucket Today?

After reading this book to our first graders, we are going to brainstorm ways we can be kind to help them better understand what kindness looks like and how they can show kindness toward others.

We also are incorporating this cute little chart into our classroom as well.

Pocket Chart

Each of our kiddo's names will be on a bucket. When we've got a few minutes here and there between activities our first graders will have an opportunity to share about another child they might have noticed showing kindness. We then will fill out a kindness note and put it in the pocket of the child who was showing kindness. We did this last year, just slightly different (used a bulletin board instead) and the kids enjoyed it and it worked! We're thinking we'll have the kids take their kindness notes home weekly. We made several different kindness notes and thought you might like them too! You can find them {HERE}!

Kindness Notes

And to go along with our kindness activities, were going to incorporate Brag Tags! Boost Promotions contacted us and offered free tags for us to try out. We definitely said YES! We are going to make sure that in the first few weeks of school each one of our students earns their kindness tag. Each day we'll select a few students who have shown kindness and we'll explain what that student had done. By the end of the first few weeks, all of our kiddos will have earned their tags. We're going to pass out the other tags as well throughout the year. Boost Promotions has so many to choose from, and you can customize them. We added our school name on the tags and they turned out ADORABLE!

Brag Tags

If you'd love some of these yourself, Boost Promotions has offered to give one one of our followers 100 tags and one set of small chains! The winner will also be able to choose up to four different types of tags (they come in sets of 25). If you'd like to enter this giveaway simply comment below and if you have a blog and/or Facebook page, Boost Promotions would also LOVE for share about this giveaway. Simply leave a link in your comment. You can also follow them through their newsletter, Pinterest, and Facebook. Links are below. Make sure to enter by Monday night so we can choose a winner.

Boost Promotions Blog

Boost Promotions Newsletter

Boost Promotions FaceBook Page

Boost Promotions Pinterest Page

Winner will be announced Tuesday, September 3rd!

Have a WONDERFUL weekend!

Back to School Sale and OUR NEW STUDY GUIDE!!

With just a little more than a week left of summer, we just can't believe it's already getting to be that time! You know what we mean... The return of getting up early, getting kiddos dressed and out the door, district meetings, setting up classrooms, YIKES! While we are excited about the start of the new school year, we aren't quite ready yet. We are continuing to soak up every second left of summer before we return to reality. So, what better way to celebrate than to throw a sale!

Everything in our store will be 20% off, PLUS an additional 10% when you use the code BTS13. Happy Shopping! Make sure to check out below for some great back to school items from our store.

But first... We get several emails daily asking us about an old product we had called our first grade study guide. We decided that it wasn't very user friendly for the first graders, and wanted to throw it out. We had it on our list to really come up with something that was our own, and was easier for the first graders to use. And.... it's DONE! Introducing "My First Grade Buddy!"

Here's a little preview of what's included in My First Grade Buddy.

There are so many ways this study guide can be used in first grade. You could put it in sheet protectors inside of writing notebooks, laminate at centers, put in homework folders or book boxes, and so much more! We are lucky enough to have a copy machine that will copy pages into a booklet that prints out onto legal size paper, and then is simply folded in half. It creates the PERFECT size booklet for My First Grade Buddy. We will be printing on cardstock to help with the durability of My Buddy so the kids can use all year. If you like it, we'd love to hear how you use it! And get it soon while it's on sale!

When you're shopping, make sure to check out our great back to school products in our TpT Store!

Sub Kit

First Grade Math Journal Prompts For The Year

Pocket Chart Calendar Set

Check out our new paper practice activities that are aligned with Treasures weekly words. Don't use Treasures? These are still great first grade words to practice.

Have you seen our new Paper Practice Activities that go with each Unit in Treasures? We are working now on Unit 3, so make sure to take a look!

Unit 2 Paper Practice

Unit 1 Paper Practice

Happy Shopping! And enjoy the last few days of your summer! If you've already gone back, we hope it's going well!

Got an iPad?

Hope you're all having a FANTASTIC August! School is just around the corner for us, and we're definitely getting back into the planning mode, our kiddos arrive the first week of September and we can't wait to meet our new first graders!

We just love using iPads in our classrooms and thought we'd share some of our favorite teacher apps that we love!

Before we share about those we wanted to show you all an awesome iPad case that each of us received.

The Snugg!!!

We just love a stylish iPad case and this one definitely meets that expectation! With children of our own we also needed a case that can easily be cleaned and is durable too, and this case meets those requirements. Finger smudges wipe away nicely and the case is very flexible.

We LOVE how the case is designed and how easily our iPads fit securely inside.

The Velcro tab lifts nicely, and tucks easily under to securely hold an iPad. There is also a stylus loop which ca easily be tucked under if not needed.

Along with being stylish, this case has several features that we love!

The case is flexible yet sturdy, and because the cover tucks nicely and securely, we are able to display our iPads vertically or horizontally without the case sliding.

Along with the nice-looking stitching, we love how all of our buttons and power slots are easily accessible! No need to take our iPads out to take a picture!

The Snugg has MANY iPad case colors to choose from, and a lot of other accessories as well!

You can check them out {HERE}!

We received this product for free in exchange for an honest review.

The opinions expressed in the above paragraph have not been influenced by the company or the free product mentioned above.

We mentioned above that we LOVE using iPads in our classrooms. There are so many educational apps out there and we'll share our favorites with you next week! Today though, we wanted to share with you some cool teacher friendly apps that we've just recently discovered and our using on our own iPads!

Grade It!

& Groovy Grader

Love that you can enter in how many questions possible and then these apps provide you with the percentage based on how many problems missed.

With Grade It! you can email the table to yourself as well.

These are both free and who doesn't love a free app?!

Visual GradeBook

This app does cost, but is SO helpful when organizing student test scores. It took a little practice to figure out, but once we got the hang of it, we could see how beneficial this app is going to be in the upcoming school year! We like that you can create charts to compare a group of students or an individual student.

TeacherKit

Another free app!!! With this app you can track behavior and attendance. We also like that you can

create a visual seating chart. This app allows you to keep track of grades as well.

CORE (Common Core Standards)

This is an easy to use free app that provides access to the Common Core Standards. This is a great paper free version that we can easily access anywhere!

Here are two apps that we've recently found and are going to teach with this upcoming school year. They could easily be displayed on a SMART Board or Whiteboard. We have been able to display images from our iPads to our SMART Boards, but have yet to find the appropriate adapters to be able to actually use apps on the SMART Board from our connected iPads. This is our second year with SMART Boards and we are determined to find the right adapters this year! If any of you have tips or ideas we'd love to hear them!

Sight Words List- Learn to Read Flash Cards & Games

Another free app!!! What we like about this app is that you can create your own sight word list. This app also contains several built in sight word lists, but we liked how we could create a list based on our sight words that we teach with our current reading program. Instead of using flash cards that can be often hard to see, this will be much easier for our kiddos to see on our SMART Boards and more fun since you can also record your voice for each word!

Teaching Number Lines

We use a number of tools and manipulatives while teaching math and number lines are one of them. This app has a free and paid version. We love that is provides a fun visual on how to use a number line and this will be perfect when while teaching addition and subtraction!

We hope this post provided you with some great ideas for your iPads or other type of tablet. If you've found other teacher apps that you love please share in our comments below. Any tips on how to play apps from an iPad on a SMART Board are welcomed as well :)

Have a WONDERFUL weekend!

Who loves Jeopardy? {A first grade CCSS math review}

Wait, what? Someone said that it's August??? That is just not possible! Our summer is going by way too quickly! Luckily for us, kids don't come back until after Labor Day so we still have plenty of time. The end of the year was crazy busy like most of ya'll, so we never got to share a fantastic new game we created to review first grade math. Our kids loved it! And who doesn't love to play Jeopardy?!?!

The great thing about this game is that we included SOOO many questions! Honestly, it would be hard to get to them all, but the kids loved having the variety. We also found that it was best to review a few topics at a time. You could print this a variety of ways as well. If you printed them smaller, 2 or 4 to a page it wouldn't take up nearly the amount of room if space is an issue. We just taped up the questions, and then taped up the numbered cards on top. We played in table groups, and tables got the chance to answer each question to get the most out of the review. As long as the table worked together and got the answer correct, they got a point. We just rotated tables as to decide which category they wanted, and for how much ("I'd like addition for 20 please."). It was so much fun to play! And really, now that we have the game made, we can use this for any subject we'd like. It focuses and is aligned perfectly with the CCSS too! We created this for the end of first grade, but would be great for a review at the beginning of 2nd grade as well. We are in the process of working on a smaller kindergarten version that we could play at the beginning of first grade, so watch out for that later.

Check out a preview of what the game looks like!

If you'd like to check it out, head on over to our STORE and take a look!

If you'd like a chance to get a copy for free, we have a quick little chance for you. Erin is celebrating her 10th anniversary next week, and to celebrate, her husband is whisking her away for a 2nd honeymoon. Be the first to guess where they are going, and you can have your very own copy of our First Grade Common Core Math Jeopardy.

We've had a ton of questions regarding a freebie we used to have called our First Grade Study Guide. We want you to know it's currently being totally revamped, and updated to make it really user friendly for first graders. So if you've been looking for it, check back. It will be done soon!

We've also had a lot of requests for our monthly math journal prompts to be bundled into one pack, and we've just added that to our store! You can find our bundle {HERE}!

We'll be back next week or so with some great new ideas, and some fabulous freebies! We are still on summer mode, so forgive us for our absenteeism. :-) Enjoy your weekend!