Catchin' up with some freebies!

So who's ready for Spring Break?  We definitely are, and it's starting to finally feel a little like Spring around here!  We're looking forward to some much needed family time.
We've been busy in our neck of the woods and we thought we'd share a few freebies that you might be able to still use, or tuck away for next year.

Even though you're all probably all done with your 100th day celebrations, we thought we'd give you a little freebie that you can tuck away for next year.  Here's a mini 100th day pack:

Our kiddos had so much ful making the poster that's in this pack.  We enlarged it to 8 1/2 x 14 (legal). Here's a picture of an (almost) completed poster:

Download our 100th Day Mini Unit {HERE} in our TpT store!

We just finished our graphing unit in math and created a few extras to go with it.
If you'd like some extra picture and bar graph practice worksheets, you can download them {HERE}

Here's a few Easter themed addition worksheets that you might be able to use next week.

We created the Easter Egg double digit worksheet because we just can't find many worksheets that help  our first graders add double digit numbers without regrouping.  

With the Easter Egg Fact Family worksheet just have your kiddos roll two dice, add the numbers together, and then finish the fact family using the two addends and sum.  We used Dice in Dice, which our kiddos just love!  Here's a little close up of the Easter Egg Fact Family worksheet:

Both worksheets can be downloaded {HERE}

Have a wonderful week!  

Plenty of president fun!

Well, after last week, we're definitely looking forward to this week!  Two sick teachers + sick husbands + sick kiddos doesn't equal fun!  With both households on the mend, we're back and ready to blog!

American presidents has been a main focus in our classrooms this month.  We began this month by introducing George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  We read several books about both presidents, incorporated activities from our FREE President's Day Mini Unit, and each of our first graders made their own George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  

You can read more about this art project {HERE}

This week and next we'll focus on Presidents' Day and other important presidents.  Presidents' Day and Celebrating Presidents' Day (see below) are two WONDERFUL books that introduce the holiday and introduce other important presidents as well.

Our kiddos will also put together our Pocket Guide to Presidents which can also be found in our President's Day Mini Unit .  We like to print this with two pages per sheet, which actually prints four booklet pages on one sheet.  It makes it more "pocket sized" plus we save a little paper too!  

Need help printing more than one page per sheet? If you're using a Mac, just go to layout and select two pages per sheet.

We also love to take our first graders on a little tour of the White House by visiting the White House website and taking an interactive tour! 

The White House Interactive Tour

Finally, one of our favorite ways to end this unit is to have our first graders complete a "When I Become President" writing activity.  This can also be found in our FREE President's Day Mini Unit.  We just love their cute little drawings of themselves as a president!

We'd love to hear how you celebrate Presidents' Day in your classrooms!

Have a fantastic week!

Snowmen and a *FREE* President's Day Mini-Unit!

Happy Monday! Or in our case, we survived our Monday! Man, it was a rough one! Here's to hoping that the week gets a little less chaotic...

The last few weeks we've tried to fit in any snowman activities possible. Our schedules are so tight this year, that we really feel like we don't have time for anything other than what we are being required to do, but we do the best we can. We tried to incorporate some activities from our Snowman Fun unit from our store.  It's a great little unit based on our some our favorite snowman stories. Even when you don't have a lot of time, the activities are easy to do after just reading the book. If you haven't checked it out, you should pop on by and take a look. 

Several weeks ago we had our school's winter carnival, so we had to create our cute little snowman wall for some fun winter decor. These snowmen were sooo easy and the kids just loved them!  We used a little glitter on the hats to brighten them up, and they were just to die for! If you'd like the patterns, click {here}.

We try to get in a least one little craftivity each month, so for January we made these adorable little snow globes. Didn't they turn our cute?

Click {here} for the pattern for the snow globe.

We wrapped up our activities with one of our favorite activities from our unit that goes along with Sneezy the Snowman. After reading the story, and completing a writing activity, we did our ice cream tasting.

 

We started by tasting all four kinds of ice cream. If you plan on doing this activity, you need just 1 carton of each type of ice cream. We actually each buy two different kinds, and share. So we actually only use about half a carton for each class. We just give each child a spoonful, and it works out great!

After the taste test we created our large class graph on the smart board.

  After the class graph, each child made their own graph, and then completed the rest of the graph activities. If you'd like more info about this activity, check out the Snowman Fun unit.

President's Day is coming up, so make sure you check our our *FREE* President's Day Mini-Unit! You can find it at our TpT store.

Hope you stop by again really soon! We have a really fun Rainbow Birthday party to share with you, and some fun space activities. Happy Monday!

Super Bowl Weekend Sale! (and a printable Super Bowl Game)

Make sure to stop by our Teachers Pay Teachers Store and pick up some great treats! Everything is on sale all weekend for 20% off. On Sunday there is an additional 10% off using the promo code: Super.

Here's a fun little game to keep you busy during the super bowl!
Click on the picture to get your copy.

 

Need some fun things for the rest of the winter or spring? Make sure to check out these fun units!

 Planets, Stars and Space... Oh My!

 Valentine Sweethearts

 St Patrick's Pack o' Fun

Earth Day Mini Unit

 First Grade Sub Kit

 First Grade Memory Book

First Grade Common Core Math Assessment

Need some fun things for the rest of the winter or spring? Make sure to check out these fun units! Happy Shopping!

New Years Randomness

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

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

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

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

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

Voila!

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

Please ignore the crooked line :) 

Have a FABULOUS rest of your week!

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

Another day... and some sweet little elves

We are heartbroken. We are speechless. We too are mourning. For those sweet little lives that were taken a lifetime too soon. We mourn for their families, and friends, and anyone who was touched by this awful tragedy. We hugged our own kids tighter, and felt blessed for what we have, and who we have to go home to at the end of the day. We keep in our thoughts Sandy Hook, and educators everywhere who will now have to have some tough conversations, and answer some tough questions. We know we are. But, today is now another day. And although we are still heartbroken, and still speechless, and still mourning, we have vowed to do everything in our power to move ahead for our own sweet first graders. And we thank God for who we have to go to school for in the morning. Bless those little babies who are watching over us now. xoxo

This week we are wrapping up our Christmas season at school. We had meant to share this with you this weekend, but...  So, better late than never. Hopefully you still have some time to use these fun activities, or just save them for next year.  We started with Rudolph this year, and make sure to check out our freebies from {LAST YEARS POST}. The Rudolph art project is one of our favs!

 

 For the kids Christmas gifts for their parents, we made these sweet snowman ornaments.

We paint the kids hands (using white acrylic paint with a tiny bit of glue mixed in really helps it stick to the ornament) and then have them grasp the ornament. Their fingers are then turned into snowmen, using wither sharpies or puff paint. We spray on clear adhesive (glitter looks amazing!), add a ribbon with a little poem tag, and they're done! We also attach the kids sticker picture to the back. Here is the sweet little poem:

These aren’t just 5 snowmen,

As anyone can see.

I made them with my hand

Which is a part of me.

Now each year when you trim the tree

You’ll look back and recall,

Christmas of 2012

When my hand was just this small!

  

Click {here} if you'd like a copy of the ornament tags to print out. 

And we are rounding out the week with our adorable elf activities. We started out by reading this sweet little story, The Littlest Elf. 

We then filled out these sweet little elf applications that we found at What The Teacher Wants. We had to reformat to make it all fit on one page. If you'd like a copy, you can find it {here}.

The next step is to make these FANTASTIC little elves we created. Are they just to die for?



If you'd like a copy of the master, find it {here}. We will use the hole punches to cut out the little circles, and they will draw their own circle for the hat. The leg stripes were colored in marker. Everything else is there. We will then put it all together, and just add a picture of the kids in the elf hat.



Here is my own little elf model for the picture of the elf hat. Please ignore the teeth! He's lost 4 recently, and is looking kinda silly. :-) 
 
 

If you still are looking for some math and literacy activities for winter time, make sure to check out these two units!  Click on the pictures to see them at our store.We hope you have a wonderful last week with the first graders. Hug them all tight!

 

We're all about treasures around here

Hope you are all having a fabulous start to December!  We just absolutely LOVE this time of year!  We  have just finished trimester one with our kiddos and are ready to start trimester two! We've got a busy 3 weeks ahead of us before winter break.  Creating games for our school's first winter carnival, helping our kiddos create gifts for  their families on Christmas, and incorporating our Gingerbread Math & Literacy Unit {you can check it out here} into our plans, are just a few of the many items on our LONG to do lists!  We'll share more about these later this month!  

Now on to our literacy block, and if you teach reading using Treasures, then you'll definitely want to keep reading this post!  Since our kiddos go to literacy centers everyday (click here to see how we do literacy centers) while we meet with small groups, we decided we'd create a center called "Paper Practice".  This center often contains practice book pages and grammar worksheets.  We've also created our own practice sheets based on the weekly sight words found in Treasures.  This center contains at least 3 different "worksheet" type activities.  Our students visit this center twice throughout the week, so we like to have a variety of "paper" activities for them to choose from.  We also have a word work center where our students practice their weekly treasures spelling words using magnets, play-dough, scrabble tiles, Wikki Stix, etc...  This center is mostly hands on and contains weekly spelling word lists for our kiddos to read while creating words.  We also have 4 other centers: listening (with ipods), computers, writing, and reading.     

If you're looking for paper practice activities for your first graders, then you'll definitely want to check out our latest addition to our store. 

   This set of First Grade Paper Practice Activities contains:

•Letter Cards (capital, lowercase, & 6 beginning and final blends)

•Spelling List Template

•Spelling Lists (on level words for each week)

•Read, Write, Make worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Roll a Sight Word worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Rainbow Words worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Two Beginning Blend Worksheets (week 4)

•Two Final Blend Worksheets (week 4)

•End of Unit Memory Cards
(all high frequency words and on level spelling words from unit 1)

•3 End of Unit Word Searches
(all high frequency words and on level spelling words from unit 1)

Stop on by our TpT store and you can check it out {HERE}!

We've also got a few freebies for you as well!  We are just loving the Treasures teaching charts and definitely love to display them on our SMART boards and make the lessons more interactive.  We've made cards to match some of the phonics/fluency teaching charts.  We use these cards when we meet with our small groups.  Our kids sort the words, practice reading them, and rebuild the sentences.  We have made teaching chart word cards for each week in unit 1.  Just click the links below!  

Teaching Chart Unit 1 Week 1 Day 1

Teaching Chart Unit 1 Week 2 Day 1

Teaching Chart Unit 1 Week 3 Day 1

Teaching Chart Unit 1 Week 4 Day 1

Teaching Chart Unit 1 Week 5 Day 1

We're always looking for new ideas and we'd love to hear what you do for word work and/or paper practice types of centers.  If you'd like to share, please comment below!  
Hope you all have a great week!