First Grade Fanatics

Thing 1 & Thing 2

2012-03-05T08:22:00.002-08:00

Erin and Leslie

Erin's Little Things

This week is conference week, so you may not hear much from us. We hope you all have a great week! Our St. Patrick's Day unit is going up tonight!

PS. If you haven't see The Lorax, GO SEE IT!!! It is such a sweet movie, with an amazing message. LOVED it!

Dr Seuss Apps

2012-02-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

Hey Friends! Today we had a ball introducing our kids to the wonderful world of Dr. Seuss! I am fortunate enough to have 10 iPods in the classroom for the kids to use throughout the day. I have 5 Shuffles, and 5 iPod Touches. We mainly use these for Daily 5, although kids can also go to them when they have finished other work. Today I bought a fun App that I wanted to share with you, just incase you have iPods or iPads in your room as well. My babes at home were excited as well. If you haven't tried the apps from Oceanhouse Media, you need to. They are books that are very interactive, that use all of the original artwork and illustrations. What's great for me, is that they are still apps, and not iBooks, so the kids can find them without having to search around. The app I got today was a Dr. Seuss Collection. It was definitely spendier than I usually get, but I wanted to get a few books, and this did save some money. 5 books for a total of $11.99 at the App store.
If that is to much money, you can also get a single book for $2.99.

And then for free, you can also get the lite version of the books, which is the same as a teaser. Honestly, sometimes any "LITE" app annoys me, because it's frustrating to have only a small piece, but definitely a good choice for free.
And this is just a fun little puzzle from the new movie The Lorax. Not really educational, but fun. And best of all, totally free!

There are many more at the App store, but I wanted to share a few I liked. Hope it's helpful for you! I can't wait to ask our PTC for my next iTunes gift card... :)

On another note, our March Math Journal Prompts are up at our TpT store. If you haven't checked these out this year, make sure to head on over. All of our Math Journal Prompts are aligned with the Common Core State Standards, and they've been incredibly useful for our students this year.

One day down... four more to go!

Dr. Seuss's Birthday

2012-02-26T22:05:00.003-08:00

This week we'll be celebrating Dr. Seuss' s birthday. We've got lots of activities planned and we thought we'd share what we're doing with you all!

Dr. Seuss Facts Hat

We enlarge and copy our hats (see below for printable) on a white 9x12 piece of construction paper. First our kids cut out the hats. Next they glue four red strips (9 x 2 1/2) onto the hat. Then, once the glue is dry and the red strips are well in place, they flip the hat over, and cut off the extra red pieces.

Finally we write important facts about Dr. Seuss.

Here are some treats we're giving to our first graders. We found some mini stickers perfect for their Dr. Seuss activities that are created throughout the week. The pencils were from the dollar bin at Michael's, great deal! We also made treat toppers to attach to York Peppermint Patties. We sure wish the patties were wrapped like they were in the past,

but they still look cute! If you'd like a copy of the treat toppers, just click {HERE} and download our little freebie! We used a 2 inch scallop punch and they turned out perfect!

We also like to do a cute picture glyph with our first graders every year on March 2nd!

We got the idea from The Virtual Vine. We made our own direction page and it can be found {HERE} along with a few other freebies to share with you all!

Click the picture below for the Virtual Vine's directions and their picture.

We're super excited to announce that Teachers Pay Teachers is having a Leap Day Sale!

On Wednesday only we will be offering 20% off of EVERYTHING in our store! TpT will offer an additional 10% off when you enter L2P9Y at checkout. So if you'd like some items from our store, just click the picture below and start making your wish list!

Hope you all have a fabulous week!

Happy 100th Day!

2012-02-23T20:19:00.004-08:00

We had a great time yesterday at our 100th day of school. We did many activities from Michelle's cute little 100th Day Mini-Unit. We didn't get pictures of everything, but here's a sample of our day.

We searched for 100 chicks.

We made a 100 day snack.

We counted groups of 10 and made a 100 day necklace.

We also did several cute 100 day writing activities, including a 100 word writing from Michelle's unit.

At the end of the day the kids all got a cute little certificate. Click on the picture below for a copy.
We've got a few units in the works, as well as Vol. 4 of our word family packs, and our March math journal prompts coming up soon...

Have a great weekend! TGIF!!! (almost...)

Whooo turned 2? {...and some owl freebies}

2012-02-21T17:36:00.004-08:00

Hey blogger friends! It's Erin talking to ya today. I can't believe over a month has passed already since my baby girls 2nd birthday! Last month we had an amazing owl themed birthday party for her, and although I realize it has nothing to do with teaching, it was too cute not to share! Now, I am by no means an event planner, or professional, so hang with me. I think it turned out pretty stinking cute! You've got to love Pinterest! The very first thing I did was to buy this adorable owl hat from Naptime Stiches on Etsy, to use on the invitations. Isn't it to die for? Unfortunately this seller is closed briefly, but check back later. Awesome to work with!

This is the birthday girl making her "whoooo" sound like an owl.

If you need an adorable baby present, they are just precious!

Then I purchased this party set on etsy, and loved everything it made! Somehow I missed taking pictures of what I created with it, but I highly recommend the seller. She has great themed party kits.

Birthday girl wore this owl shirt that was also from Etsy. {Have I mentioned I may be addicted to Etsy as well?} She did a custom girl version that turned out perfectly!

Here are some pictures of a few decorating ideas too.

I had a horrible time trying to find the perfect table runner, so I just got a few super adorable ribbons and made my own. I think it turned out really cute. When I have some time (yeah right) I want to actually sew these together to create a table runner.

The goodie bags were one of my favorite parts. They had a yummy cereal mix, owl cups from dollar bins at Target, owl stickers, owl pencils, owl cookies, a water bottle, and some other fun stuff. If you'd like the owl patterns, {click here}. I thought those could actually work well for when we do our night creatures unit next fall.

I used my Cricut to cut the eye ovals and circles, and the little flowers, but you could use anything for those.

And then the desert table... yum.

Cake Pops from KupcakesAreYummy who is a friend of the family. To. Die. For.

Cookies are from another friend of the family, Cookies by Sarah in Portland.

And then my fabulously talented sister-in-law made these adorable owl cupcakes.

Maybe my very favorite desert was a treat that my neighbor showed up with for birthday girl. They were gone before I could take pictures, but here is a picture of some I made for Super Bowl. Definitely my newest sweets addiction. Rice Crispy Pops. Who knew? Covering rice crispy treats with chocolate makes them even better!

I'm telling ya... BEST THING EVER!

So, hopefully you can use some of these ideas. We had a fabulous party, although I'm still a bit sad my baby girl is already two. I guess it's time for number 4..

And now, for a little piece of actual school news...

With our math program that we are currently piloting, our first graders have math homework every night. We like to show recognition to the kiddos that are always bring back their math homework regularly so we created an award.

We just started this last month and we'll be giving a new one out each month. Typically if a student brings back most of the homework (might have 1-3 missing) they get an award.

If you'd like a copy just click the picture above to download!

Hope you all have a great week! Is is just us, or are 4 day weeks the best?!?!

President Freebies!

2012-02-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

Whoa! It's definitely a busy month around our neck of the woods! It's Wednesday, Valentine's Day has now come and gone and Presidents are our focus for the remainder of the month (although we do have our 100th day next week!) Below is a little Presidents Day freebie mini unit that we'd love to share with all of our friends in the blogging world. We've decided to revamp our presidents unit and create some new activities for our classrooms. Just click the picture below to get our Presidents Day Mini Unit!

Here's another little creation our kiddos make:

George Washington & Abraham Lincoln

We however did not create these on our own so we can't take credit for them. We got the idea from THIS BOOK which lists all of the materials and instructions.

The ebook can be found {HERE}

Have a great rest of your week!

We'll be back in a few days with some owl freebies!

Clip art courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

Valentine Sweethearts

2012-02-09T16:48:00.001-08:00

We have had such a busy week and we're so glad that tomorrow's Friday! We've finished up our planets unit and now we're getting ready to incorporate several valentine's themed lessons next week. Our math focus for the last few days has been related facts and fact families, so tomorrow we thought we'd create a little heart fact family activity, that correlates with our math program, for our kiddos to do. Just click the picture below and you can get this freebie that we'd love to share with you all!

Here's another freebie that we'd like to share with you as well. We are planning on incorporating this into our schedules next week. We have just began to talk about sorting words in alphabetical order. As an introduction to ABC order, we have our kiddos help us arrange our weekly word wall words in ABC order before we put them up on the word wall. Next week we thought we'd do a little activity that they can start on their own.

We'll probably have them begin by cutting and sorting their words, then we'll all glue them together. Click {HERE} to get your copy of our Valentine's Day ABC Order.

We've also just added a new valentines pack item to our Teachers pay Teachers store, just ion time for Valentine's Day! It's filled with valentine themed math & literacy activities perfect for Valentine's Day! See below for a preview of what we've included. You can also find it {HERE}. Our Valentine Sweethearts Unit is on sale through Friday for 20% off!

Valentine Sweethearts Unit

Have a great rest of your week & weekend!

Oops, forgot a second winner!

2012-02-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

Oops! Forgive us, we forgot to pick a second winner. So congratulations Lori! We will send it off after school. Have a great day!

Planet Pack Winner

2012-02-06T22:12:00.001-08:00

Chrissy, send us an email and we'll get you our Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! set. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, please do! Our little firsties have had SUCH a great time with it. Have a good rest of the week! Our Valentine set will hopefully be up tomorrow, so watch for that and some fun freebies!

Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! (giveaway and freebies)

2012-02-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

We made it through another week! Man these kiddos have been all sorts of crazy! We've spent the last few weeks learning all about the solar system and snowmen. Quite the combination, right? This year our school has gone to a school-wide science theme schedule. Each month we have a focus, which is taught K-5. There is a list of vocabulary words for each focus, and the thought is that by 5th grade, the kids will have a strong grasp on all of the words. Of course, each grade has their own twist on the theme, and we only teach what is grade appropriate. To be honest, so months have been more fun than others, but it seems to be working well so far.

This month our focus has been the solar system. I haven't taught this since my very first year teaching, so it was so fun to revisit! Our goal was to introduce the kids to the concept of the solar system, but to mostly just focus on the 8 planets. We want them to know their names, the order of the planets, and a few facts about each. We've also introduces the earth's orbits, and rotations. The kids have had a blast, and we have as well. Here are a few activities that we've done with them.
Click {HERE} to get a copy of our planet book.
The first graders water colored the planets, and then made a poster out of them.
We made a few posters of all of the planet facts we've learned.
This next week our school is having a door decorating contest to celebrate Love of Reading Month. Since we were on a space kick, we kept the theme going with STAR: Sit, Think and Read. Each rocket shows a picture of a student reading, and we included another set of water colored planets to really make it look like space.
This isn't ours, but had to share. One of our 5th grade students made this INCREDIBLE model of the solar system. This picture really doesn't do it justice. (*I apologize for the photo quality btw, I left my camera at home and had to use my phone for many pics.) The bright stars are actually Christmas lights. Isn't it cool?

And of course this isn't all we've done. We loved this theme so much that we had to create a fun unit to go along with it! Introducing our newest baby, Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My! She is a 70 page unit packed with planet-themed activities, and lessons for teaching your first graders all about the planets. Included in this unit:

*planet posters

*planet game board & cards

*”BLAST” sight word game

*fact family activities (3)

-including worksheets

*addition/subtraction game

*mnemonic device poster

*original mini-book

*Planet report

*Planet riddles

*planet cards

*inner & outer planet activities

*sentence builders

*Word sort

*color & b/w printable planets

Here's a little preview of what you'll get!

Click {HERE} or on the picture below to head on over to our store to check out our Planet Pack.

Need some Solar System vocabulary cards? Check these out!
Make sure to grab these for free too!
Vocab Cards

We ended our week by incorporating one of our Snowman Fun Pack math activities into our day today, and boy was it fun! We began by retelling Sneezy the Snowman and then we conducted our own data experiment by tasting one of Sneezy's favorite foods, ICE CREAM! We brought in four flavors and each of our students had a sample.

Next our kiddos colored an ice cream scoop that represented their favorite flavor out of the four flavors that we tried. Then we grouped the scoops to view our data.

You can definitely see that each of our classes had completely different data! Our kids were surprised to find out that the other classes most favorite was different than their own.

Finally we recorded our data, answered questions, and created a bar graph that was attached to their packets (sorry we didn't get any graph pics).

This was such a fun math activity and our kids really had fun. They couldn't believe we could complete a math lesson and eat ice cream too! We can't wait to do this again next year! Interested in checking this unit out, you can look {HERE} and read all about it!

Before we head off to bed, we'd love to host a quick giveaway! We'd love to give a lucky follower a copy of our Planets, Stars and Space Unit. So leave a comment with your favorite science theme to teach, and we will draw 2 lucky winners on Monday night, February 6th. Good luck!

We hope you all have a great weekend! We'll be back soon...

A few things we've learned...

2012-01-31T18:28:00.001-08:00

As many of you know, one of the most amazing things about this blogging world, is how much is out there to learn. New lessons, new ideas, new projects, new classroom decor, new recipes, new eye shadows (Thank you Cara!)... the possibilities are endless! From all of this new learning comes a new found drive to really make our teaching better. We've gained so much from this, and it really has helped us focus our teaching, and to create explicit, meaningful lessons. We do our best to make miracles, with very little sometimes. Today we wanted to share just a few favorites that we've been using, that were definitely inspired from the blogging world.

In these uncertain financial times, districts have had to tighten their budgets. You cut a bit here, a little there, and the next thing you know, you are currently using (or not using) an adopted reading curriculum that is... (gasp) 17 YEARS OLD! Yes, it may still have some good pieces here and there, but it's 17 years old. Which means we were never trained on it, we don't have all of it, and it's so outdated it's often painful to use. So although we dabble in it, mostly we create our own stuff. This year we created a new Word Family Structure, to make sure that we are hitting all of the important word famillies that our first graders need to know, while keeping it fun, and functional in other areas of the classroom. We've created these sets to include a sweet little story about a unique character for each sound we learn. There is a blackline master, and worksheet for each as well. When we introduce the word family to the first graders, we build the words using the letter cards that we made and this table top pocket chart.

If you'd like to take a peak at a sample word family lesson, click on the picture below. You'll get the King set for free! If you like it, make sure to take a look at the others we have at on our store.

Our kiddos have loved using these. They are also great to have out for word work during Daily 5. Check out a few pictures of our kids using them.

Make sure to check out our Word Family packs at Teachers Pay Teachers!
Word Family Pack Volume 1: at, op, an & it
Word Family Pack Volume 2: ed, ig, on & in
Word Family Pack Volume 3: am, at, op & ug

Be sure to keep your eye out for Volume 4, coming soon!

The other big activity that we've implemented after following all of your fabulous blogs is math journals. We use these as a way to reinforce the concepts taught during our lessons, and our kids can't get enough of these! We've made sure they are aligned with the Common Core State Standards, and get harder as the year goes on. We get lots of comments and questions about these at our store, so we wanted to let you know that February is now up!
Our focus for February is Subtraction to 20, and place value. March will be up in the next week or so, so make sure to check it out. Click on the picture to head on over and take a look!

We also have these at our store for September -January, so take a look.

We know we haven't been blogging as much lately, but the families have needed some attention. We are still working on some exciting things that will be ready soon, so stay tuned. We have a fabulous space unit that should be up by the weekend, and of course we'll have to have a giveaway! And hopefully soon we can share our 2 year old Owl party that Erin did for her little girl. Such good ideas (LOVE Pinterest), and some fun printables. One of these days...

Have a good rest of the week!

It's never too late for snowman fun!

2012-01-30T07:30:00.000-08:00

Although there isn't any snow where we're at, it's still winter and we have been busy incorporating our Snowman Fun {book based math & literacy activities} unit into our daily schedule. This unit is filled with snowman math/literacy activities. Six of the math & literacy activities are based on the following books:

Snowmen at Night

Sneezy the Snowman

and

All You Need for a Snowman

Along with the six activities based upon the books above, there are several additional math & literacy activities also included in this 48 page unit. Here is a peek at what's inside:

Literacy and math activities include:

*How to build a snowman writing activity

*Snowball fact family math activity

*Snowmen at Night adjective, noun, & verb sort

*Missing addend snowmen math activity

*If my snowman caught a cold (creative writing activity)

*Favorite ice cream data collection activity with questions & a graph.

*Snowman adjective writing

*Snowman adjective, noun, & verb sort

*Snowflake/snowman addition & subtraction equation match (with sums and differences 11-15)

*Snowman stick activity with measuring worksheet

*Snowman doughnut treat directions with ingredients list & pictures

So if you'd like to add a few more snowman activities to your resources, just stop on by our TpT store and check our Snowman Fun Unit! It's on sale now, along with our Winter Wonderland Game Pack!

It's a little late, but... {update}

2012-01-17T22:33:00.001-08:00

Ever feel like there just isn't enough time in the day? We apologize that this post wasn't up earlier, but it was a crazy 3 day weekend. One of our mini-fanatics had a 2nd birthday party this weekend (which we will post about later with some fun ideas and stuff to share) and it took up the whole weekend. But, we are focusing on Martin Luther King this week, so we thought better late than never. Use it now, or save it for next year. We begin by reading several books, but these are our a few of our favorites.
Our school district belongs to a database of educational movies called Learn 360, where we found a video version of Martin's Big Words made by Scholastic, which was incredibly powerful to watch. Michael Clark Duncan narrates it, and his voice does such an amazing job recreating this story. We also found it on You Tube, although the quality isn't quite as good, but still worth watching. Find the video {HERE}.

After reading about the March on Washington, and the "I have a dream" speech, we like to show a little clip of the speech, so that the kids can hear how powerful Martin's voice was. Here's a few links to watch.

"I Have a Dream" clip

Entire "I Have a Dream" speech

We then do this great activity with our firsties. We found this somewhere last year, and couldn't find it again this year, so if you know where it came from, please let us know, and we can give credit and include a link to it. This is great for reinforcing positive behaviors that we'd like to see in our students.
Next we talk about Martin's dreams, and have the kids tell us MLK's dream in their own words, which is always so sweet. We haven't done it yet, so don't have any to share. The kids also write a dream that they have for the world, and every year these are just priceless! We mount these to a 12x18 piece of construction paper, and include the craftivity from TLC Lessons.

Next we do this reading, and fill in the missing words to really see if the kids have understood the basics of Martin Luther King. We then finish up by having the kiddos fill out the MLK 4-square sheet.

Click {HERE} to download these activities.
Update: Oops! There was an error in the first pack. Re-download to get the correct version!

We also thought that now would be a great time to do one of our favorite writing activities. We begin by reading this fabulous book, The Colors of Us.

We then go to Home Depot, or Lowes or any paint store, and collect a bunch of those paint sample cards, mostly in browns, oranges, and whites. You want to get the ones that have several shades on each card. We then cut those up, so that each rectangle is one color. You know how paint colors have the most incredible names? Like indian summer, or paradise island. We have the kids do this writing activity where they pick a shade that they think is closest to their skin color (which is often hilarious seeing what their version of the color of their skin is), and then write it. For instance, "I am the color of cornsilk. It makes me feel ________." The kids draw a self portrait using the multi-cultural crayons, and glue on their paint sample. We then put them all together to create a class book called "The Colors of Us." It always turns out so cute! We can't wait to post pictures after we've done it, hopefully later this week.

Thanks for sticking with us, we know it was a long post tonight! We are busy working on our next units {snowmen and space} which hopefully will be done by the weekend. Hope ya'll have a great rest of the week!

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

adjectives, verbs, and nouns oh my!

2012-01-14T15:55:00.001-08:00

We use several writing programs in our classroom, but our main program that we use is Step Up to Writing. We like how this program helps our first graders understand what a sentence is and what parts of speech make up a sentence.

Step Up provides us with several lessons for teaching these parts of speech. This week we have really focused much of our writing instruction on adjectives, nouns, and verbs. We created anchor charts with our first graders for each of these parts of speech, and watched a few cute videos/songs. Our first graders really enjoyed this noun song {HERE} and they loved watching this verb show {HERE}.

We are have also been practicing identifying adjectives, nouns, and verbs, in our read alouds and have created word sorts for our kiddos.

Below is a January word sort freebie we'd love to share with you.

You can get it {HERE}

Some whole group sentence building activities have also been going on in our classrooms. We use 4 cards (see the picture below): who, action, what, and when and our kids take turns adding words to create a sentence. For example, the child with the who card might begin the sentence with the words "A cat". Then the child with the action card might state say the word "ate". The child with the what card might say, "it's food". The child with the when card might say, "in the morning". Finally each child would hold up their card again at a faster pace and put the words together. The sentence would sound like, "The cat ate it's food in the morning". Our kids LOVE creating sentences together like this, and we like how it's a great cooperative way to learn and have fun too! Oh and one last tip, the cards don't necessarily have to go in the order below. You could have the when card first.

Below are some cards that we created to use for this activity and we'd love to share them with you too! We created them in color and black and white, and have also created a set of smaller cards that could be used at a literacy center for sentence building. Just click below the picture to download!

Cards can be downloaded {HERE}

Have a fabulous weekend, and we'll be back in a few days with a Martin Luther King freebie and some crafty items!

New year, new classroom pet, and a freebie too!

2012-01-07T22:44:00.001-08:00

Well I took my classroom fish home during Thanksgiving break and she was not doing too well. So I decided to keep her home through Christmas break, but Cupcake didn't make it. A new Betta fish was purchased and is doing well in our first grade classroom. I wanted my first graders to have the opportunity to name him, and turn this into a lesson as well. This was a perfect opportunity to discuss voting again and have my kiddos participate in voting.

Since this was a spur of the moment lesson, I didn't have time to run to the store and find a cutesy container to use as a ballot box. So I created my own using a small shoebox, bulletin board paper, and some clip art.

I read aloud a few pages from this book (the only one I could find at the library), but am going to purchase this one (looks like a great read aloud for first grade).

To make the vote feel official, I created small ballots for my students to use while voting. The votes were counted, and Swimmy is the name of our newest fish!

Hopefully he will live as long as Cupcake, she made it for 3 years!

Are you interested in creating a ballot box or needing some small ballots for your students to use while voting? Just click {HERE} for our ballot box topper and blank ballots.

Have a great rest of your weekend!

So sorry it's been so long. We had a short (3 days) but busy week, and finally have a full week coming up, so we should have more tips and freebies next week!

We're Back & Having a Sale

2011-12-29T17:21:00.000-08:00

Well we know it's been a while but we have REALLY been enjoying our time with our families. Winter break has been full of family time and we have been busy playing with our kids and enjoying every single minute of it!

And now we're back and ready to share a few new products that we have just finished working on.

Our January Math Journal Prompts can be found {HERE}

Our math journal prompts for January focus on: subtraction (using fewer & more/less), understanding the meaning of the equal sign, beginning fact families, & place value (1's, 10's, & 100's).

We've also just added a set of subtraction worksheets and they can be found {HERE}!

This set of subtraction worksheets contains 6 different worksheets. Each worksheet has 4 different versions so you can use the version that works best for you and your students.

And finally, to celebrate the upcoming new year, we've decided to throw a sale at our Teachers pay Teachers store. Everything in our store is 20% off through January 2nd.

We're both wishing you a great start in the new year and when we return to work next week, we'll be back with more freebies and ideas from our classrooms to share with you all!

We're All About Matter Around Here

2011-12-10T18:14:00.000-08:00

Hope you all are having a great weekend. We have been so busy in our classrooms! Our students have been making Christmas gifts for their families, we're so thankful for our volunteers who help us with this one, definitely couldn't do this activity without their help! Our Christmas classroom celebrations are all planned and we're looking for a fun filled Friday with a school wide sing-a-long! LOVE this time of year!

Anyhow, matter has been our science focus this month and we wanted to share some ideas and freebies with you all!

After reading a book about matter to our first graders, we completed a vocabulary building activity. When we introduce new vocabulary to our kiddos we usually complete a worksheet like the one below. Our first graders put these worksheets in their writing binders and refer to them when needed. If you'd like a copy of the worksheets below, just {CLICK HERE}.

After a lengthy discussion about solids, liquids, and gasses, we did a little experiment about solids and liquids with our first graders. It was SUPER easy and they were just thrilled! We showed our kids how liquid takes the shape of it's container by pouring water from a pitcher {cylinder shaped} to a rectangular shaped container.

Next we explained that a solid is different from a liquid because it does not take the shape of the container in which it is placed. We used several classroom objects, like the tape dispenser shown, and again they were lovin' this experiment!

Finally we told them that we can take a solid, turn it into a liquid, and then back to a solid of a different shape. They were seriously amazed! We took a container filled with ice cubes, let it melt throughout the day, and it turned into a liquid. The next day we poured the liquid into a new mold {heart shaped} and turned the liquid back into a solid by freezing it. The kiddos will see our result next week, and we're sure there will be excitement!

We also like to display our science vocabulary cards near our science table. You can get a copy of our matter vocabulary cards {HERE}. See below for a picture.

We hope you all have a great week! If you teach matter we'd love to hear activities that you do with your kiddos. Just comment below!

Reindeer Freebies!

2011-12-06T22:46:00.001-08:00

Wow. There isn't much more to say. After conferences, we changed up our schedules a bit to really fit everything in. We are piloting a brand new, off the press math program, and we wanted our math time to be consistent everyday (which it wasn't before), and wanted to get in Daily 5 everyday (which we weren't) and somehow we made it work. But, it feels like we run all day long. The morning is packed so tight, there is very little room to breath. It's a miracle we are able to get in everything we have to teach, let alone fit in any type of Christmas activities. Add to that, the craziness of our little firsties this close to Christmas. We don't know how you all do it! This year, we've decided to focus mostly on our Gingerbread unit, and we are in LOVE! The kids just eat it up, and we are having so much fun teaching it! If you haven't checked it out yet, you should! The books are so fun, and flow so well together. Tomorrow the kids get to taste gingerbread cookies... But I digress...

We have managed somehow to create a tiny chunk of time to reindeer this year. Is this Rudolph just to die for?

We really love activities where the kids get to use hand prints. As a mom, these are always my favorite. Something about seeing the size of their hands way back when. Hopefully this sweet Rudolph is pretty self explanatory, but here are a few helpful hints to help you get started.
Cut for each child:
Head-light brown square 7" x 7"
Ears- 2 each, light brown rectangle 2" x 3"
Antlers- dark brown 9" x 12"
Eyes- white rectangle 2" x 3"
black rectangle 1" x 2"
Nose- Red square 2" x 2"

To go along with this, we wrote this poem. Click {HERE} for your copy. We've also included a writing sheet for the kids to write their own poem.
We also love to make this adorable book Brown Reindeer, Brown Reindeer, based on Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? This is of course a class favorite, so the kids do their very best to make this an incredible book. We wrap it up, and give it to parents for Christmas, along with their ornament (check back for that post later).

Click {HERE} for your copy of the book.

And last, as a special treat for the kids to take home we make Reindeer Dust. I used to do this with the kids, but as demands get higher, we just don't have time. So now I make it and give it to them for a treat to take home. To make it extra cute, add a bit of red glitter to the nose. {Now, I used to make these with stamps, punches, the works. But I now make them for my class, my 2 son's classes, plus our friends kids, so they are on the computer now. :) }
Reindeer Dust Recipe: Uncooked rolled oats, and glitter (I use red, green, and either gold or white, but whatever works).
Click {HERE} for your the bag topper. Enjoy! We'll be back later this week with some more freebies!

Subtraction Stories

2011-11-29T18:33:00.000-08:00

Happy Tuesday! Hope you all are having a wonderful week. We've been busy, busy, busy. We only have a few weeks before our winter break, and so much to do! Subtraction is happening in our classrooms and are kiddos are really grasping the concept of whole, part, part. We try to connect literature as much as we can throughout all content areas, and if we need a particular book, our online public library system is a fantastic resource and of course free! We just LOVE it! If you're looking for a subtraction story, the story below is great!

Subtracting with Sebastian Pig and Friends On a Camping Trip

Our kids enjoy watching Sebastian and his friends as they camp and their items seem to mysteriously disappear. And when our first graders discover who is taking their items, they are even more engaged and eagerly await to see what happens at the end of the story. We like this story so much, that we created a subtraction worksheet to use with the subtraction equations in the story. As we read a subtraction problem, we write it down on the worksheet. We have also incorporated whole, part, part vocabulary in the equations.

See below to get your copy!

We've also included an additional subtraction worksheet that could be used without the story.

Click {Here} for subtraction worksheets

Need a few other book ideas?

The two below are also great read alouds

and perfect for first graders!

More Bugs? Less Bugs?

Subtracting

Do you have any tips or strategies when teaching subtraction? Just comment below! We'd love to hear any ideas and tips you use when you teach subtraction.

Have a great rest of the week!

Cyber Monday...Hurry while you can!

2011-11-28T18:49:00.000-08:00

Only a few hours of Cyber Monday to get your shop on! Make sure to head on over to our store while you can still get a total of 30% off of our products. Don't forget to use the code CMS28 at checkout.

Make sure to check out our 2 latest units!

Winter Wonderland Game Pack

Word Family Vol. 2

We'll be back tomorrow with more freebies! Less than 3 weeks to go... {but who's counting?}

It's Time For a Sale!

2011-11-25T18:14:00.001-08:00

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

To kick off the holiday shopping season we are having a 20% off sale at our Teachers pay Teachers Store through Monday the 28th.

On Monday TpT is offering an additional 10% off!

Use the code CMS28 when you checkout!

Happy Shopping!

And the winner is...

2011-11-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

Congratulations Kelly Bee aka Queen Bee! You've won our

Gingerbread Galore {book based math and literacy activities} unit.

Send us an email and we'll send it off to you!

Thanks everyone for all of your great gingerbread activities, we're

definitely going to have to try them out!

If you'd like to see a preview of our Gingerbread Galore unit you

can head on over to the post {Here}.

It's available in our TpT store and can be found {Here}.

Wishing you all a very

Happy Thanksgiving!

Clipart Courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

Gingerbread Galore (and a giveaway)

2011-11-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

Hello friends! We are busy in the midst of conferences today and tomorrow, but we wanted to pop in with a quick hello! We know there is a great linky party going on over at What the Teacher Wants, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. We wanted to quickly share our newest unit at TpT with you. Are you looking for some fun Gingerbread activities to do with your firsties? Then this will be perfect for you! This is our newest baby Gingerbread Galore.

She's packed full of all sorts of fun inspired by 3 Gingerbread books. Head on over to our store, and have a little peek! For now, here's a quick preview.

Are you a follower? Comment on our post with your favorite gingerbread activity and we will give away our unit to a lucky winner. But hurry, we'll chose a winner at the end of conferences tomorrow night. Send good thoughts our way... 17 hours left. :)

Didn't Scrappin' Doodles do a fantastic job on this set? We've emailed them a few times lately asking for a clipart set, and they have worked magic! (Pinktastic anyone?)

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Gobble, Gobble!

2011-11-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

We promised that we'd share some of our turkey art projects with you all and let me tell you our kiddos just loved them. Anytime we get out the watercolors or do any sort of art project, we've got all sorts of creativity happening throughout our classrooms!

This simple art project always turns out soooo cute!

We have our students trace their hands, cut them out, and glue them on a piece of construction paper. Next they draw legs, cut out a wattle and beak, and glue on a googley eye. Next comes their favorite part. They add feathers using their watercolors! You would not believe the silence in our rooms when the watercoloring begins, it's AMAZING!
We also have a cute little poem for you all that our kids glue on the back of this page. This poem is all over the web! We also added a few lines after the poem because we have our students write, "I am thankful for..."

You can get the poem and paper {Here}

This next turkey activity is something we found a few years ago somewhere online, but can't remember where. This is an adorable activity using scrapbook paper. We gather several sheets of fall toned scrapbook paper (reds, oranges, yellows, browns, maybe some greens) and cut it into 3x4 inch rectangles. Each child will get 5 of these rectangles. We then print sheets of the turkey body on brown construction paper, the wattle on red, and beaks on orange (download below). We use scraps of white for the eyes, or google eyes, whichever you prefer. For the feathers, we print out several sheets on a very thick cardstock to be used as a pattern {enough for 1 pattern for every 1-2 students}. Kids pick 5 different colored rectangles, and trace the pattern on the back of the scrapbook paper. After cutting out the pieces of the turkey, they glue them together and voila! A cute little detail you can add is before you glue the wattle to the body, crinkle it up first. It looks a little bit more like a wattle then. Also, don't forget to fold the beak in half.

Get your copy of the Turkey parts {HERE}.

We use this along with a "I'm thankful for..." writing and add it to a placemat that we've woven, laminated, and it becomes their Thanksgiving placemat.

Get your copy of the "I'm thankful for..." paper {HERE}.

We are actually doing this on Thursday, so we don't have any pics of the placemat yet, but we wanted to share just in case you still need a few last minute turkey ideas for your class. We hope this is useful for you!

Whales and Sharks

2011-11-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

This fall, we've had some fun with the higher reading group doing some non-fiction animal activities. These have been in a pile to share, so we apologize. :) We don't have any pictures, but we will do our best to share.

We started with learning about sharks while we were learning the 'ar' sound. Sharks seem to be one of those things that really just grab the kiddos attention. They couldn't get enough of reading about sharks, looking at pictures of real sharks, and even watching a fun video. We began by reading several books about sharks, and made a chart of all of the cool and interesting facts that we learned. Next we completed this shark activity.

We then read this little sheet that the kids loved, since it had such great pictures. They also loved that the got to take home a little mini-poster to teach their families about sharks. We read over this several times, and by the end, the kids were able to read most of it by themselves. (Keep in mind this is the high reading group, so we have several reading at a second grade level.)

Last we each did a shark report to really share what we had learned about sharks. These turned out sooo cute, I wish I would have remembered to photograph them. Next time!

{Also, I apologize that the jpeg cuts off the side of the picture. Drives me all kinds of crazy! The actual document is ok though.}
Click below for copies of all of these for yourself!
SHARK ACTIVITIES

Later on, we learned all about whales when we learned the 'wh' sound. This came right after the sharks, which the kids loved. It was really fun to compare and contrast whales and sharks, and to discuss the similarities between the two.

We followed the same basic pattern by starting with reading several books about whales. We also found some really great videos on you tube. HERE is a great one of whales breaching. Of course there were few if any of our kids who had seen this, so it was really fun to watch the kids watching them. We also watched a great video of Beluga whales singing, which was another really exciting idea for the first graders. Unfortunately when I went to link it, it had been removed. But I recommend sharing something similar if you're learning about whales.

We then completed this whale activity.

{Sorry, it doesn't seem to want to rotate for me. }

The kids loved this whale text that we read together, and loved reading about different kinds of whales, and looking at their different pictures online as well.

At the end of our whale activities, we also created whale reports. We had a great bulletin board of our reports up that turned out so cute!

As mentioned before, we wrapped up by comparing and contrasting whales and sharks, and made this Venn diagram.

Make sure to grab copies for yourself!
WHALE ACTIVITIES
WHALE & SHARK VENN DIAGRAM

We hope you find some of these useful! Tune in later this week for some bat and owl activities. Have a great night!

Some clipart courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

What's coming up...

2011-11-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

We're still here! Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about all of ya'll! We have been busy working hard with our firsties, and trying to get ready for conferences which we have the week of Thanksgiving. We've been assessing, and DRA-ing our little ol' hearts out. Not to mention working on some fun stuff for you! Keep your eyes out this week, because we've got some big stuff coming up!

*Sharks, Whales, Bats, Owls.... Oh my!!! You won't want to miss this! We'll have TONS of freebies for reading and learning all about these fabulous creatures!
*Some fun turkey art projects, just in time for turkey day! Complete with some Thanksgiving freebies!
*Our next word family pack up for TpT. Have you checked out our first one? See it HERE. These are a great tool for introducing word families. This year we are doing one of these a week, and so far it's working out great! Can't wait to share Vol. 2!
*Our newest unit is just about done... hint, think gingerbread... It should be up by the end of the week! Yay, it's turning into one of our favorites! ;-)

Don't forget about our Pumpkin unit, and our Fall Games pack. These are great additions to your fall lesson plans.

We'll be back tomorrow (hopefully, fingers crossed...) to share some fun non-fiction reading stuff with you. Have a fabulous week everyone!

More Counting Fun & a Winner

2011-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

Happy Sunday! A few weeks ago we focused on counting by tens with our kiddos and you can go {HERE} to read all about it and download a counting by 10's freebie! Well, last week we did an activity that focused on counting by 5's and we thought we'd share our creations with you all!

We began this activity using cards like these:

There are several activities that you could do with these cards:

1. Place cards in a pocket chart and students practice counting by 5’s to 120. Then have students close their eyes and remove 1 card. Have students try and guess what number is missing.

2. Print number cards twice and use to play a matching game. Students turn over 2 cards at a time, name the numbers, and try to find a number match. If the numbers match he/she keeps both cards. The student who has the most matches at the end of the game wins.

3. Have students work with a partner and place the number cards in order

while counting by 5’s.

Next we had our students each make a counting by fives book. Each child gets 1/4 of the sheet that looks like this:

We pre-cut these for our students.

Then we gave each of our students 3 double sided sheets that look like this:

Giving each student 3 double sided sheet makes 24 pages total inside their book. We had our students cut these out themselves and then we stapled their books together.

While they were waiting for the others to get their books stapled, they wrote their names on the cover and colored the title.

Once everyone had their book stapled we began counting by 5's. On the first page we wrote 5, and then drew 5 of the same shape, on the second page we wrote 10 and again drew 5 shapes (different from the first page). We continued writing numbers and drawing five shapes on each page until we reached 120. Then we explained to our kiddos that we have 120 total shapes on our book and we counted them all by 5's from the beginning.

We also made some worksheets to go along with this activity. These could be great for homework or morning seat work.

You can go {HERE} for the cards, book masters, and the worksheet above. We've even included a blank master too!

Here's another worksheet that you might enjoy too!

You can find this worksheet {HERE} and we've also included a blank master with this one too!

And now for our winner. We had 5 comments on our post asking for advice about reading programs. Thank you for all of your comments.

Congratulations #2 Mrs. S. who said,

"My district uses Treasures also. We are allowed to choose which parts we use or leave off. We found the Phonics portion to be very weak, so we use Saxon Phonics instead. I like the basal okay. There is a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, but some of the stories are not that great. I hardly ever use the workbook, but I do like the big charts that came with the series."

Mrs. S. please email us and let us know which fall related item you would like

from our TpT store!

Have a great week & thanks so much for stopping by!

Happy Birthday to me, and presents for you!

2011-11-04T09:24:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday to Me! Today is Erin's birthday! To help celebrate, we thought we'd throw a little sale at our store! So from now until Sunday night, everything in our TpT store will be 20% off! So head on over and get yourself some goodies.

Thanks for all of your sweet comments about our new blog design! We love it more and more each time we look at it!

Unveiling Our New Look

2011-11-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

Well... it's been in the works for a few months, and we are SOOOO excited to introduce you to our new look! What do you think? Isn't Becca A-MAZ-ING? We're feeling refreshed, sophisticated, a little more grown up, and ready to go! Please, if you have our button, grab our new one and update it. Check back this weekend for some fun new freebies. We're headed to The Oregon Children's Theatre tomorrow to see Pinkalicious the Musical. Can't wait!!! Have a great end of the week, and thanks for checking us out!

2011-11-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Stay tuned... big changes are coming!

December Math Problems & We've Got a Math Freebie!

2011-10-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

Our December Math Journal Questions are now available in our Teachers Pay Teachers Store!
December Math Questions include:

*Addition (2&3 addends with sums to 20 and adding while counting by 10's)
*Subtraction
*Greater than/less than
*Place value (tens & ones)
*Ordering numbers
Just click the picture below and head on over and take a look.

Don't forget to check out our November Math Questions which can be found {Here}.

And now for our math freebie! Last week we reviewed counting by 10's with our kiddos. students are pretty familiar with counting by 10's to 100, so we created a counting by 10's to 120 activity. Click the picture below for directions and free activity printables!

Also we thought we'd call upon on blogging friends for a little advice on reading programs that you are currently using. Our district is currently going through the adoption process, and we have to make a decision by mid-November. Erin is on the committee, so she'd love any help you can offer! Are any of you using Journey's, Imagine It!, or Treasures? These are the three it's been narrowed down to. If you are using one of these programs, we'd love to hear what you think! Leave us a comment with your thoughts/advice/info on these programs and we will enter you into our drawing. One lucky comment will win any fall item in our TpT store. We'd really appreciate the help! We will pick a winner next Friday night (November 4th). Have a great Sunday!

Candy Corn (Pssst, we have some freebies!)

2011-10-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Today was a good day. Sure, the kiddos are crazy, we have too much to do, and WAY too little time to do it, and we are nearing Halloween, but in the craziness we call first grade, we had a few fabulous moments...

We are doing secret pals this week, as a fun way for the teachers to celebrate Halloween, and we found this when we arrived at school today. How cute is this!!! {This was for Leslie, so Erin is secretly super jealous!! :) }

And then, I got a package in the mail. I know, I'm sure ya'll do book orders. But doesn't it just make your day when a box arrives, and you get to open it and smell all those brand new books? I only had a few kid orders this month, so most of these were mine for my classroom, or for some Christmas presents for the kiddos...

If you don't do Scholastic Book orders yet, you are missing out! It's amazing how many free books we get each month!

So candy corn... we love it during the fall, but don't care for it the rest of the year. But the kids always love doing any type of candy activities {duh}, so fall is a great time to get this in. We started with the cute poem we wrote:

The kids wrote it on the paper, but we weren't able to get any pictures of it.

We glued those to the bottom of a 9x12 black piece of construction paper, and did a cute art activity for the top.

This is the type of art where you cute tissue paper into squares, and then use the end of your pencil, and some glue to stick it on. They turned out so cute, I wish I could have gotten pictures. Maybe next time. :)

In math we made these cute candy corn math fact flashcards for the kids to practice.

We also thought that if we printed these on card stock, and laminated (may have to color them a bit first) we could use them as game cards. So we had to create a little candy corn game to do with it. This we will be playing on Halloween.

If you would like these activities, click below for the downloads.

Candy Corn Activities
Candy Corn Flash Cards

Here's a little fun treat if you need help giving out little goodies to your firsties. Just print these, and then fold in half. Staple onto a little baggie filled with treats. (We haven't put ours together yet, but wanted to share before the weekend just in case you want to use.) Sign the back, and you've got an easy treat! Enjoy!

Halloween Treat Toppers

Have a good rest of the week!

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Do You Use a Behavior Clip Chart?

2011-10-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday Friends! We wanted to share with you how our behavior clip chart system is going this year. This is our first year of implementing this in our classrooms and we absolutely LOVE it! We have tied it in with our school wide behavior/reward system and our students feel so proud when their clips are moved up. If you'd like to see our examples of our clip charts you can scroll down through the post HERE.

This behavior system was working so well, and after the first few weeks we really wanted to reward the kiddos who made it to outstanding. We thought about several ideas and came up with the option of allowing our students to customize their clips with pieces of ribbon.

Here's what we do:

*******************

Before lining up the kids for busses and pick up, we review the chart. Using a spreadsheet with the kids' names, we put a tally by the students who've made it to outstanding.

*******************

When a student has made it to outstanding 3 times, they get to choose a piece of a ribbon to customize their clip. We then glue their piece on after school.

How cute are these?

We made sure to get our state's college colors and some theme related ribbons as well.

Our kids love this and we too are having so much fun finding different ribbons for them to choose from!

Here are some close ups of a few clips with ribbon pieces:

After a clip has 5-6 ribbon pieces, the student gets to take their clip home and then start all over again. We haven't had anyone fill up their clip yet, but we are thinking about 5-6 pieces should fill up a clip.

We also wanted to create a simple sheet for some of our students to take home that communicates with their family about how their day went. Here's a freebie that we would love to share with you.

Just click the picture below!

Have a wonderful weekend, and if you use this clip chart system, we'd love to hear

how it works for you!

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It's Time For Place Value

2011-10-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Wednesday! Hope you are all having a wonderful week! Our math focus this week has been place value and we thought we'd share some freebies with you all. Place value is an ongoing focus during our calendar time and our students are familiar with counting straws and base 10 rods and bits, but this week place value has also been a focus throughout our math lessons.

Race to 50 is a game our first graders really enjoy. This is a 2 player game and each person gets one worksheet and the partners share a spinner. Player 1 spins and records their number on a 10's frame and writes how many 10's and 1's, and the total. See the example below.

Here I spun a 4. So beginning from left to right, I filled in 4 dots on my 10's frame and then wrote how many 10's (I didn't have any filled yet) and 1's I that I had, and my total. Then player 2 spins and records their number on their worksheet. Next player 1 spins again and records their number by adding it to their total. See my second spin below.

Next I spun a 9. So I filled in 6 dots on the first 10's frame and then filled in 3 more on the next 10's frame. Then I wrote how many 10's and 1's I had, and my total.

The object of the game is to be the first person to reach 50 by having

all five 10's frames filled in.

Our first graders had so much fun! On the first day we played this game as the class against the teacher, then the second day the students played with a partner. They had so much fun!

If you'd like a copy of the worksheet and spinner just click HERE!

Keeping the focus on place value and 10's frames, we made a few worksheets that we used as masters, filled in our own dots, and copied the worksheets for our students. We've used these worksheets during morning work and we've also sent them home for homework.

If you'd like your own copy, we would love to share with you all! Just click HERE to download.

Simply fill in the 10's frames and copy!

Do you use a behavior clip chart system like the one we talked about in this post? Stay tuned later this week for a helpful tip and a freebie to go with this system.

Have a wonderful rest of your week!

Pinkalicious is Here!!!

2011-10-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

Next month we are taking our lucky little firsties to the Oregon Children's Theatre to see "Pinkalicious the Musical." And let us tell you, we are all kinds of EXCITED! This is one of our student's favorite books, not to mention a favorite of our own. Who doesn't love Pinkalicious?!?! We've had to buy several copies throughout the years, because these always seem to be a favorite in book boxes, and not-so-gently used. Even the boys seem to love these fun books! So when we decided to go to the musical, we of course thought it would be a fantastic time to create a little Pinkalicious unit. We asked the amazing Scrappin' Doodles to see what kind of pink clipart they could come up with for us, and the end result was INCREDIBLE! If you haven't seen the new Pinktastic set, you must hurry over. To. Die. For.

So now, we'd like to introduce Perfectly Pinkalicious!

This is a 88 page pink pack filled with oodles of pink deliciousness, all surrounding the kid favorite Pinkalicious. Here's a little preview of what you will find in our fun new unit.

Head on over to our TpT store to check out this little gem.
This unit is based on Pinkalicious, but of course could be used with out it as well. We also wanted to share something with all of our fabulous followers, so here is a fun freebie just for reading. Click on the picture for your copy.

And since we're introducing a new unit, we of course have to have a giveaway! Leave us a comment with the date you think we are going on our field trip, and the first two to guess the correct date will win our Perfectly Pinkalicious pack for free! Good luck!

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Our Writing Notebooks

2011-10-13T15:30:00.001-07:00

This year we have implemented writing binders into our kiddos took kits. We've had writing folders in the past that the kids have used for writers workshop, and we've used a variety of personal dictionaries, both purchased and created. This year our school has gone to a school-wide science focus, where each month we are all focused on the same theme, with the same set of vocabulary words. You might go more in depth, or just introduce them, according to to your grade. We've previously posted our habitat vocabulary words HERE. If you like our vocabulary sheets, keep watching. (We will be posting them as we do them.) So this year we thought we would try to combine their vocab with their writing folders. Take a look at our writing notebooks!

The cover of our notebooks. Like the cover? Click HERE to get your own, as well as b/w versions for your students.

On the inside pocket of their notebooks the kids have these fabulous personal word walls to use for words they need help with. We don't use these for word wall words, since they already have those (later on), but just for any other words they want spelled. These were pretty cheap and should hold up pretty well.

Next we've put their plastic folders that they use for writers workshop. The go side is for work they are still working on, and the stop side is for work that they've finished. Once a week or so we share our writing, they turn in their best piece, and take the rest home. Click HERE for our stop labels and HERE for our go labels, which fit Avery Labels 8160.

Next is our first grade study guide. This has their word wall, letters and sounds, color words, months, days, and even some math words. You can find these HERE if you'd like your own copy. We keep these in page protectors to really protect them all year.

We have included our writing reminders in a page protector as well. We also have these as smaller book marks that the kids can keep in the back pocket, or take home for extra help. Find our writing reminders HERE.

Last is where our firsties keep their vocab pages. (I apologize that this picture won't turn. It's refusing, and and is driving me CRAZY!!!) We'll continue to add these throughout the year.

Thanks for taking our tour of our writing notebooks. How do you handle writing in your classroom?

If you haven't already been over to visit Anna at Crazy for First Grade, head on over. We were guest bloggers today, and we have some great freebies for greater than and less than.

Have a great weekend! We have a day off tomorrow so we get a 3 day weekend!!!

Some clipart courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

Coming soon...

2011-10-13T13:25:00.001-07:00

Pinkalicious

National Fire Prevention Week

2011-10-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Did you know that this week is National Fire Prevention Week? Yesterday our local fire department came and did a great assembly for our students on fire safety. As a follow-up we sent home this Fire Escape Plan for the kiddos to complete with their families. Grab a copy for you!

Fire Escape Plan

Clipart courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles

Halloween Freebie!

2011-10-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday! We're working on a few things for later on this week, so for tonight we have a quick little freebie for all our our First Grade Fanatics! Today in reading group we did a fun little reading about the history of Halloween. We only have kids 2 days this week, so I decided to not to start a new unit. Anywho, I found a reading somewhere out there a few years ago, I'm thinking maybe on ABC teach. We read it a few different ways, and talked about it, and the kids really learned a lot about why people celebrate Halloween, and the history behind it. Then later on during intervention (where I have my reading group again) we did this activity. The kids had to come up with 4 things that we learned about Halloween. They did a great job, so we thought we'd share it with you. Enjoy!

What do we know about Halloween?

We Have Some Winners!

2011-10-08T21:35:00.001-07:00

Congratulations Kelly and Miss Taylor. Thanks for including your email addresses! We will email our Fall Fun Game Pack, It's a Pumpkin Parade, and October Math Journal Prompts to you shortly!

Thanks everyone for participating. And don't forget you

can still get these items from our TpT store. Stop on by and take a peek!

Have a great weekend!

It's Fall & It's Time For a Giveaway!

2011-10-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

Happy Fall y'all! To kick off the season we thought we'd share a fun game with you, let you know about our latest additions to our TpT store, and throw in a giveaway that includes some of our fall themed lessons/activities!

Pick Your Pumpkins

Pick Your Pumpkins is a perfect game to have your student practice addition and understanding more/less when comparing two sums. We liked Jodi's apple version so much that we decided we needed a version using pumpkins that could be used in October & November!

To get our pumpkin version click HERE!

We've got some new fall additions to our TpT store and would love for you to check them out and let us know what you think!

Fall Fun Game Pack

Our Fall Fun Game Pack is a game pack that includes 5 fall themed games and over 500 math/literacy game cards that can be used interchangeably between all five games. Plus each game includes 12 theme related special cards!

Click HERE to stop on by and check it out!

It's a Pumpkin Parade!

Another new addition to our TpT store is It's a Pumpkin Parade! This 88 page unit is oozing with math and literacy activities! It's perfect for use during both October and November, and will be a great addition to your themes. This unit contains:

*Pumpkin Blend Game

*Playin' at the Pumpkin Patch Game

*Greater/Less than

*Scarecrow Addition

*Find my pumpkins (greater & less)

*Pumpkin Place Value Puzzles

*Pumpkin Equations

*Pumpkin Word Builders

*100 Pumpkins

*Pumpkin Word Sort

*SQUASH (sight word game)

*My Pumpkin Mini Book

*5 Senses Writing

*Pumpkin Life Cycle

*Pumpkin Pie Sequence Cards

*My Pumpkin Report

*Pumpkins Can, Have, Are

*Pumpkin Pie in a Bag

Click HERE to check it out!

Now onto our GIVEAWAY!

We would like to give 2 lucky winners our Fall Fun Game Pack, It's a Pumpkin Parade, and our October Math Journal Prompts!

There are three ways you can enter:

1. Follow our blog and leave a comment that you follow us.

2. Follow our TpT store and leave a comment that you follow our TpT store.

3. Blog about our giveaway and leave a comment with the link to your page.

This giveaway ends on Friday, October 7, 2011 at 11:00pm (PST)

Winners will be announced Saturday October 8, 2011.

Don't forget that you can enter up to 3 times!

Thanks so much for being our FABULOUS followers and have a wonderful week!

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A Week of Apples

2011-10-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Hello friends! Hope everyone is having a fabulous Saturday. As September came to an end, we finally finished up our apple activities. Much of what we did can be found in our Apples, Apples Everywhere unit, but of course we also had to use some great ideas we found from our blogger friends. But don't worry, we're also going to include some freebies for ya'll today.

Our students have had some fun with our apple word work activities. They had fun building words, sorting our word families, and working on sequencing.

We also found this great apple addition math game on Pinterest from First Grade Friends. We actually loved it so much we've made a pumpkin version which we'll share soon.

We also tasted apples this week, and graphed our favorite apples. We began by tasting, and then each colored an apple for our favorite apple. We made a quick data table, tallied our results, and then made our graphs. Our graph can be found in our Apple unit.

We then did a 5 senses writing piece about apples, and made some great charts with the funniest adjectives. Of course I forgot to take pictures of those.

We ended up the week with some apple sequencing activities. We really talked about what comes first, next, last, etc with apples. We started by making our apple tree book about how an apple comes from a seed.

We then did Cara's great apple pie activity, and extended it a bit further.

To end our week we made applesauce. Each child brought in an apple, and before the kids came we cut them up and threw them in the crockpot. We did the cutest sequencing activity about who to make applesauce.
We then turned it into a First, Next, Then Last flip book that turned out so darn cute. It also REALLY helped reinforce this concept. This seems to be one thing that our kids struggle with, so we're starting on it early. Aren't these great?

And voila! Here's the finished product!

We like to send home a recipe for applesauce with the kids, so we added it to the back.

Before we actually ate our applesauce, we did Cara's labeling chart, and talked about and looked at everything we used to make the applesauce.

It turned out pretty yummy!

Here's our graph that we made for our class. Click on the links below to get your copy of our applesauce activities.

Applesauce Sequence
Applesauce Class Graph
Applesauce Recipe

And don't forget to check out our Apples, Apples Everywhere Unit at our TpT store.

We're working on our fall and pumpkin units, so keep an eye out for those, as well as for some great freebies early next week.
Happy Saturday!

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Clipart Courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

Watchya Doin' Wedesday... homework and dinner

2011-09-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

Happy Hump Day! Truth be told, I hate that saying, but this week it fits! These kiddos are keeping us on our toes this week! Sometimes I wish the public could spend a day in our rooms with us, and see what we go through on a daily basis. Teachers just are NOT appreciated enough. But I digress...

At our school we do small group reading groups for 35 minutes, and then also do Daily 5 with our whole class. For reading homework, we focus on our reading group. We know that they are many ways to do homework out there, but we wanted to share what we do. Because our "small groups" are actually quite large (our kids who have the highest need to get 1:6 groups, but the classroom teachers end up with 15-20 or so), we just don't have time in our groups to collect and pass out homework everyday. So we decided to go with the weekly homework system. We pass out homework on Monday, and the kids are responsible for taking care of it all week, and then they turn it back in on Friday.

In our homework folders, we include our Reading program homework for the week, as well as 2 paper books at the kids individual DRA level. We print these mostly from Reading A-Z and also use Scholastic Mini Books. The kids take great care of these and do return them for the most part. This year in my reading group I've also included a parent component to reading. Not only do the kids have to read for 10 minutes a night, but they have to be read to for 10 minutes as well. Hopefully this will really stress the importance of reading to your kids, no matter what level they are at.

If you'd like to use our reading homework logs, here ya go! Click HERE to download your own copies. And since most of you fabulous teachers need to eat... we thought we'd share another recipe with you!

Crispy Southwest Chicken Wraps

Here's a little recipe that my family LOVES! We are a burrito lovin' family and always looking for new burrito/wrap recipes. This Crispy Southwest Chicken Wrap recipe comes from melskitchencafe, and it is oh so yummy!

I always change recipes up a bit and here are a few of my changes:

* I left out the peppers and cilantro since we topped ours

with fresh homemade salsa.

*I added the spices to the rice as it boiled.

*I fried our burritos in a little oil instead of spraying them with cooking spray. Probably not the healthiest, but they sure did taste good.

Have a great week friends!

Only 2 more days and it's the weekend!

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Motivational Monday: Chrysanthemum, TpT, and Newsletter, Oh my!!

2011-09-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday! We hope everyone had a relaxing and fabulous weekend! It seemed to really fly because we were both so busy! We had an inservice day on Friday, so we are itching to get back into our classrooms. But we definitely could have used a bit more time off! Hope you all have a minute, cause this is a long one... :-)

We've been running like crazy people since school started, but it's finally starting to calm down as we settle into our school year, and get into our routines. We've been really training our first graders on the Daily 5, and hopefully (fingers crossed) we'll introduce our last 2 dailies this week, word work and listen to reading. Hopefully next week we'll be able to blog about how wonderful it's going having Daily 5 up and running....

We've got a few new things up on our store that we wanted to share with you. First, as a result of all of our blog stalking over the last year, we decided to give our phonemic awareness lessons a make over. We have changed the way we introduce our sounds to the whole class. We do small reading groups that do this as well, but this year we've decided to be more explicit in teaching the sounds, blends, etc. whole group style. Our district has had the same reading program for 17 years, so needless to say it's not used much. Thank goodness that we both have such a passion for reading, because we've had to sort of re-invent the wheel so to speak. (We are finally going through the curriculum adoption process this year, and I'm on the committee. If you have a program that you're district uses that you love, please let me know. I'd love to share the information!)

Anyway, this year we will be focusing on 1 word family a week for now, and as the school year progresses, we'll work up to 2 or 3 sounds or blends a week. For September, we've been focusing on at, op, it and an. We've created a fun packet to help you teach these word families to your first graders. Make sure to check out our Word Family Pack. And if you like it, make sure to watch for our next pack coming soon...

During September we've also been focusing on habitats. We created these Habitat Vocab Cards for our class's science bulletin boards.

Make sure to check them out at TpT as well! Many more Habitat words are included. We will be making more of these as we focus on other things in science so stay tuned!

This past week we read Chrysanthemum in our reading group, and did several activities with the sweet book. Click below to get your own copy.

CLICK HERE for your copies.

Do you have any other activities that you do with Chrysanthemum? What are your favorites?

And last, I've decided to try a new newsletter this year. We both have done the monthly newsletter, and I've done a classroom blog, but with our population, it just isn't checked enough by parents. So this year, I'm going to try a weekly newsletter, that's a bit shorter, and more to the point. This week will be the first time it goes out, but better late than never, right? I'm sure I will play with the format a bit, but what do you think?

If you'd like a copy CLICK HERE. The cute border is getting cut off on the picture, but it shows up in the download. Due to copyright, I can't share a version that you can edit. But if you'd like one you can change, I can email one without the clipart. Just send us an email. This may change throughout the year since this is my first draft, so if I have an updated version to share, I will let you know!

Have a great week friends!

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Clipart courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

Habitats & What to Eat Wednesday

2011-09-20T22:36:00.000-07:00

Hi all! Hope you're all having a fantastic week! This week we have been busy focusing on habitats and we thought we'd share some freebies with our blogger friends!

The first vocabulary activity relates to our Step Up to Writing program. These vocabulary worksheets have a word, brief definition, and a picture. We read the definitions with our students, write the word, glue on the matching picture, and then these sheets go into their writing binders (we'll show you these soon). Our kiddos can refer to these vocabulary words throughout the school year when writing. As soon as february approaches, our students do most of the definition writing with us, but for now we print it for them.

Click HERE for two vocabulary sheets along with picture cards and answer sheets!

Tundra, River, Ocean, Rainforest, Forest, and Desert have been our main focus this week. We've shown several photos and read books about these six habitats. Here is a habitat writing activity that we also did this week with our first graders.

Click HERE to get your copy!

Finally we are finishing off the week with a small group activity. We each have 6 table groups in our classrooms. Each table group will get a large white poster with a specific habitat written on the poster. Each student will get a picture of an animal that can be found in their specific habitat. The table groups are going to create posters of their habitats and glue their animal pictures onto their posters.

Click HERE to get 6 different sets of animal cards!

And finally we have a yummy new recipe that you all might like to try. Even my picky little eater devoured hers!

Lasagna Cupcakes (from: The Girl Who Ate Everything)

These were fantastic and really quick to make

A few tips:

1. I used gyoza wrappers instead of wonton wrappers. Gyoza wrappers are similar to wonton wrappers but they are round. They worked perfectly!

2. Throwing in some minced garlic while the ground beef was cooking really added a lot of flavor to the meat.

3. I used a little over 1 lb. of ground beef and also used a jar marinara sauce. I was able to make 12 Lasagna Cupcakes and even had leftover ingredients to make a few more for leftovers the next day!

Hope you all have a fabulous rest of your week!

Only 2 more days until Friday!

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Clip art courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

Daily 5 Anchor Charts & CAFE Headings

2011-09-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

We are going on year 3 now of teaching Daily 5 and LOVE IT! We decided that our anchor charts and CAFE wall needed a makeover, so we created our own posters and anchor charts. Stop on by our Teachers Pay Teachers Store to have a look! Included in our pack is:

Charts for:

*Read to Self

*Read to Someone

*Work on Writing

*Listen to Reading (2 charts included. One for ipods and one for any

other listening device)

*Word Work

*3 Ways to Read a Book

*IPICK Good Fit Books

*3 Ways to Read to Someone

Also included are:

* 5 choice cards for display

* Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanded Vocabulary Headings for your bulletin board

Click HERE to go check them out!

Clip art courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

What To Eat Wednesday

2011-09-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

Along with motivational Monday, we thought we'd start another weekly post,

What To Eat Wednesday

Our lives are so busy with teaching and being moms and we are always on the lookout for yummy dinners and treats to make for our families. Although our blog is a teaching blog, we thought you all, being busy teachers, parents, caretakers, etc... might appreciate a great recipe that even the pickiest eaters might enjoy.

Today's recipe is one of our favorite kid friendly recipes, and what's even better is that we have some ideas on what to do with your leftovers!

This Crunchy Baked Chicken Cutlets recipe comes from Family Fun and the recipe

can be found HERE.

Here are some of our tips when making this recipe:

We don't always follow the measurements for the mayonnaise, mustard, or panko, (we just use the recipe as a guideline and adjust the flavor if needed).
We pound the chicken breasts before cutting and dipping into the mayo mix and panko. They seem to cook better this way.
We like to cut the chicken into nugget size pieces. Our kiddos are able to dip them easier this way:)
We always make a little extra so we have leftovers. The leftovers definitely don't reheat well in the microwave so we serve them cold in Chicken Wraps (chicken nuggets, lettuce, shredded cheddar, and ranch dressing wrapped up in a tortilla) or use the nuggets to make a salad (lettuce, chicken nugget pieces, tomatoes, and any other toppings you might like on your salad)

Here is a picture before they went into the oven. These are baking as I type! I know the picture is a little off center, but this was the best looking picture out of the bunch, and raw chicken really doesn't look very appealing in pictures :) This is 4 chicken breasts pounded which made quite a bit with a lot of leftovers for my family of 3.

We hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week! Stay tuned tomorrow for some new items that will be added to our TpT store!

Clip art courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

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

2011-09-12T23:27:00.000-07:00

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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Our First Few Weeks

2011-09-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

We have been so busy during our first two weeks of school. Routines and rules have been reviewed daily and many community building activities have been incorporated throughout the days. Reading groups will begin for our first graders next week, so until then, the last two weeks have been filled with reading and literacy activities surrounding several books. Here are a few literacy activities we have done this week:

To encourage positive behavior at recess and get our students thinking about playing safe and fair, we read The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill.

Next we developed a list of safe activities and games to play at recess. Then our students chose one activity they like best and completed the writing activity below. We are going to make a class book with the completed papers and when a student is having a difficult time finding an activity to do at recess or needs some guidance on making good choices at recess he/she can read the class book. This book will also be great when there is a new student. We can buddy up the new student with another student and they can read the class book together!

Click here to download

We also did a book comparison of The Little Red Hen and The Little Ren Hen Makes a Pizza. We used these books to introduce characters to kids, and then they picked their own favorite character to draw a picture of. For those higher kids, we also incorporated a sentence or two about the character.

Click HERE for The Little Red Hen character activity sheet

The following day we did a whole group retell of both stories then came up with a list of other things The Little Red Hen could make. Our students then completed a writing describing what they think The Little Red Hen should make next. They came up with some great ideas!

Click HERE to get a copy!

In math we've been reviewing numbers 1-20 with our first graders, and we've done some really fun things with our All About Numbers Pack. We introduced our 5 in a Row game and loved watching the kids work together. We used it to have the kids draw a dumber card out of the bowl in the middle, and then they just had to color in that number. It was a great review of numbers, and really worked on working together as a group.

We've also used the number cards to work on ordering numbers to make giant number lines for the kids to use to help them with counting. We didn't want to use the ink to print out so many colored versions, so we just printed them on colored construction paper and it worked great! We also did the same thing with our counting cards included in the pack, but it's been so busy calming these LARGE classes that we have, that we weren't able to snap any pictures. That's on our list though!

Click the picture below for numbers 11-30.

We had our students cut, order, and glue the numbers

on large sentence strips taped together.

We're trucking along in Daily 5, and have worked really hard this week on read to self and picking good fit books. Glad to say that we're up to about 10 minutes of stamina! It's amazing how much it improves once the kids get their own book boxes in their hands. This is our 3rd year doing Daily 5, and we just love it more every time we introduce it. We'll have more to post on Daily 5 later. We've made some great charts to reinforce the expectations, so keep watching as we will be sharing them shortly!

We ended the week with Jitter Juice from Abby's Fun With Firsties pack. There really are some GREAT activities in there! Since we had a hard time getting our hands on the book First Grade Jitters we weren't able to do it until the end of our second week. We introduced the poem, looked for our word wall words for the week, and did an extra writing piece. Since we did in after we'd been in school for a bit, we came up with a new writing activity. Click on the picture for your copy.

As we've been watching all of the other fabulous blogs out there, our jealousy of artistic talent is growing. Neither one of us can draw to save our life, and we are just in awe of those who can. But, we've figured out how to make our anchor charts almost as cute. We'll share those next week! Hope everyone has a fabulous weekend! We deserve it!

Welcome to room 4!

2011-08-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

Happy Hump Day friends! We have officially made it through three days with our little people, and we are STILL tired! Man these kiddos have some energy! Our classes are as big as they've ever been this year, and we both have 28 first graders! We continue to teach, model, practice and teach again. We've done some really fun stuff so far, and will share some of that later. Right now, we'd like to share some classroom pics, FINALLY! These are from Erin's room. It's never going to be cleaner than this, so I had to share now. Leslie's pics will come later... So grab a treat, and relax as you join us on our classroom tour!

Welcome to room 4! As a first day treat, I made these signs for all of our pod members (K-1). Our school is separated into three areas, or pods. We have the earth pod (K-1), the water pod (2-3) and sky pod (4-5).

Window with my student's names.

To the right of the door as you walk in, take-home folders, Eagle Eyes (school-wide behavior recognition system), box tops and bathroom passes.

View from the doorway.

Moving to the left, view from the left corner. My room is square shaped.

Colored tubs hold math activities, will eventually be math tubs. Behind my attendance chart is storage for supplies, and math materials.

Colors and shapes cards from our Colors and Shapes Pack. More storage, and filing cabinets inside.

Left corner, science area. Eventually this will have science themed posters and such based on the unit. Meet Mikeriley, our classroom guinea pig. Under the table is storage for science materials.

Classroom library. This is the first time I've had the books under our white board. So far I'm loving it! Shelve seem safer and more protected from little hands, and it freed up a lot of space in our calendar/group area. Books are organized into themes, and boxes are labeled. Our labels aren't the cutest yet, but they work. We made them before we entered the blogging world. We'd like to redo them, but it's not to high on our priority list. :)

Front of the room. Number cards are from our All About the Number Pack. SOOOOOOO jealous of all of your smart boards! Just last year they finally replaced our chalk boards so that we had 2 white boards. Someday....

Calendar area to the right of the calendar. Like our calendar set? Check out Pocket Chart Calendar Cards. The green, turquoise and pink squares (which are glitter paper btw, WAY too cute! I have it all over the room this year, and it makes me so happy!) will have our weather chart, weekly sound focus, and our poems of the month. Not starting those until next week.

Calendar area. Rug hasn't been brought back from summer yet. I've been busy, and it really needs to be shampooed. Green bin hold math journals (and after today apparently our special carpets, and reading comprehension beach ball).

Calendar/group area. Saw these chairs at Target, and had to have. Kids LOVE them! And of course my Oregon State pillow sits on my bench at all times. Go Beavs!

CAFE board, again with glitter paper. Download these HERE. (That border really isn't that crooked. It would drive me crazy. The picture just makes it look funny.)
Update 9/6: There was an error on our Accuracy poster, it had the same definition as the Comprehension. Oops, make sure to re-download it. Sorry for the inconvenience. :)

Saw these Daily 5 posters at KinderTastic (How cute is her blog design? Great blog!) and had to copy to make some to match my CAFE posters. Find these HERE.

Maybe my favorite part of my room this year, is my new word wall. I used our alphabet cards from our All About the Alphabet pack instead of just letter cards, and I love the way it turned out! I can't wait to start adding words. Above will go our Reading Strategies Posters, which I'll add after I introduce them. That picture to come later.

Word wall

My listening table. These bins hold my 5 iPod shuffles for Listen to Read. Read more about that in this post. Under the table stores stuffed animals, and pillows for Daily 5 reading.

My desk and small group meeting table.

Finally decided these needed to stay on my desk. Check out this post to see where I found these glitter gems. Glitter makes everything better! That's sort of my motto this year. I just wish ya'll could really see the glitter paper on my walls. It's amazing the difference it makes!

View from listening center.

New this year, our Hall of fame. Each child has a colored square (glitter of course!) that will display their work for the year. First grader's names are on the little black ribbons in the corner of each page.

My version of the behavior clip chart. Found the words HERE at Teaming Up To Teach. Aren't they cute? I just added some glitter paper on the background.

Here's Leslie's version of the behavior chart if you don't want to use ink. She just printed it on colored paper and it looks awesome. Click HERE for her posters.

Word work activities and games.

More word work, and writing bulletin board. Still waiting for a few anchor charts to be added later.

Writing center, storage underneath.

Back to the door.

Cubbies, and baskets. Like the labels? Get these and many others HERE and HERE.

Thanks for visiting! Hope you found some freebies or ideas that you can use. We'd love to hear and see how we helped you!

All clipart courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

We're Still Here!

2011-08-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

Clip art courtesy of Scrappin Doodles

UPDATE: We have added a kindergarten and second grade certificate as well!

Just stopping by to let you all know that we are still here! We had our first day with students today and we are so TIRED! We wanted to be sure and share a freebie with you that we send home with our students on the first day of school. After reading The Kissing Hand, by Audrey Penn, our students complete a beginning, middle, and end story retell activity. At the end of the day we send home this award with Chester the raccoon, with each of our first graders. Click HERE to get your copy of our certificate! Be watching this week for some of our classroom pictures! We've finally got our classrooms set up and can't wait to share our pics with you all! Also, beginning in September, we've got some great weekly posts that we will be sharing with you! Have a wonderful week and we wish you all a wonderful start to the school year!

14 Days of Summer # 14

2011-08-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well it's Monday and our last day of summer vacation and our last day of our giveaway. After several classroom visits last week and getting our classrooms somewhat organized, we are very excited to finish up the decorating and finally get some planning time together with our colleagues. Today's Freebie comes from Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade. Denise is sharing her version of a Spelling Contract called Spelling Star. She is including an informational page and scrabble letters in her download too! Click the worksheet above or HERE to download.

Below is her blog button. Just click below to head on over!

Thank you to all of the blogs that joined us in our 14 Days of Summer!

This was so much fun, and we had a great time!

14 Days of Summer #13

2011-08-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Morning! We've got a GREAT activity for you today! We can't wait to try it out in our own classrooms. This comes from Christie at First Grade Fever. Today she is sharing with us an activity from her new Wonderful Name Fun unit at TpT. This freebie is called "My Wonderful Name!" It is an activity that focuses on identifying vowels & consonants in the students' names. The finished name activity makes a "wonderful" back-to-school hallway display. She's even included a mini-poster to use as part of the display. Click below to grab your own copy!

My Wonderful Name

Make sure to visit Christie's blog! She has some adorable ideas!

14 Days of Summer # 12

2011-08-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hope you all are having a fabulous Saturday! We have a few more days left of our summer vacation and those days are going to be all about family time. Spending time with our families and kids is what we enjoy most about our summer vacation!

Our Freebie today comes from Alicia at First Grade Factory. She is sharing reusable template pages to create student math journals. Below is Alicia's explanation of what's included in the download:

This download offers reusable template pages to create student math

journals. The pages include: mathematics journal page cover, higher level

craft stick question pieces, 100s chart, Today's Number page, Math

Vocabulary page, How I Solved the Problem page (constructed response),

3-2-1 page, thinking maps, graph templates, and student information pages

(shapes, money, and keywords).

Click on the picture above or HERE to download.

Don't forget to visit her blog! Just click her blog button below!

14 Days of Summer # 11

2011-08-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Morning folks! It is a lucky day for you today, because we have 2, that's right, TWO freebies for you today! Our first one is from new blogger Jamie from Teaching Little Firsties. She's got a great behavior chart to share with you, and guess what! It's in Spanish as well! At our school that's a big deal since we have about 25% speaking Spanish. Jamie also had an adorable birthday chart to share with you. For directions on how to use them, head on over to her blog! Click on the links below to get your copies!

Behavior Chart
Birthday Icons
Birthday Numbers

Our next freebie is from Mrs. Parker from Learning With Mrs. Parker. This is a great activity to use when working on place value, which she does at the beginning of the year. Click below to get a copy for you!

Place Value Math Mat

14 Days of Summer # 10

2011-08-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Thursday friends! Today's freebies come from A Rainbow of Teaching. Sue's first freebie is a set of safari themed labels for organizational binders. Also included in the download is a letter explaining what each pocket is used for in the organizational binder.

Click the picture above or HERE to download!

If you are looking for a great informational letter to send home at the beginning of the year, Sue has generously provided us with one in an ABC format. She has provided us with a version that she sends home with cute letters that make the ABC's stand out. This one is a PDF, and is an example of what she sends home. Sue has also provided us with a word version so you can modify it to your needs and also include your own cute letters!

Click on the first handout to see her example, and the second to download the word version.

PDF Handout Word Handout

Sue is also sharing worksheets that would be great for word work. These would be great when introducing stamps as part of word work. Just click on the worksheet below to download. She is also having a giveaway at her blog for 2 sets of small alphabet stamps and 2 stamp pads. Her blog button is below and she is just a click away!

14 Days of Summer #9

2011-08-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, the progress in our classrooms had been amazing. We've got furniture set up, tables cleaned, everything put away, and most of our organizing is done! Yay!! We are now both going to head out for a long weekend to really end our summer. Lots of family time, and no school work! Next week when we go back we've got the fun stuff to work on in our rooms. New bulletin boards, and we'll be adding all of the great stuff we've been creating this summer. Don't worry, we'll post pics some time next week.

Today our freebie is from the fabulous blogger Mrs. Saoud at Primary Graffitti. So ya'll do class mascots that travel in your room? Have you been thinking about setting one up, but needed some inspiration? Then you will love this freebie! It's a great activity based on The Lorax. Click on the picture below and check it out!

Make sure to head on over to Mrs. Saoud's blog and check out all of her fun stuff!

14 Days of Summer # 8

2011-08-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well even though we don't officially have to return until next Tuesday, we are headed back to our classrooms today to get lots of laminating done, and hopefully some things up on the walls. We'll definitely post some pictures of our classrooms within the next few weeks.

Today's wonderful freebie comes from Little Priorities. She is sharing her Number Stories Math Journal that correlates with Everyday Math for First Grade. Click either worksheet below to download. Don't forget to visit her blog. Just click on her blog button below and hop right over!

14 Days of Summer #7

2011-08-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

We officially have one more week left of vacation! We've both been super busy working on classroom stuff, printing at home, blogging, not to mention trying to get into our classrooms. We are really getting ready to head back... Fingers crossed that the sunshine sticks around for our last week off! But now, today's freebie. This one comes to us from Kylie over at Down Under Teacher. Kylie is sharing a board game with us called Planet Hop. The goal of the game is for students to read oi/oy words and 'planet hop' back to Earth. Students take turns picking up a card. If they read the word correctly, they spin the spinner and move that number of spaces. If they don't read it correctly, they stay where they are.

There are three levels of play:

Red cards
Green cards
Spell the words (either red or green). The other player picks up the card and reads the word. If you can spell the word, you spin the spinner and move the number of spaces spun.

The winner is the player who reaches Earth first. Click on the picture below for your copy.

Make sure to check out Kylie's blog!

An error was found on our 14 Days of Summer post #3. It's been all fixed, so make sure to check back HERE to download your new copy! Thanks for fixing it Erica!

14 days of Summer: # 6 and Some Winners!

2011-08-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Today's Freebie comes from Jodi from Fun in First! She is sharing a handout that is great for sending home with your students on the first day of school or at Meet the Teacher Night. If there are any Kindergarten or 2nd grade teachers out there, Jodi has also included a version for you! Just click on the handout below to get your copy!

Don't forget to stop by her fantastic blog. You can click her button below to head on over!

And now for our winners! We had 260 entries for this giveaway! Wow! So we decided to choose 2 winners!Drum roll please.........................

Martha # 117 and teachfirstfun #212 please send us an email and we'll send you our back to school items from our TpT store. Thank you everyone who entered and don't forget to stop on by tomorrow for anther fabulous freebie!

14 Days of Summer #5

2011-08-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hello! We hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful Saturday! Today's freebie is from Jennifer over at First Grade Blue Skies. If you haven't visited her site make sure you do! She has a super cute new TpT unit to check out. Her freebie is for the book Bad Case of Stripes. If interested, you can hear the audio version read by Sean Astin HERE. Just click on "more stories" to find it. The first activity is a class book that you can make after reading this story. The second is just a fun activity to do with your class. Click on the links below!

Class Book

Taste Activity

Make sure you have entered our Back to School Giveaway. We will be drawing a winner tonight, and posting it with tomorrow's freebie. If you haven't entered, check out this post. Good luck!

14 Days of Summer # 4

2011-08-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally made it to our classrooms today and got a few things done. It was so nice drop off all of the containers, paper, pocket charts, etc... that have been filling our houses and taking over spare rooms and closets. We are already planning on going back next week and maybe even getting some lesson planning done!

And speaking of planning, our freebie today will give you a head start on planning some October/Halloween activities. Rachelle and Natalie from What the Teacher Wants have a great spider ring patterning activity for you.

Spider rings can be found HERE

Using spider rings like the ones in the link above, students can create several patterns and color in their patterns on a spider pattern recording sheet.

Just click the worksheet below to get your copy.

Don't forget to stop on by and check out their blog.

Just click on their button below!

14 Days of Summer # 3

2011-08-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Thursday! All of us teachers are busy getting ready for new little kiddos, getting rooms reorganized and ready for the year all of that fun back to school stuff! Although we must admit, we haven't even stepped our pretty little feet back into our rooms yet. It's coming close though, and are so fortunate to have all of those fabulous blogs to get ideas from! We can't wait to get back and get our rooms put together so that we can put up pictures. Today the wonderful Erica from Erica Bohrer's First Grade is sharing a fantastic way to organize classroom jobs. Here is a great chart for you all to use.

Click HERE for your copy.

And make sure to visit Erica's fabulous blog!

On a side note, if you downloaded our First Grade Study Guide, please re-download it. Oops! One of our fantastic followers found an error. Have a great day!

14 Days of Summer #2

2011-08-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well it's day 2 of our 14 Days of Summer and we have a freebie for you from First Grade and Fabulous. She is new to the blogging world and is offering all of us a game that focuses on beginning and ending sounds. Click on the spinner below and get your copy.

Come on back tomorrow for another freebie and don't forget we have a giveaway going on now too! If you haven't entered yet, you can go HERE to enter.

14 Days of Summer

2011-08-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

14 Days of Summer is here!!! As excited as we are to get started, it's also a little bit sad that our summer is coming to an end...

So for our first post, we have a few back to school items. The first is something that we came across when we first started following all of the amazing bloggers out there. The very talented Michelle over at Fabulous in First came up with her wonderful First Grade Helper. We loved it instantly, and knew we had to use it! But, we really wanted our word list, and to really make it work for us. So we came up with our version, our First Grade Study Guide.

Our TpT store features lots of fun games and activities, and we wanted to share one with you. We've created a Back to School Game Board for you to use, complete with a fun spinner and fun cards. We've also included a card master so that you can create your own task cards based on what you want your students to work on. The possibilities are endless for this game board. We'd love to know how you will use this!

We hope you enjoyed our freebies today! Make sure to come back tomorrow.

Revised 8/10: Oops! We found a mistake on our First Grade Study Guide. All fixed, so download your new copy!

HUGE Back To School Giveaway!!!

2011-08-08T08:57:00.001-07:00

It's so close we can smell it! Alarm clocks, pencils and crayons, teacher voices... the time to go back to school. But before we do, we're going to have a little fun with our blogger friends! We've got some great things planned for the last two weeks of our summer. Starting Tuesday, we begin our 14 Days of Summer! We'll be sharing at least one freebie everyday, and we've teamed up with some great bloggers to help up out!

Before we begin, we'd like to kick off our last two weeks of summer with a FAB-U-LOUS Back to School Giveaway! The winner will get our back to school items in our TpT store for free! Here's what you'll win:

Pocket Chart Calendar Cards
Pocket Chart Daily Schedule Cards
All About the Alphabet
All About Numbers
Word Wall Words
First Grade Math Assessment
Reading Strategies Poster Pack
Apples, Apples Everywhere
September Math Journal Prompts
and our new Math Journal Buddy

All that for just being our blogger friend!

So from now until Saturday, enter to win and we'll post a winner (or two...) Saturday night, August 13th. 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 our 14 days of Summer, and leave a link
4. Blog about our giveaway, and leave a link

So there you go. Four ways to enter! Good luck! And make sure to watch tomorrow for our first freebie!

THE GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED STAY TUNED TOMORROW, AUGUST 14th , FOR OUR WINNERS!

B-I-G Things Are Coming...

2011-08-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Summer feels like it just started, and already we are getting so close to our new school year! What has happened to our carefree and lazy days?!?! Well, as that back-to-school date keeps getting closer and closer, we've got some fun and exciting things to share with you.

We will be hosting a fun event at our school-bound blog that we'd like to call "14 Days of Summer" because that's what we'll have left. For the last 14 days of our summer, we will share a great freebie with you! We've got some great stuff planned, from things that you can use for back to school, and things you can use all year long! We'll start next Tuesday, August 9th so make sure to be watching! Would you like to be featured in our 14 Days of Summer? We're still looking for some bloggers to include their own freebies. We're looking for new freebies that haven't yet been shared, that you're willing to let us share on our site, of course with your button linked back to you. We thought it would be more fun to have others as well, and to team up as we head back to school. So if you'd like to participate, please let us know as soon as possible. Email us if you have any questions! We're planning out days already, and we'd love to fit in as many as of our blogger friends as possible! :)

And to kick off our 14 days of summer, we will be having a HUGE giveaway next week, full of some great things for back to school, so stay tuned!

The Three Little Pigs

2011-08-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

Well it's definitely back to school mode around here lately (we go back in 19 days) and we have already been thinking about reading and literacy activities during our first couple of weeks of school. Reading groups will not begin until the third week, or until all of our students have been assessed. Along with Daily 5, whole group literacy activities will also be incorporated throughout our day. We will be reading some familiar books to our students during these few weeks and also introduce some newer versions to compare them with. There are so many versions of the The Three Little pigs out there and we found a few and created a little freebie to share with you all. First we'll read an original version of The Three Little Pigs. Here are two examples:

In the first book written by Betty Miles, all of the pigs remain alive at the end of the story and the wolf ends up falling into their soup, but just gets burned, and makes a quick exit out the door. The first pig, second pig, and the wolf have worse luck in the second version above illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay. The first and second pig both get eaten by the wolf, but the third pig tricks the wolf and eats him for dinner. I am sure there are several others, but these were the first two I found at my libaray that were similar to the original story.

This fabulous book, The 3 Little Dassies written by Jan Brett, is version similar to The Three Little Pigs, but the characters are different and the the houses that they build are also different. Jan Brett tells about how she got the idea for this story HERE. I won't giveaway any details about this story, but let me tell you after reading it, I am definitely going to buy a copy for my classroom, so darn cute!

These two books below are also other versions of The Three Little Pigs, and are very cute as well. A few of the houses are built from the same materials as in the original version, but the characters are different. The Three Little Gators is written by Helen Ketteman and The Three Little Javalinas is written by Susan Lowell.

And now for the freebie.

We wanted to do a book comparison with one of the original versions and a version similar to the original, and since we'll be doing this during the first week of school, it also has to be easily completed by our new first graders. So here is a worksheet comparing the houses in an original version of The 3 Little Pigs and a version that you choose. We'll be choosing The 3 Little Dassies because the houses are completely different. Click the worksheet below to download your copy

Watch for more book comparisons as we get closer to school!

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And speaking of school, don't forget about our TpT Sale going on at our store through the 6th. All of our items are 20% off and TpT is offering you 10% off of your total with the code B1T1S when you checkout! We have lots of items that are great for the beginning of the year: Pocket Chart Calendar Cards, Pocket Chart Daily Schedule Cards, September Math Journal Prompts, All About the Alphabet, All About Numbers, and many more. Come on by and take a peek!

Apples, Apples Everywhere and November Math Journal

2011-08-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

They are finally up! Our Apples, Apples Everywhere Unit and November Math Journal Prompts are on TpT! So head on over to our STORE to check them out!

And don't forget, as the year goes on we will be adding more Math Journal prompts each month that will continue to get more difficult. Make sure to keep your eye out for them!

Everything in our store is still on sale, so grab your goodies now!

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So much to share... and give!

2011-08-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

Hello friends! Bare with us today, because we've got a whole lot of lovin' to share!! We hope everyone had a FANTASTIC weekend, because we sure did. Summer weather has FINALLY arrived in our beautiful state of Oregon, and fingers are crossed that it will stick around for awhile. What a busy week coming up! We're sure you all know about the Back to School Sale at Teachers Pay Teachers, and don't forget that everything in our store is 20% off as well! Make sure to check out our store, and get yourself some goodies!

We had hoped to get a few more things up before the sale starts tomorrow, but UGHHH, the site won't let us upload anything until Tuesday! Bummer, but we are just so dang excited that we had give you a peak at what's coming.

We have finished our Apples, Apples Everywhere unit that is a great addition to your back to school tool kit. It's filled with 67 pages of apple themed math and literacy fun! Here's a preview of what's included, but don't worry. It has much, much more! Check back on Tuesday, and we'll have some links all ready to go.

We have a few great freebies to share with all of our lovely followers too, because we just can't wait to get back to teach with all of this stuff! This fun apple is one that we use every year to help the kids introduce themselves to each other, and to share with parents at Open House. Now there are about a hundred different ways to use this, but this is what we do. We first enlarge them big enough to fit on an 11x17 piece of paper on the copy machine. We help the kids fill in the information with a sharpie. We then have them paint the apples, and we add a wallet-sized picture from the first day of school in the middle. We cut them out, mount them to a 12x12 piece of construction paper, laminate, and done! They turn out super cute! They make a great bulletin board, and then later we collect them, and turn them into a class book called "The Apples of My Eye." The kids love looking back at the books from previous years, and see who's been in our classes. Click on the picture below for your copy!

If you like these apples, we'd love to hear how you use them in your own classes.

One thing that we are going to be implementing this year are math journals. We've decided to do these as a part of calendar time, all together on the carpet. This is a first for us, so cross your fingers for us that it goes smoothly! The plan is to have a basket of notebooks, and a basket of glue sticks, so that as the kids join us for calendar they can just get their slip with the question on it, and stick it on. One other trick that we've decided to use, is to go with composition notebooks, rather than spiral bound notebooks. These always seem to get trashed when they kids use them daily, and we've found that composition books last longer. So all of our math journal prompts will fit in these perfectly. However, you can really use them with any notebooks you'd like. On TpT we so far have September Math Journal Prompts and October Math Journals Prompts. On Tuesday we will be adding November Math Journal Prompts. Be watching later on for the rest of our monthly themed math journal questions to come.

Since we're loving apples today, here are some apple themed math journal prompts for our blogger friends. Click on the picture for your copy!

Thanks for sticking with us until the end of this post! We love our followers! We've got a big giveaway planned in the next week or 2, so make sure to stay tuned. And as we head back to school, check out our blog for more fun ideas, recipes, freebies, and teacher tips. Have a great week!

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