Good for nothing...

I know, ladies (& the occassional gent), I have been MIA for what seems to be forever!  I am basically good for nothing!  I have a few things I have been meaning to post and just haven't had time to spare to get it done.  How in the world some of you blog every day is BEYOND me!!! 

I should have posted this back before Valentine's Day and I was tempted not to post it at all since it is a good month later but I thought some of you might save it for next year.  I am sure by now everyone has seen the cute little love monsters that have been floating around Pinterest and blog land.  Well I created a template for you all to have in one document.  Just click on the picture to enjoy this little freebie.  I hope to have more coming very soon!

Click HERE to download the Love Monster Set.

Thanks for sticking around!

Say WHAT?!?!

Did you know that you must have permission to pin things to Pinterest??  If you did, you are one step ahead of me because I had no clue.  Please, feel free to pin anything you see on my blog that you like.  It is here to help....lol!

Check out Laura's blog post to find out more and grab this button for your blog.

Money...Money....Money.....MONEY!

So for some strange reason all week long, my stupid computer would not work with blogspot.  It kept telling me to download Google Chrome and well to be honest I didn't want to because it is just ONE more thing on my desktop.  Long story short...it's back to working.

So for all of you who have stuck around from my dry spell of blogging, I have a freebie for you!  This week we basically just reviewed all of the coins (penny, nickel, dime, and quarter).  We decided as a team to just kind of refresh our sweet firsties memories...lol! We started each lesson making anchor charts very much like the super cute ones from The First Grade Parade. 

Then we proceeded to fill out our coin collection book to keep us on our toes.  The kids did great and you can definitely tell it is one of their favorite things to talk about...lol!  So I have posted the Coin Collection Book below along with our exit tickets we did daily with each coin.  We use our exit tickets as quick assessments to see who might need a little extra time with that particular skill.  Hope everyone enjoys the freebie and have a FABULOUS weekend!!!

Click here to download the Coin Collection Book

Click here to download the Exit Tickets

Short /U/ Pumpkins RTR and some visualizing!

Can I just say that I absolutely LOVE blogging!  Boy how boring would teaching be without great ideas from others.   I have to admit that although some things are my original ideas, most of the stuff I post about is things I have found on other blogs and just had to share. 

  This past week, we have been working on the short u sound in Reading.   Before we start each new sound for the week, I head over to Youtube and see if they have any videos from Hooked on Phonics for that sound.  Here is the one for short u and trust me your kiddos will love it.   Mine can't wait to hear it every day.

I also created a little read the room activity with short /u/ pumpkins.  I saw this on First Grader At Last and just had to do it!  Here are the pumpkins I made for my room and the recording sheet I made to go along with it.

Short /u/ RTR Recording Sheet

Our skill was visualizing for last week too!  I found so many great things on Pinterest for this skill.  The kids totally got the skill after these activities.  The first one we did was "The Green Giant" from Mrs. Williamson's Kinders.  They turned out so cute and so very different which was one thing I really emphasized to my kids.  Not everyone sees the same image.

The other visualizing activity we did was during our station time and sorry I don't have a picture of that but I do have the printable I created for it.  I saw this idea on Snippets By Sarah but I tweaked it a little to be more kid friendly for my kiddos.  I used the poem by Ding-A-Ling by Jill Egglton because it had words I knew my kids could sound out on their own.  Here is what we did...

Mental Image Printable

Enjoy Ladies!!!

Hocus...Pocus....Fairy Tale Fun!

We did our week long Fairy Tale unit the last week in October and I wanted to share a few things we did for fun.  Sorry there are no pics...I totally forgot my camera.

First, we read Rapunzel and did this great activity I found at Mrs. Tabb's First Grade Awesomeness .  The kids loved making the tower with the long hair.  We did make a little bit of change to our tower.  We wrote the things we would do in the tower and created one person we would let climb up our hair to hang out with.  They were cracking me up with who they would let climb up their hair.

Next, we read Cinderella and created her a new slipper that would definitely not fall off as she was leaving the castle.  I got this idea from Amy Lemons blog.  My kiddos came up with the same kind of ideas just like her kiddos.  Many of them created sticky shoes or fancy shoes with laces.  Every girl's dream!

Then, we read The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and discussed the differences between the two.  We also talked about the different points of view from which the stories were written and who we thought was actually telling the truth.  I told my kids we were going to make wanted posters for the pigs or wolf, whoever they thought was lying.  They did such a great job!

Wanted Poster

The last thing we did was discuss our favorite fairy tale of the week.  We read so many that it was very hard for them to choose just one but most of them liked Hansel and Gretel.  I think it is mainly because they had never heard it before.  I created this little sheet for them to review their favorite fairy tale and they did an excellent job.

Fairy Tale Review

Hope you all can use some of this stuff!  Sorry it is late for those of you who have already done it!

Remodeling Noun Town!

As I mentioned in my previous post, my class made a Noun Town for one of my observations this year.  Our town turned out great...especially once we created proper nouns for all of our common nouns. 

Since we were down with Nouns, I hated to trash our town so I hung on to it and I am so glad I did!  We moved on to verbs after nouns and we began a little remodel on our town.  First we watched this School House Rock video on Verbs...which they LOVED!

Next, we went to Noun Town and did a little remodeling.  We went through the town and talked about all of the verbs/actions we could do at each stop.  They thought this was just madness that we could do so much in our little town...it was super funny!  I have attached the verb pows we made in our town.

 



Verb POWS!

After we went through our town, I gave each child an action card (I cannot take credit for this idea...my co-worker did it for her observation).  Without talking, each child had to act out their card and find their partner in the room.  I don't think I have ever laugh so hard!  It was hilarious!

Action Cards!



After the action cards, I told the students we were going to create our very own action heroes (thanks to The Teacher Wife).  They were SUPER excited!  We made a circle map and discussed all of the actions a hero can do.  Then, we created our own heroes and let's just say they are MEGA cute!

Sorry I don't have the hero to download.  I had to free hand it from a picture I found online but check out The Teacher Wife...she has printables in her TPT store.

Here's a close up!

I know this seems like a lot to do in one lesson but it went super fast I promise.  Enjoy!

Noun Town!

This year, our school district adopted this new teacher evaluation system.  So, for my first observation I chose to do Noun Town.  Now, I have seen several different Noun Towns on Pinterest which is where I got my inspiration from.  I started our Noun Town by giving each student an index card and a plain sheet of white paper.  The index card had nouns on them that we would see around town.  I told the students to create the noun listed on their card.  They turned out so great! 

Here is our cute little town.

For my observation, we went through our town and made everything a proper noun.  We talked about how proper nouns are more specific and start with a capital letter.  I let each student take their common noun they made and tell me a proper noun to replace it.  They were so good at thinking of proper nouns.  It was a great visual to have!

Don't ya love the Goodwill...lol!

Check out the Chinese lanterns in our Chef Wang's...too cute!

I created some extra practice pages for morning work and they could totally find all the nouns.  Thanks to all of you bloggers out there for your great idea of Noun Town!



This one is both common and proper.



This one is common nouns only.