Thunder and Lightning Oh My!

We just finished our water cycle/weather theme unit that we've incorporated into our classrooms and we wanted to share a few thunder and lightning activities that we did last week with our first graders.

Click {HERE} for a great resource that has "kid friendly" info about thunder and lightning.

Here's a great non fiction book. There is quite a bit of information, so we read bits and pieces to our first graders.

Since we've been talking a lot about author's purpose, we discussed with our kids that the author wrote the above book to inform.

We also read the book below and talked about how the author wrote this book to entertain.

After reading and discussing thunder and lightning we showed our students pictures of lightning Click the picture below if you would like a PDF of lightning pics!

Just in case some of our students hadn't heard thunder, and to remind them of the sound it makes, we downloaded thunder sounds and saved them to our laptops to listen to after we displayed the lightning pictures.

Finally after watching and listening to thunder and lightning, we made lists on our whiteboards of adjectives that describe thunder and lightning. Then our first graders filled out the worksheet below by writing an adjective in each box that describes thunder and/or lightning. Just click the worksheet below if you'd like a copy!

We ended the week discussing the different types of weather that we've learned about and our first graders completed the writing below. They wrote what type of weather they liked and why it was their favorite. Example, "I like sunny weather because I can play outside with my friends." Just click the worksheet below if you'd like a copy!

We've also added our newest addition to our TpT store. It's a new weather themed math and literacy game pack that includes a nonfiction printable weather book too!

Included in this game pack are:

*48 addition equation cards (double digits 10-20 plus a single digit number)

*48 subtraction equation cards (minuends 10-20 minus a single digit number)

*24 telling time (hour and half hour) cards

*24 counting coins (pennies, nickels, & dimes) cards

*36 spring phrase cards

*198 sight word cards.

*Weather themed special cards are included as well!

If you'd like to check out our Weather Themed Math and Literacy Game Pack, just click the picture below!

Have a great week!

President Freebies!

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

Whales and Sharks

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.

Halloween Freebie!

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?

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

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.

Story Retell Printable

We've been working on retelling stories a lot in reading group lately. Here is a generic story retell sheet we have been using. Click on the picture for the download!