We Dig Dinosaurs!

In my long term plan for the year I devoted the last 4 weeks of the year to studying nonfiction. After seeing so many ideas in blogland I decided that dinosaurs would be a great topic to help teach this to my kiddos. 

We began our two week study by creating our schema chart. My husband so graciously drew this for me and decided we needed bones instead of using post it notes. After he came up with that idea he decided that he could totally take over and do my job. Ha! Do you ever have things that you start but never finish? This chart fits into that category...We have for sure learned a great deal but I haven't taken the time to finish the chart. I keep saying we'll do it the next day but never get around to it. So, maybe tomorrow!

Before we learned about specific dinosaurs we learned all about paleontologists and what it's like to have that job. I found the idea to excavate chocolate chips out of cookies and we went with it. Everyone got a couple of tooth picks so they could do their picking and each table shared some brushes. I loved how everyone was so into it. Most were very careful and treated the chocolate chips delicately while others just smeared it everywhere. Ha, some people just aren't cut out to be paleontologists I suppose. 

 

Throughout the 2 weeks we've been focusing on a nonfiction text feature which I plan on blogging about later on. Let's just say I'm totally digging that as well! 

The second week of our dinosaur study we learned about specific dinosaurs. Lately I've really been enjoying having my students keep and add their learning to their own book on a specific topic. I used KPM Doodles dinosaur clip art and created an All About Dinosaurs book that students wrote in after learning about each dinosaur. You can grab a copy here! 

Here are a couple of examples of my students writing in their dinosaur books. 

I agrere. The velociraptor was not cute at all. 

The stegosaurus ate plants. He couldn't put his head high. Stegosaurus ate short plants. We need to work on rereading our sentences but this student has made great growth from the beginning of the year.

I love 1st graders illustrations. Just look at the look on the T-Rex's face. Intense! 

To wrap up our dinosaur unit we created the T-Rex bones from Deanna Jump's Dinosaur unit. They turned out super cute and really spruce up our hallway after having to take everything off the wall for 3 weeks. 

I've had such a good time learning about dinosaurs this year. I'm definitely looking forward to adding more ideas and trying this again next year! 

Also--please go check out a new blog by an awesome Kindergarten teacher at my school! Ms. A's new blog is called Ms. A to Z and it's very cute! (She made the header and everything on her own...I definitely need to learn from her!) Towards the beginning of the year I noticed something from Cara Carroll on her bulletin board and I knew we were going to be friends. :) She's very dedicated and has great ideas so please go follow her. Have a great week! 

9 1/2 days left! 

AHHHH!

Word Wall Linky

I'm joining Jen from The Teacher's Cauldron (one of my favorites!) for her work wall linky. A couple of months ago I wrote about how I do my word wall and showed pictures from previous years when I taught ESL. You can look at that first post here. 

Here is a picture of my current word wall. It's high above my very cluttered lockers. 

At the beginning of the year all I had up was my students name along with their picture so the kids could easily find the name they needed. I also had a great idea to print all of those words that are truly sight words and you can't sound out on hearts because "you gotta know it by heart". As you can see, that didn't happen so we just have some random hearts up there. :)I use the words from our reading series Treasures to add to our wall. Each week I try my best to illustrate the word. Some weeks are harder than others. Last week the words were just awful and my kids were disappointed because I didn't draw on a single one. I think I redeemed myself this week as I got a few oohhhs and ahhhs. Ha, I love first graders!

Here are our sight words for the week:

PS- The kids were impressed with the bird. You are too, right? ; ) Since we just recently learned about synonyms and antonyms I'll be adding them to the bottom of the card as well. I am all for invented spelling as a 1st grader but I hold my students accountable for the words that are up on the word wall. Here's one last picture of a couple letters up close (cute students blurred out included as well). Throughout the week we practice alphabetizing our words, say them in funny voices (opera is my favorite, I make them really get there arm into it as well), and do a sight word scramble to practice writing them. 

 

A goal of mine this summer is to make our sight word cards ahead of time so I'm not rushing and start the day 5 minutes late. This may have happened this morning...I also want to laminate them so I'm not remaking them every year. I'll just add it on my ever growing to do list this summer. 

Can't wait to read everyone else's post to learn more about how your word walls work! 

Teacher Blogger Exchange Gift!

At the last minute I decided I would sign up for the Pinterest gift exchange through the Teacher Blogger Exchange and I'm so glad I did! Ms. T from Journey of a Substitute Teacher got my name and definitely delivered! I had hinted at wanting some type of decorations for my house and that I was planning on making a button monogram soon. Here's what came in the mail the other day:

Super cute, right? The button monogram came in a frame that unfortunately got damaged during shipping.  My husband found another frame and placed it on our armoire where it proceeded to fall behind it and brake yet another frame. Ha, so we need to get another frame but we're going to give it a few days to chill out first. Thank you so much Ms. T, love it all! : ) 

If you've read my blog before you might know that I love making wreaths. I saw a burlap grapevine wreath on Pinterest and I knew I had to make it. Here's what I made a couple weeks ago over Spring Break: 

It's really cute, I just wish our front door weren't so plain or else it'd really pop. I was considering making one of these for my partner but ended up going with a different color scheme to match the colors of her house. Here's what I sent: 

Is it bad that I want to completely redo the color scheme in our place because of this wreath? I'm definitely digging the warm colors. Hope my partner likes it! Thanks to the girls over at Teacher Blogger Exchange for putting all of this together! : )

Work Station Management

A while back I was really struggling with managing my work station groups and rotations. I would end the day with post it notes on my desk marking which students had been to which work station. Basically, it was madness. I borrowed some ideas and came up with a situation that works for me right now.

Here's what I use to rotate students. When people first see it they think it's really confusing but after explaining it to my students a few times they all got the hang of it. The names (which I blurred) do not move unless they move to a new group. All groups are based on ability level. We do both reading and math work stations so the reading work stations are identified by letter and math work stations have the numbers.

So if you look to the 1st two students, you can see to the left that their row says B, D, 5. If we're doing our reading work stations they know that their first stop would be station B and then station D. If we're just doing math they know to look for their number and they'd be going to station 5.

In my perfect world we'd be doing 2 reading work stations and 1 math work station a day but of course that rarely happens. I have velcro on each of these pieces so I can easily change them or just move them over if we don't get to everything I planned.

My biggest issue has been figuring out how to get each group to each station and so I come up with things like this. I can't tell you how many times I have to erase and change things. It drives me crazy! Eventually I just had to be okay with it so we could start our rotations. It's definitely more difficult for me to figure out our reading rotations because I meet with my lowest group almost every day. I was actually too embarrassed to post my reading rotation like this one. Ha! Is this normal?? How do you figure out the rotation without going crazy?

I just read a post from KinderGals yesterday about their math station management and I'm totally digging it. Since I'm getting a lot more practice running & maintaining stations this year I'm hoping that next year I'll feel more comfortable with students working in bigger groups. If you're already thinking about plans for next year (only 24 days left- ahh!) then I'd definitely recommend this post.

I'm also participating in the Pinterest Craft Exchange through the Teacher Blogger Exchange and I was so excited when I won a giveaway for $25 to Amazon. I knew right away that I wanted Math Work Stations by Debbie Diller and it should be here soon! Thanks to Leea from Set This Circus Down! My goals for the summer are to figure out a simpler way to do things and create more of my own materials.

My question to you: If you put your students in heterogeneous groups, how do you manage pulling your small groups? While the ones are with you, do they still do the same work that the other students are doing but just at a different time? I need a lot of time to wrap my brain around all of this but hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon.

And to leave you with a little cuteness: we've been working on cause & effect these past two weeks and my students completed this page with a sub.

Haha! Choose the good mouse side, friends! : )

Do you use Cookie.com?

Do you ever use cookie.com? At my computer work station I have had my kids using Starfall all year. They haven't complained about getting bored with it but I wanted to switch it up a bit so I looked into cookie.com. The first couple of games I played were good, too easy for my kids but overall I knew they'd like them. I then looked into something that we were working on and found an adjective game. Here's what I found when I played the game:

I really couldn't believe that it had this...Do you notice how the 'fat' boy isn't smiling at all and has less footballs than the other boy? I don't see why they couldn't have used an animal or object to show the meaning of fat. Ridiculous!

With that being said, I'm wondering what websites/programs you use in your computer work station that are 100% reliable and free. If you have any great ones, please share!

Free Spring Literacy Centers!

I created 4 literacy centers using the adorable Rainy Day graphics from KPM Doodles. I was planning on creating both math & literacy stations but thanks to the flash sale that Rachelle from What the Teacher Wants had, I bought her Spring Time Math Centers for half off. I love flash sales! : )

This is only the 2nd time that I've made my own work station items- it was one of my goals to do it more this year. I thought about what we're doing these next two weeks as it takes 2 weeks for everyone to make it to every station (I have 8 total for both math and reading). Anyways, I downloaded it onto TPT and it's your for free!

This is the first time I've ever created a cover and I think it's pretty stinkin' cute. One thing that scares me is giving credit to those who deserve it...For the life of me I can not find where I downloaded this cute frame from. If anyone knows who it came from, please let me know so I can give them credit!

Here are the 4 different literacy centers:

1) Spring Time Story Order- Students put 4 different sentences in the correct order to make a paragraph.

2) Compare and Contrast- Students pick a card containing 2 pictures and use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the 2 times.

3) Noun and Adjective Match- Students separate the nouns and adjective cards and pick an appropriate adjective to describe each noun.

4) Word sort with or and ar words

5) Writing paper for Rainy Day story

I would love it if anyone could use these to help them plan. Lord knows I've used others ideas enough times! I'd love to know what you think if you download it. Hope you all have a great start to your week!

One last thing- can anyone tell me how to insert lines into documents? Not just a regular line but the lines that help students form their letters (I can't think of what to call it!) I'm not sure if there's a font that has it or if it's something else? As you can tell, I'm clueless. Thanks in advance for any help with this. :)

Random Goodness

We all came back from Spring Break rejuvenated and ready to tackle our last 9 weeks together. *Tear*...I seriously love my class this year. I'll be so sad when this school year is over.

We've done a ton of amazing activities that I've found from various blogs this past week. Here are some of the highlights:

We're learning all about adjectives this week and Abby's Pop Rock writing unit has been a great way to add some excitement to it. Tomorrow we're going to put together the craft with this. I'm super excited to see how cute they turn out! In their final writing today one little girl added in her story how I couldn't eat any with them because it was all sugar. Ha, little ones can be so perceptive sometimes!

We started learning about the sun and the moon this week in Science. To help understand why the moon has so many craters we used flour and these bouncy balls to show how a meteor would impact the surface of the moon. We mostly just pressed them down...but a couple of times I let them fall from higher up. They loved it! I originally found this idea here.

When we first started talking about the moon I asked my kiddos what all they already knew about it. One of my sweet ones said, "I know that when the moon is full, the weirdos come out." And I was being observed at the same time. Ha...I laughed and she insisted that it was true. Tomorrow we'll be learning about the moon phases with some delicious cookies!

Near the back of my room we have a book wall where we can see the books we've read throughout the year (ahem...I did a much better job copying the covers last year. We have definitely read more than this throughout the year!) I got this from a friend who got the idea from Beth Newingham. I wanted to bring this up because I often have my students referring to it to make connections as we read. This week our main story in Treasures was Olivia. After reading that her brother was a copycat a student raised his hand and said he had a text-to-text connection and that it reminded him of Ruby the Copycat. I'm blown away by my students memory of the books we've read. Since it's near our carpet they're always looking up at it and it keeps everything fresh in their mind.

We also referred to it a lot when practicing summarizing. Students picked a previous read aloud and gave the summary while students scanned the wall to find the book they were summarizing. It was great practice and everyone was successful when using it!

I've shown this before, but every day I am just blown away by the number sentences that my students can create. Because my students are obsessed with it, I've taught them very informally how to multiply. I've only told them about the numbers that we regularly count by (1, 2, 5, & 10) so they can be more successful. Do you think that it's okay to teach them this even though it's not developmentally appropriate for some of them? I have mixed feelings about it but as you can see some of them can really do it! I welcome input! :)

One last thing I wanted to share was what kept me busy over the last couple of days of spring break. It was time to retire my Valentine's wreath and I made a cute new spring wreath. It turned out much better than I was expecting!

This weekend my goal is to create some new spring work stations. Hopefully they turn out well and I will have some to share. Have a great Friday!