Five for Friday

I'm joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly linking party, Five for Friday.

I have been going crazy the last month or so with pencils. A couple of my rascals were breaking them in half, brand new pencils!!! I had two boys in particular that were changing out their pencils probably 10 times a day.  I had read a blog post from the Ladybug's Teacher Files HERE about the Great American Pencil Challenge last year. I decided to give it a try. Let me tell you, it is working like a dream! I gave each student 2 new pencils. I wrote their number on the pencils with a Sharpie and then wrapped a piece of tape around it to keep it from rubbing off. We just finished up our second week. Three students are out because they lost their pencils and had to get one from me, but both of my pencil breakers are still in and  I may have to sharpen one of their pencils during the day. I just couldn't believe it would be this successful. We are going to keep it going till their is only one person that still has a pencil or school is out. In that case all of the kids that still have pencils will get a prize. I can say I have been sharpening a lot less pencils since we started the challenge.

I got a nice surprise the other day! I gave the kids a math page to do and is usually the case I have some fast finishers. I told them to turn their paper over and write their own story problems.  We had just started working on them so I wasn't sure what I would get, I thought they did terrific!

BTW I said I was proud of their story problems...not their grammar!

We were working on number collection boxes one day. I told the kids they could choose their number. This little girl bit off more than she could chew. She chose 200. She wrote, "Sorry I can't finish." and "Sorry I don't have enough."  How could I count it wrong! lol 

Anybody like frog legs? We had a parent meeting at school one evening. One of my former students got bored and decided to pull all of the legs off of the frogs we had made. My daughter caught her doing it. This was the scene the next morning. 

The only frogs that still had legs were the ones that she thought were colored the best! Hahaha 

I guess I got into a major recycling mode. I had cut out a kites that the kids had used to write important facts about Ben Franklin. I had a bunch of left over triangles. I was going to toss them but then I thought they would work to do fact families. I gave the children a planning page that they used dominoes to get their fact families. After they completed the planning page, I gave them 2 triangles and 2 rectangles and a piece of butcher paper cut in half. I had the kids work in pairs. I told them they were making "Fact Family Avenue".

After I took these pictures, we went over the numbers in the fact families with a Sharpie because 

I realized they were not showing up.

 It was fun to watch the groups. The girls really got into it, they added lots of detail, while the boys did the bare minimum. Ha!

 These two girls had a Day side and a Night side!

 The two girls that made this one, labeled  all of the things in their picture!  : )

Have a great weekend!

Fun Finds and Frog & Toad

I feel so much better after my downer of a post from yesterday. Today I found a song in our songbook from church that I'm going to make my new theme song. It's called The Best Day of My Life. When I read over the words, it hit me that I am letting school problems completely overtake me. I can't go around letting others rob me of my happiness, I realized that is what I have been doing.

Here's the first verse and chorus from the song.

The Best Day of My Life

by Kerry D. King

Every morning when I wake up here

I hold anticipation near,

For this could be the best day of my life

For if I could lend a helping hand,

Could guide someone to that fair land,

Then this could be the best day of my life.

Fix my eyes on the prize

Some tomorrow soon I'll realize,

No more sorrow, endless pain or strife,

This will be the best day of my life.

 

I wanted to share a couple of cool things I found at on of my favorite stores, Dollar Tree. The first are these large foam dice. I put them next to regular dice to show their size. They were 2 for $1.00. They were in the toy section.

I think I am going to use these 2 sizes of dice along with a giant foam dice for a place value activity. The kids will roll the giant dice for the hundreds number, the large dice for the tens and the small dice for the ones.

 

They also had these neat little containers. They had several sizes, some were sandwich size and then these are about half that size and they were 2 for $1.00. They were in with the kitchen containers.

 

They come in green, red and blue. I have thought about using them for"dice shakers", not sure yet.

 

I have had so much stress at work that I have fallen behind in posting some pictures of some of our activities. We read The Kite from the Frog and Toad books. I was wanting to do a craftivity for our Literature Response. Here is what I came up with.

I made a kite-shaped form for the literature response then I used manilla folders to make kite tracers.

 

 The comprehension skill that week was Problem and Solution so I made tail pieces for the kite. The small ones say. Somebody. Wanted, But, So. The larger pieces were blank for the kids to write on. This picture isn't too good, but I think you can get the idea.

 

Since we were reading about Frog and Toad, I wanted to talk about the differences between frogs and toads. We did a Life cycle of frogs and toads. They both lay their eggs in the water, but toads live most of their lige on land. I tried this activity last year and it was rather a mess. I have refined it a little this year, but I'll probably make more improvements to it next year.

I was going to share a copy of the kite page, but I have been having computer problems and I just found out that Powerpoint isn't working. If I get it fixed soon, I'll share it. I'm sorry, but the frog and toad pictures are a mixture of some packs I bought and some I googled. I'll try to get a set that I can share. 

 

Make tomorrow the best day of your life! ; 0

 

 

Week in Review

I posted my Testing Song in the last post. Several classes are going to sing it Monday morning to kick-off our testing week. My kids worked on it Monday and Tuesday. They had it down and were singing it during centers. Then at staff meeting Tuesday afternoon, one of the kdg teachers brings up that she didn't think it should say "Don't you guess.". She said they are supposed to guess as opposed to leaving the answer blank. We have sang this song the past 3 years and no one has ever said a word about this, but I do want to be a team player, so I sat with the said teacher's sister(who teaches 5th) and made the adjustment. So here is the revised version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4viYvUGzTgqMUlQUmQzU3g1cEk/view?usp=sharing

We always make bags of brain friendly treats for the test takers. I teach at a very small school (2 teachers per grade level). So I usually sign up for to help out with the testing incentives. I want my former students to know that I am pulling for them. ; ) Anyway, I made a little poster for each testing classroom. I printed it on 4 sheets of paper to make it bigger. Since there are a bunch of Googled pics, I can't share it.

Each of the treats on the poster are in the bags for the testers. Then the first graders made drew pictures of the testers and I put them together by class to make a little quilt. Here is an example of the one for my daughter's class.

As you can see some of my students are in serious need of some art lessons. haha

When I used to teach kindergarten, one of my favorite websites was www.makinglearningfun.com
Now that I teach first I can still use some of their things. We have been studying plants, so this week we made the lifecycle of a sunflower from www.makinglearningfun.com. I added the words to each picture. I talk about my old teaching buddy a lot, she moved away and I miss her dearly. I don't have anyone at the moment that I create with. Anyway she was very sciencey (is that a word?), she wanted the lifecycle to go in a circle, so we would always trace pictures 3 and 4 from the back so the life cycle would be in a circle. They turned out great! Ignore my scratched up chalkboard, I just hung these for the picture.

Here is one upclose.

Here is another great one from www.makinglearningfun.com It is the seasons of an apple tree.

And here it is upclose.

Those 2 projects inspired me to make this frog life cycle. I already had the copy of the life cycle so I made up this frog to put it on. Here is the link from Scholastic. Thanks Michelle Blackburn!