How is it the end of MAY already??

Quick post today... been sooo busy, oh my goodness!

 

I am proud to present my Summer Learning Activities Packet...
now on TPT!!

 

ON SALE NOW: MAY 26- MAY 30 for just $1.50.
Then the price will go up to $4.00.

 

 

50 pages of Summer Learning Activities for First Graders

 

Including:

 

Language Arts: using reading strategies, sight word rainbow writing, sight word graphing, word family brainstorms, compound word practice
 

Writing: poetry, letters, opinion writing, reader responses, writing about summer activities, nonfiction writing

 

Math: addition, subtraction, greater than/ less than/ equal to, math fact practice, number grid puzzles, number writing, money math, telling time, measurement, story problems, What's My Rule problems

 

Social Studies: interview a family member, drawing maps, writing letters

 

Science: bubble blowing experiment, living things exploration, outdoor scavenger hunt

 

Enjoy! Now, I'm out to enjoy this beautiful Memorial Day weather!

Five for Friday: It's May!

Another great, relaxing, sunny Saturday morning! So thankful for lazy Saturday mornings!! Loving my Sara Bareilles Pandora Radio station, steaming cup of coffee (loaded with Hershey's chocolate creamer... oops!), and it's time to do some blogging!

 

Linking up with Doodlebug's Five for Friday... with 5 great things about my week!

 

MATH FLUENCY!

 

 

As part of our math workshop, I have been teaching the kids about "MATH FLUENCY." We talk about fluency all the time during Daily 5... rereading texts, practicing sight words, etc. Then, we started talking about how having math fact fluency helps us to be more accurate and faster math thinkers. During math workshop, I have math fact rings for kids to practice while they are waiting for me at the back table to start "teacher time." It was a great way for my kiddos to warm up and get their math brains ready.

 

HOWEVER, what I was noticing is that students weren't taking the math fact practice seriously. They would take a ring of math facts and casually flip through them, look at the answers, and I don't think that they were really even looking at the math facts. THEN, I realized, WELL, DUH.... I never modeled how to correctly practice math fact fluency cards. We had talked about why they were important, but we NEVER talked about the correct way to practice. We stopped math workshop mid-rotation right then because I could not let this go on any longer... and it wasn't their fault... it was TOTALLY mine!

 

I modeled for my students how I go through a ring of math fluency cards and WOW, what a difference in their practicing for the rest of the week! This inspired me to make new sets of facts to add to our already existing collection...

 

Updated the set in my TPT store... now with 23 different fact sets!! Check it out here!

 

A-Z READING BAG UPDATE!

 

 

Back in February, I posted about how I send home books with students each week from the website, readinga-z.com. Here's my previous post about book organization and parent communication about the student's reading at home.

 

This week, I put together some new books to send home... my kids have been flying through the ones that I previously made!! Time consuming project... printing the pages, copying the covers on colorful cardstock, laminating the covers, binding them... but so worth it! When my kids came back from music and saw the new stack of books, they all wanted them NOW!

 

SPRING CONCERT PREP!

 

My kiddos have been practicing like crazy for their spring music concert with our fabulous music teacher. The theme for the concert is U-N-I-T-E, Songs of Peace and Joy. I absolutely love one of their songs... "This Is My Wish." Brings tears to my eyes when I hear their little voices singing this! I am creating the slideshow to accompany the performance... here's a sneak peek!

 

FINISHING UP POETRY!

 

We are finishing up our poetry books!! Just have to make the "About the Poet" page and decorate the covers of our books. My kids can't wait to take them home and show them to their families! We loved writing poetry. Unfortunately, I don't have any new pictures of the kids' writing... I'll have to update next week, when their books are completely finished. Check out our poetry unit in my TPT Store... The Ultimate Poetry Writing Unit for K - 1 -2.

 

Grab TWO freebies from my poetry unit in this previous post, We LOVE Poetry!!!

 

SWEET NOTES!!

 

 

Love when kids come to school with kind words that they wrote for you at home!! Warms my heart... this is why I do this!!

Quick Math Freebie!

So excited to use this new math center this week during math workshop.

 

All you need to do is write #s 0-10 on popsicle sticks and make a +, - , and = stick.

 

I did the numbers on one color and the symbols on another, but you wouldn't need to use colored sticks.

 

Students put sticks together to make addition and subtraction problems!

 

Grab your FREEBIE of the recording sheet here!

 

I don't know about you... but my kids love ANYTHING to do with popsicle sticks.

We LOVE Poetry!

What a beautiful Saturday morning... up early working on my Poetry unit, which I just posted to TPT... whew, relief!!!

Doing a little shopping this afternoon with my sister and my cousin... It's going to be a great day! Love these girlies! 

 

So during the month of April, we have been writing poetry for National Poetry Month... as I'm sure many of you are! When I first told the kiddos about our poetry unit, I was met with several groans... but they have all realized that poetry is fun, creative, different, silly, exciting! They LOVE it!!

 

We jumped head first into the unit by doing a really creative project that I blogged about last week.... It got the kids' creative juices flowing and was a great start to the unit. The project incorporated writing a poem about spring and doing a great Kandinsky-inspired art project. Click this link for my previous post, We Welcome Spring with Kandinsky.

 

During our unit, we wrote the following types of poetry and as we went along, I created/recreated my previous poetry writing paper, planning sheets, examples.... ALL OF IT!

 

Shape Poems
Couplets
Alliterations
Acrostic Poems
Color Poems
Cinquains
Haikus
Word Poems

 

Here's a peek at our Shape Poems and our Word Poems... the writing paper has been updated since I did this a few weeks ago! Check out the FREEBIES for these poems!

 

WORD POEMS:

 

Students had to write a poem creatively to represent its meaning. The writing paper has been updated in this FREEBIE for WORD POEMS.

 

SHAPE POEMS:

 

Students wrote about a shape... where they see it, what they like about it, etc. Then they write their poem around that shape. Here's a link to the FREEBIE of the SHAPE POEMS.

 

For the rest of my poetry pack, click the LINK to go to my TPT store!

 

 

Wow, it feels so great to have this all organized... Next year, I will be GOOD TO GO! :)



Five for Friday: What's for Word Work?

I can say that I am so HAPPY that this stressful week is over. My husband and I are in the process of buying our first home, which we LOVE, but there have been a few hiccups with water in the basement after a spring rain.... but TODAY... all is settled and great! Whew!

 

I am linking up with Doodlebugs in the special WORD WORK themed Five for Friday.

One of my biggest challenges this year is my management of the Daily 5 structure in my classroom. I struggle between giving the kiddos too much freedom (last year) and not enough freedom and variety (this past fall). I finally feel like I've hit my stride and it comes with the introduction with my word work organization in January. I try to keep the Word Work activities fun and hands-on!!

I love when my kiddos come in at the beginning of the week and ask "WHAT'S FOR WORD WORK?" They used to ask this same question in the form of, "What's for lunch?" I figure if word work is ranking above lunch now, I MUST be doing something right!

ORGANIZATION:

 

Here is a peek at my word work organization board, Across the top are the 5 word work centers for the week. Each student is in a color group (based on their guided reading group... that way I can differentiate the centers based on reading abilities). When we are ready to start word work, students look at what their group is doing that day, they get their supplies, and they can sit anywhere in the classroom. THEY LOVE IT! (and because they love it... I have very few behavior/redirection problems, which frees me up for my reading groups)

 

I take pictures of the word work materials to make the center labels. You can see from the photo that I don't always have time to make the new labels after I introduce the new center... I write on a blank laminated card with a Vis-à-vis marker. The backs of the word work labels have Velcro so that I can switch the centers each week!

The word work supplies are always organized on the top of our classroom library book shelves. My "teacher's helper" make sure that everything is ready to go in the morning and that is it all put back nicely when we are finished!

 

WORD WORK FAVORITES: BEADS

 

 

Every week, student focus on 7 phonics related words (based on a common spelling pattern) and they have 5 sight words (from the pre-primer and primer dolch word lists). As we go this year, I have been making laminated cards with the words on them. This allows students to easily complete their work anywhere in the room... they just bring their little word card with them. Last year, I would write the words on the board, but then students couldn't always see them from the spot that they chose to work in.

 

One of our favorite centers is stringing letter beads on pipe cleaners to spell our words. EASY!! Just a little prep to put the bins together... I initially had the beads organized into the above organizer... but it was too hard for the kids to get the beads out of them.

I recently switched to putting the beads in old pencil boxes and it works great!! I also have a choice of big or small beads!

 

WORD WORK FAVORITES: FLUENCY FOLDERS

 

I recently used Cara Carroll's Rock Your Fluency packs to put together Fluency Folders... I posted about this about a month ago... Check out this LINK to see my previous post about fluency folders... I do have to say that these are a class favorite (and totally worth the cost!)

 

WORD WORK FAVORITES: WORD SORTS

 

 Students sort word family words into categories and record. I put the word cards and the word family heading cards into a tub. Students spread out on the floor and sort the cards. If they finish early, they write sentences with the words on the back of the paper!

  LONG VOWEL WORD SORTS are available in my TPT store!

Here's a freebie of the Long U Word Sort!

 

 WORD WORK FAVORITES: PRINTABLES

 

Stumbled across this great set of word work printables last year and THEY ARE FREE!!

Click the link to check them out on Mrs. Mabe's TPT Store!

 

 

Enjoy!!

 

 

We Welcome Spring with Kandinsky!!

This past week, we completed one of my FAVORITE writing/art projects!!! We have been studying and writing poetry in celebration of Poetry Month and we took this week to focus on colors and how different colors make us feel.

I began the mini-unit by reading "I Love You the Purplest" by Barbara Joosse. The book has GREAT description and helped us to start a conversation about how seeing different colors makes us feel.

Then students wrote a poem about how spring tastes, smells, feels, sounds, and tastes. We talked about using describing words like those that the author used in the story.  Here's a copy of the poem template if you are interested. I had students to a "sloppy" copy on the top box and then re-write their poem to put on their artwork.

Then we did a little more exploring into colors and sound and our senses. We started by talking about artist, Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that you could see music and hear colors. This is a very abstract concept for my firsties and I was met with many confused faces or "what's weird" comments! Little did they know... they would soon understand and experience this for themselves!! Below is an example of Kandinsky's Concentric Circles which inspired our projects!

Then, we talked about how different colors make us feel... many said that yellow made them feel happy or black made them feel scared. Red made them feel mad. I played an instrumental song on my ipod... we talked about how that song made us feel. This particular song sounded happy so we might choose a color like yellow or pink to express our feelings about the song.

On the kid's desk groups, I had a set of crayons and large white paper for each student. I had eight different songs queued up on my ipod. As I played each song, students experienced the music and used colors for their circles that reflected their mood and feelings.

It is important to have a variety of different instrumental songs... we had some Vivaldi, Disney soundtrack songs, Caribbean inspired songs, country, and Broadway musical songs. As we moved from each song to the next, students began a new circle and switched colors based on their feelings.

After our day of experiencing color and music, we cut out our circles and turned them into blooming spring trees. Take a peek at some of their artwork! I LOVE this project because it really gets the kids thinking about how music and art and writing are all interrelated and they make such great connections to color and feelings and description.

 

 

Enjoy!! 

Beautiful Spring Weather = Pure Bliss!

I don't know about you... but I am LOVING this gorgeous spring weather that we are having in Wisconsin this week. It totally makes all of the difference in my patience and my motivation!! (and it does the same for my kiddos too!) Posted this photo on Facebook this morning. I knew it was going to be a great day! I could just FEEL IT! :)

"Sun is shining, Starbucks in hand, and cute new tubs for my math centers.
It's going to be a good day!"

Now for a quick post with a few FREEBIES!

 

LONG VOWEL PRACTICE:

 

Since coming back from winter break, we have been focusing on long vowel spelling patterns for our phonics work. LONG E can be so tricky because of the different patterns so I put together this Long E printables pack... including { rainbow writing - nice & neat handwriting practice - ABC ordering - word sorts - sentence writing - connect 4 games } all focusing on LONG E patterns of EE and EA. The thing that I am enjoying about using these is that they are truly "print and go" with the exception of the connect four games (in which you need to cut out the cards-- still, that's easy!).

 

 Here's a FREEBIE of my CONNECT 4 GAME.

 

 

For the full pack of LONG E PRINTABLES, visit my TPT store! It's only $2.00!

 

TELLING TIME:

 

One skill that we really work on in first grade is telling time to the five minute mark. Common Core requires first graders to tell time to the hour and half hour, but our Everyday Math series expects students to tell time to the 5 minutes. This is a skill that first graders need lots of practice with and I am always trying to think of new ways to practice!!

I saw this idea on Pinterest last year... I can't track down the pin anymore, but I made these cardstock dice. One dice has the "hour" time and the other dice has the "minutes." Students roll the dice and then make it on their clock. Perfect for partner practice or individual practice during math workshop! Grab a FREE COPY OF THE TELLING TIME DICE here. Enjoy!

 

A few other fun practice tools... Click the links to visit my TPT store!

 

Telling Time Bingo (whole class set)

 

Telling Time Memory Games

 

Enjoy these fun freebies! Now I need to get out and enjoy this fabulous weather!