Alphabet Link Up

Happy Saturday friends! Since the fabulous Abby is having her Alpha-BOOM week, we thought we'd link up and share a new idea for introducing the alphabet to your kiddos! Since Erin is now going to be teaching kindergarten, this will be the first thing she does in her new classroom. We've spent the last few weeks creating our biggest product yet, our new ABC Bootcamp pack! It's 200 pages full of activities and resources to help you introduce the letters to your students, in the first 26 days of school.

Just click the pics below or go {HERE} to check it out!

Here's a little preview of what's inside!

We've also added a little freebie of a few items that can be found in our ABC Bootcamp pack.

If you'd like to check out our Bootcamp freebie, stop by {HERE} to download!

We are currently LOVING Show and Tell Aprons!  If you're not sure what they are just look on Pinterest or Google.  Since we'll be using them in our classrooms next year, we're creating card sets that can easily fit the aprons.  If you don't have an apron, these can easily work with pocket charts too, or can be used at a table for a center activity! 

Here's our first set!

 You can check out our Alphabet Show and Tell Apron Cards {HERE}

And here's our numbers 1-20 set!  You can go {HERE} to check it out!

Another new item added to our store is our

 Read the Rainbow Sight Word Pack.  

This is a unit to help teach and master the first 220 sight words based on the Dolch Word List. Each list has a color, and as the students master reading their list, they move through the colors of the rainbow. This is set up so that you can easily make this work for you!  We created it in March, and used it toward the end of last school year.  

Our kids just loved it! 

Look for a post in September about how we incorporate this into our reading instruction.

Just click the title or picture below to check it out!

Read the Rainbow Sight Words 

Here's a freebie to use with our Rainbow Sight Words pack.  This sheet could be used for kiddos to track the list that they are currently on.  You could use this sheet several ways.  One idea would be to  place a sticker on the number of the corresponding list that they've mastered.

Read the Rainbow Freebie can be found {HERE}!

And since we're on the topic of Dolch words, below is a preview of some new Dolch sight word worksheet sets that we've recently added to our store.  These worksheets incorporate the first 220 Dolch sight words.  We use these during our morning literacy centers and our kiddos an easily complete them independently.

You can find these {HERE}

You can also click below for separate links:

Write a Rainbow

Roll a Sight Word

Write it!

Spin a Sight Word

Two more sets are in the works and we'll be adding them to our store soon!  

We're updating our numbers, colors, and shapes posters in our classrooms so we added our new designs to our store!  They are full size, but can easily be printed 2 or even 4 to a sheet if you want to make them into flash cards.  On a mac when you select print, just go to layout and change how many pages per sheet.

 Numbers, Colors, and Shapes Poster Pack can be found {HERE}

Here's a little preview of what's inside!

Numbers, Colors, & Shapes Poster Pack

We've also created a few worksheets for 

number, shape, and color recognition.   

  Just stop by {HERE} to get your Numbers, Colors, and Shapes Freebie!

And here's who we're linking up with! 

Babbling Abby from The Inspired Apple!  

One of our favorite blogs!

 Check it out {HERE}:

Hope you all have a FANTASTIC weekend!

Sunday Sharings

Happy Sunday!  Hope you're all having a great day!   

Summer vacation is in full swing for us and we're really enjoying our time with our kiddos and family!

We're also creating lots of new products and can't wait to share them with you in the next few months!  

A new blog design is scheduled for the end of this month, plus we're now on Facebook, Instagram, & Pinterest! If you'd like to follow us just click on our Facebook, Instagram, & Pinterest icons in our sidebars located to the left and right of this post!

This summer we're also catching up on a few books!  The First Six Weeks of School & The Morning Meeting Book are both WONDERFUL books and great for reading before the school year starts.  We've had these books for several years and refer to them often!  They both offer great tips and ideas on building a classroom community that can be incorporated into ANY classroom.  Both books really give great ideas to help start a successful school year!  

You can find them both on the Responsive Classroom website and also at Amazon.

And speaking of the Responsive Classroom website, they have a blog that has WONDERFUL articles that offer great ideas and teaching strategies.  We also follow them on Facebook and subscribe to their YouTube videos :) If you'd like to check them out, links are below!

Responsive Classroom Blog

Responsive Classroom Facebook

Responsive Classroom YouTube

Here are a few freebies that we'd like to share with you!  We incorporated these into out last few weeks of school and hadn't got a chance to put them on the blog yet!

One of our last weeks in our Treasures reading program had a strong focus on number and color words.  We created this little color by number worksheet and added it to the back of a Treasures grammar/spelling worksheet.  It was one of the worksheets at our paper practice center.

Color by Number Worksheet

To continue the focus on color and number words, we incorporated these I Have Who Has cards during our small group reading instruction.  If you have less than 10 kids in a group (teacher reads one card) You could read the extras, or give a few students more than one card.  Our students absolutely enjoy this game!

I Have Who Has Colors & Numbers

Since our last chapter in math focused heavily on 3-dimensional shapes, we created a worksheet, and a math game for extra practice.  Both are pictured below just click the pictures and you'll be able to get your freebies!

3-D Shape Worksheet

Roll a 3-D Shape Bingo

Wishing you all a WONDERFUL week!  

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season!  We have a little math game freebie that we’d love to share with you, but first we thought we’d share about how we do math and incorporate math games into our first grade classrooms. 

Our school uses My Math, which is a pretty structured math program.  After our kiddos finish their “On My Own” page, and we have looked it over, they have a list of things they can chose from such as flash card practice or the math game of the week.  
While kids are using flash cards, or playing the math game of the week, we are able work with kids who might need some extra support on their 

“On My Own” page.    

Thursday, during the last half hour of the school day, is what we call Math Review.  During this time we incorporate math journals using our math journal prompts.  After math journals our kiddos can choose shape/pattern blocks, counting cubes, math board games, math apps on the iPad, or ixl on computers.  While our kids are at these math centers, we meet with students who have math work to finish from the week.  We also use this time to assess math skills if needed. 

And here's our freebie for you all!  We’ll be using this next week as our math game of the week.   

It’s a game called “Who has the number that is greater?”  Or “Who has the number that is less?”  

We made our game double sided so the players can decide if they want to focus on who has more or who has less.   

This is a two-player game.  Each pair will need one game board and 20-30 number cards.   The players split the cards evenly and place their cards face down in the labeled box.   

 Each player flips a card over.

Since this is the "less" side, the person with the number that is less (57) gets to keep both cards, and puts them in a separate pile. The game continues until all cards have been flipped over.  Then, both players count their cards and whoever has the most is the winner.  

Here is the back of the game board.  If playing on this side, the player with the greater number (104) gets to keep both cards.  

 We've created two options for game boards and number cards 1-120.  

If you'd like this game just click {HERE}!

Have a wonderful Friday!

Our First Few Weeks

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!