It's back to school for us this Tuesday,well actually we've been back since last week, but this week will be our first week with our new kiddos and we're so excited to meet them!  We've got lots of Pete the Cat activities scheduled for our first week back.  Pinterest has sooooo many wonderful ideas!  To go along with our Pete the Cat themed week, we created a little award that we're sending home with out kiddos on the first day of school.  It's an editable version too!  Just click the picture below to grab your copy!

Cat Award

This little award has been on our blog since we first started blogging.  It works well after reading The Kissing Hand books with Chester the Raccoon.  Since we added our cat version and made it editable, we updated our raccoon one as well!  You can click the picture below to download this recently updated freebie!

Raccoon Award

Our next resources tie in nicely with our First Grade Treasures reading program.  Leslie uses this program with her first graders and has mapped out the themes for the entire year!  If you use First Grade Treasures and would like a copy of our map, just email us!  She plans on sharing freebies and book titles that tie in nicely with the weekly themes!  So check back often for updates!

Smart Start will begin next week and will run for three weeks.  After that, Unit One Week One will begin.  

The themes that we've connected to Unit One Week One in our series are:

 My Home

My Senses

 School Rules

If you don't use Treasures, we're sure these freebies will still work for you at some point throughout the year!

Here are a few books that we've checked out through our local library network and plan on incorporating in our themed book display.

And here are two freebies that we'd love to share with you!

Five Senses Label

This simple book provides easy patterned text for your kiddos to read to someone,

and includes two printing options.

All About Me Book

We hope you all have a wonderful week!
We'll be back later this week with classroom pictures!

Thanksgiving themed freebies

Well we've got report cards and conferences right around the corner so this week we're finishing up assessments and managing to fit in some thanksgiving themed activities.  We though we'd share some freebies with you all in case you need some last minute Thanksgiving themed activities!

We're constantly changing up our paper practice and word work centers and always looking for new ideas.  Here's one we just created:

The first page is the code page for our kiddos to use while solving the secret word pages.  The second page contains our spelling words for the week.  If you use Treasures and are on Unit 2 week 3, then this will be perfect for you!  Don't use Treasures?  We've included a sight word page as well! Just click the pictures above to download!

ABC order is another skill we're working on with our first graders.  We have been having our kiddos sort up to eight words at a time.  Below are recording sheets and two sets of Dolch words.  The last set of eight words are our Treasures sight words for the week and the previous week.  

Just click the pages above to download!

 And finally, here's a writing prompt that we'll put out with our writing center materials this week.  

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

Hope you all had a FANTASTIC weekend and have a wonderful week!

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!  

  

  

We're Thankful For Freebies

Hi all!  Hope you're having a great start to the week.  Our week has been filled with assessment after assessment and we're almost done!  Amongst all of our assessing we've found time to also incorporate some First Thanksgiving activities and since we just LOVE freebies ourselves, we thought we'd share a few freebies with you all! 

Here's a little fill in the blank First Thanksgiving mini book that we created.  It incorporates facts about The First Thanksgiving in a format easy for first graders to follow.  We also included a word search that includes the words used to fill in the blanks. 

Just click the picture below for your own copy!

We've read several Thanksgiving books, and have also incorporated Scholastic's online First Thanksgiving interactive videos and tools which we LOVE!  Tomorrow we're ending out First Thanksgiving unit and we'll be making these books with our kiddos!

Another freebie that we'd love to share with you all is our Reading Focus Wall labels.  Our new reading program, Treasures, encourages creating a focus wall.  We've now added this to our reading instruction and are really loving it!  Each week, we change the cards below the labels to match the weekly focus.  This focus wall provides our kiddos with our weekly focus and we refer to it often throughout our while group lessons.  We hang ours right next to our SMART Boards so they are easily accessible and our first graders can constantly view it.

If you'd like a copy of our labels, just click the picture below!

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!  

We are looking forward to spending some much needed family time with our kids and families.  We'll be back in  a few days with some new products and freebies!

What we've been up to... and LOTS OF FREEBIES!

We're back... for now anyway. So as we mentioned before, we are now just about done with week 3 of implementing Treasures. Since we've been so busy with that, on top of working on other units, and updating some of our current stuff, not to mention gearing up for the end of the year, we haven't had a ton of time to work on word work for Treasures. We have managed to come up with a few quick things, so you can take a look. We haven't managed to get in many pictures lately, but hopefully you'll get the idea. These activities help to reinforce the vowel sounds of the week. And just in case you're wondering, we started at unit 4 so we may seem off on our time line for the year. We know. :) Click on the links below to get your copies.

Long E Word Work

Stamping OA Words

Read, Write, Create
Long O Cover Page

Long A Word Sort

Long A Build-A-Word

We've also been doing a whirlwind week of studying the earth, and it's different layers. We have some great freebies for these as well, so make sure to check them out too!

{CLICK HERE} for Earth Activities

We are also starting to plan out our last month {GASP} of school. One thing that we love to do every year is our End of the Year Memory Book. Love it? Don't worry, we have it up at out sweet little store! Make sure to check it out. The kids may love this more than anything else we do all year!

Teach Kindergarten or Second Grade? We've got versions for you too!

Check back this weekend for our Mothers Day Activities! Happy Friday!