Happy April

Happy April friends! We sure are wishing for some sunshine in our neck of the woods. It has been so rainy and windy! Hopefully April will be less rainy than March {fingers crossed}.

We are enjoying our last day with our families today. We head back to school tomorrow after a relaxing spring break. We've got a few months before summer vacation and boy do we have a lot planned for our first graders!

This month is packed with finishing up weather activities/lessons, Earth Day activities/lessons, and beginning our Rocks & Earth unit. If you're interested in checking out our Earth Day Unit, you can find it {HERE}.

Here's a little word sort freebie that we'll be having our first graders complete next week. Included in this word sort are Easter/Earth Day themed words & we've also included an answer sheet

Just click the picture below if you'd like a copy!

Have a great week!

adjectives, verbs, and nouns oh my!

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!