Testing Week

This is my 19th year to teach and my first year to administer the state test. I may be more nervous than my students. I hope I am because I don't want them nervous.

We all have door decorations to encourage the students. I like mine, but if I hadn't procrastinated so long, I know it would have turned out better than it did. It was really sort of a "squirrel" moment when I came up with the idea. I was looking up synonyms for smart, since I hadn't found what I was wanting, I looked up brilliant. Radiant popped up as one along with shining, etc... Well, when I saw radiant, I immediately thought of "Charlotte's Web" and that is where my inspiration came from.

In case you can't read it, Wilbur is saying, "Charlotte, what does it all mean?"
Charlotte replies,  "Wilbur, it means these kids are ready for the test."

I started with the word brilliant and each day I added a new one in the web and put the other word some where else. If i hadn't procrastinated so much, I was going to try and make the words look like spider webs using white pipe cleaners.

On Friday, I let the kids make some posters for the classroom and the hallways. we looked at a few ideas and then I let them do what they wanted. Here's what they came up with.

We did good together, now we can do it apart.

One of the girls said to me, "Oh I guess we should have put the state flag on it for the state test." LOL!

I think the message they were trying to say was something like, You can't be judged by the state test.
We had talked about all of the things the state test couldn't judge about them like creativity , kindness, helpfulness, etc...

I almost cracked up when I saw this. I guess I didn't really read it when they brought it up to me,
 needless to say,  I hung it in the classroom instead of the hallway. ;)

In case you are interested, a friend and I wrote a testing song several years ago, to the tune of "Jingle Bells" you can find it HERE there are several different color borders to choose from.

I'm not sure why, but the school isn't providing the cute incentive snacks this year. So I decided I would do some for my class. Since my printer is out of ink, I thought I would make the signs and put them on my Smartboard if you are interested in using them instead of printing all of the little labels, you can find it HERE. This is a sample.

I am making one more poster for the kids. I got the idea from this pin.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/221591244139998028/

I sent home pieces of construction paper popcorn with the kids so the parents could write a positive message to the class. I'll post a picture of it when I get it finished.

Hope you have a wonderful week!

My E & I Art Class

I believe I have told you that we have a thirty minute session 3 days a week for students who are working below grade level to get Intervention ( the I of E & I) and the kids who are on level get to go to "E" or enrichment classes. 

This past nine weeks, I did an art class. It was a lot of fun, I had 24, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders so the ability levels varied greatly. I am not an art teacher so I looked at some great art teacher blogs to get some ideas. Since we were only in class for 30 minutes, I had to make some adjustments to the original projects. The students loved the class, I mean what was not to love they got to sit and talk while they drew and colored using smelly markers, sharpies and colored pencils! :D

For our first project, I combined two lessons the first one can be found here

As you can see this one is pretty simple and straight forward so I decided to take some ideas from this project.

Since we were on a tight schedule, I had them write their first initial instead of their names like the top picture and then to add a little pizazz they used sharpies markers and made zentangle drawings in the blank spaces.and then added some color. Here are a few of their designs.

One of the other projects I also combined two ideas. I had seen this one that I thought would be great for Valentines Day. It's called fractured hearts. The kids made their designs and then cut it into fourths. They kept one piece and traded the other three squares with classmates to make their heart complete again. I had three small tubs that I had the students put their give away ones in and then once all or most of the pieces were in I let them come up and select one out of each tub...I didn't want them only trading with their friends and grade level.

I overplanned for Valentines so I changed it up a bit after seeing this project. In this project each child only made one fourth of the circle. I decided I would make a page for them to color and already have the lines where they needed to cut.

Here is a link to the page I made, if you are interested.

Here are some of the ones the kids made.

I did this project with my class, but I skipped using two pieces of construction paper, I think I liked them better, here are a few.

I'll share some more later. :)

Wednesday WOW 2/5/14 with a FREEBIE

Here it is Wednesday and time for Em @ Curious Firsties, Wednesday WOW!

WOW, I was talking to a friend from church, she and her family have only lived here since June. Anyway I said something to her about turning 54 in March, she said, "You're kidding, I thought you were 45!"  Wow that made me feel good! Then the next day she sent me a text. she had asked her husband how old he thought I was, his answer was 42! Double WOW!!! I really don't think I look that young, I think having a 10 year old threw off their guestimator! But it did make me feel good, even if it's not true! lol

WOW! Don't you love it when a lesson turns out great? We have been working on place value    

            the last week or so. While perusing through Pinterest,  I found this from Jennifer Oyler

I loved the idea, but before I had a chance to do it with my firsties, 

I found this idea on Amy Lemons' blog Step into Second Grade

So I sort of combined the two ideas. I didn't want to do their first name because some of my kids have nine letters in their name. So I decided to have them do their initials.The day before we were going to do it, I showed them an example using my initials. We did have to have a discussion on what initials were. I told them to make sure they knew what their middle name was when they came in the next day because I wouldn't have time to look up everyone's. I also told them if they had more than one middle name to pick out one of them to use. 

So we started out reviewing my initials to make sure they remembered what we were doing. Then I put a copy of the alphabet  on the smartboard. I highlighted the parts of the letters we thought we should use "longs". We decided as a class that the "Cs", "Gs", "Qs", "Os", and "Ss" would have to be made using only "cubes". Here's what we came up with.

After that we sort of set up an assembly line to get our materials. I gave each child 10-12 "longs", if they needed "cubes" they had to cut them. They put their initials on construction paper and then I made a recording page to go at the bottom.

Here are a few of their pages. The first girl does not have a middle name. What they did was write the initial and then count what it was worth. Rozlyne's R was worth one long and 16 cubes or 26. The challenging part was to then draw it using the tens and ones of the number (2 longs and 6 units). I'll be honest, I didn't think about that being a little over their heads when I was planning it. I had them come up and I worked with the ones who needed help. It was cool to see the lightbulb come on as they"got it".

It was interesting to watch how they made the letters, as you can see this little girl struggled with her M.

 On Arabella's, you can see that they also had to count all of the longs and units and then write what their initials were worth. The next time I do this I will have it on the recording page.

I really liked this activity and the firsties did too. I think we are going to try it again instead of doing initials, I think we may do words from the -ar family or the -ay family. Practice a phonics skill and a math skill in one!

If you are interested, here's the pages I used. I did add a page for with four slots to record the word families so those who wanted a challenge could do a word like play.  BTW there are two blank hundreds charts. I printed them both on one page because I wanted to use 9 x 12 construction paper.

Base Ten Names

Can you believe it? We just hired a kindergarten teacher at the beginning of January and at the end of January our other kindergarten teacher retired. We only have eleven regular classroom teachers and this makes the second one to retire and we have had one to quit. Our PE teacher also quit, but she had just finished up getting a nursing degree. It has been a tough year for our teachers and an even tougher one on the children. Seven out of the eleven classrooms have had students juggled around due to the teachers leaving. I don't know what is going to happen with this new development. I'm hoping that we will be able to hire someone quickly. Most of the days the kids have been split up into different classrooms, as you can imagine kindergartners with a pack of papers isn't a good learning situation. :(  

Since the new kdg teacher hasn't been trained in the easyCBM (and she can't log on to the site), I have been trying to get the kinders tested during centers and my plan time. Yes! I only have 4 left to test of 49! It will be a big WOW when I finish. 

I found this on pinterest the other day. I really liked it.

source

Stay warm, we are having bitterly cold weather the next few days here in Oklahoma.