Five for Friday

I'm joining Doodle Bugs Teaching in her weekly linky party Five for Friday. I'll be honest with you, the first few are old, but I couldn't post them due to computer problems. Plus I am on Fall Break this week, so I wouldn't have any school pictures anyway.

1. Here is the final picture of our pumpkin. The plants were doing fine, but the pumpkin had mold on it and it was getting very soft and stinky. I set it outside my door for a few days. Then one of the older kids decided to kick at it and put a hole in it. As I told my daughter, he probably got yucky stuff all over his shoe. 

 2. This is a little activity I have been doing ever since I started teaching first grade. All you need is some colored squares of paper (1" squares will work), gluesticks, a pencil,  and a piece of copy paper. I like to use 11 x 14 because some kids have a hard time using their space wisely.

 So what we do is take our spelling words and segment them as a group. Then we decide how many sounds were in the word and glue down that many squares. Then we say the segmented word and write the letter/letters for that sound (notice the word "are"...1 square the kids are always so surprised). The picture is my copy, I forgot to take a picture of one of the kid's papers. I always like to color code my paper, but the kids just use whatever color they want, some use only one color, some like to make patterns, some like to copy the teacher. After we have learned about Silent E and Magic E, a lot of times we will mark them on the squares. I also like to mark the breves and macrons. I'm not sure why I didn't mark the breves. Anyway it is a fun activity to give a visual to segmenting.

3. It was a beautiful morning and we were learning about nouns. We took an impromptu trip out to the blacktop. I took these pictures during recess, I didn't think to take my camera with me when we went outside. We sat around the four square court?. I wrote person, place, thing and animal in the squares and the students each took a turn coming up and giving a noun and then writing it in the correct square. The kids helped each other with the spelling of the words.

 Here are the squares close up.

Person

    

Place

Thing 

Animal 

4. I'll share some pictures of Delaney (surprise, surprise ;P) from this week. Sunday after church I took these four to Taco Bell for lunch. They were so nice, they say at the tall table and gave me a little seat in the corner by myself. haha

 Here is a picture of her on the first day at the new school. She spent quite a while picking out the right outfit. I guess it paid off, she said it was the best day of her life.

 Since her school is on a different schedule than mine, I have gotten to get a taste of being a stay at home mom. I have been taking her and two other girls to school. Since I'm not going in, I have just gotten dressed and maybe not even combed my hair (I did brush my teeth) and drove them to school. The last couple of days I have dropped them off about a block from school and watched them walk the rest of the way. They were excited to walk. today was crazy socks and shoes day for Red Ribbon Week (notice the pink shoe and the grey shoe). I have enjoyed my week as a stay at home mom, I wish it could go on longer.

5. I want to be a great teacher. In my quest to be the best I can be, I think I have cheated my daughter and myself. I have stayed up at school way too late, way too many times. I haven't always done this, I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it when I was married. I think it started getting bad when Delaney started school because she was with me and I didn't have to go pick her up. I've really been thinking about this a lot lately, especially since she has started her new school. I think this is going to be a  good thing for both of us because I am going to have to leave at 3:30 to go and pick her up. So that means we will have time to cook dinner at night, she will be able to play with the neighborhood kids after school and hopefully I will start going to bed earlier. I plan to start getting to school at least 30 minutes early to make up for not staying late. I think it is going to be a positive change for both of us.

Have a wonderful weekend!