I am linking up with Tara and her fabulous linky once again. My list keeps growing with all of the great ideas everyone posts weekly. I used zebra duct tape and wrapped popsicle sticks for my mystery person jar. For those who do not know what that is, I pull a random stick from the jar daily and never announce who it is. All day long we watch this student for good choices. If they make good choices, they receive a prize at the end of the day. It worked extremely well last year! I went on a dollar tree hunt for these green bins that fit perfectly on my bookshelf. It will hold my personal books that I read to the students at large group time. I thought they needed some pizazz so I added the chevron tape. I really like how it turned out! I found this on pinterest and decided I needed one ASAP for my classroom. Pre-K students have a hard time communicating how they feel instead of tattling. I am hoping this chart will help. The chart is just a picture on pinterest without a link so whoever made this kudos to you! My version is below. At the end of the school year we threw all of our dry erase boards out and discussed going to Lowes to buy the dry erase board. Well when everyone posted their versions on Monday Made It I was inspired to follow through with cute duct tape too. The teal color is a scotch tape and it doesn't stick really well. The corners keep coming off. The bottom was my favorite. It was a small roll of duct tape and worked perfectly! Hope everyone has a great Monday. My cheerleading camp was cancelled an hour ago so I can enjoy my Monday at home working on school stuff. I am trying to not be MAD about the fact that the AD scheduled something in the time frame the cheerleaders were allowed to have the gym. Have a great Monday!

A few weeks ago I had the idea to incorporate sports into a vocabulary review. Many of my students play basketball on a team and/or play at recess, so I incorporated basketball into our review. My son received this over the door basketball set for Christmas so we brought it to school one day. He told me to "make sure they don't break it, but you CAN show them how to dunk it." Although I didn't share my dunking skills, my fifth graders LOVED this! I knew they'd notice the goal as soon as they walked in so I wrote a little message beside the board: "Are you ready for vocabulary basketball?" It was a fun way to review vocabulary in an engaging way. We split into two teams. I had the vocabulary words written on the board and I'd call out definitions. If they told me the correct word, they earned 1 point for their team. Then, they could earn 2 points or 3 points by making a basket. I had ribbon on the floor to show what would count as 2 points vs. 3 points. They had a BLAST! Most of our vocabulary words come from our read alouds, but most of the words in this unit were student generated. I kept a sheet of paper that students could add words to as they read independently. If they found a word they didn't know or one that they thought would be a good vocabulary word, they could write it down.  Vocabulary review - basketball style - was a HIT! 

Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!! I know - it's a scary thought reality!!!! I'm sorry to even say the words......Back to School. But let's be honest. It's not that far away now, and closer for some than for others. So let's start thinking about how we can prepare. I don't know about you, but I have been stalking Target, Hobby Lobby and a few other places all summer long looking for the best deals and the cutest little bins, buckets, and supplies. Why, oh why, do we teachers spend so much dang money on our classrooms (and have so much fun doing it!?!). I know, I know!!! (I say as I wave my hand in the air like my new students will likely be doing soon enough.) We buy cutesy new things for our classrooms and spend our money on supplies because we love to see the looks on the faces of our little ones when they walk through the door and see their new HOME! It's one of the many reasons why we love teaching so much. As much as we all dread the end of another summer and the freedom we get with it, we also secretly love the excitement of the first day of school. Come on - admit it - you feel the same way too. If there ever comes a time when I don't feel that way, then that should be when I retire. I say retire because I am positive it will not be happening for a LONG time, if ever. I feel like I'm going to be one of those lovely, older, experienced teachers who doesn't want to retire and has to be kicked out. I'll have to dragged out kicking and screaming - dragging my chevron and polka dotted decorations behind me! So back to how we can prepare for going back to school. I don't actually go back until after Labor Day (I'm sorry if that makes you hate me right now, but you get out earlier I'm sure =) I will definitely be posting pictures of my classroom when I actually get around to organizing and decorating it. I also have to find room for all of this stuff... (remember I mentioned I had been shopping just a teeny bit). Even though my room is nowhere near ready I have been thinking A LOT about what I plan on doing those first few weeks of school. This will only be my 2nd year teaching 1st grade. It is my 12th year teaching, but I taught 3rd and 4th grades for 10 years. Last year I was in survival mode with the implementation of Common Core, all the changes with teacher evaluation, and being my first year in a new grade level. It was fun, but I have so many ideas for what I want to do differently this year. But before I talk about all of the things I plan to change (that will have to be another post), I have to get through the first week of school. Yikes!! So here are a few ideas I've been throwing around for that first week. I will start with some things from my Welcome Back Pack. I've always loved reading First Day Jitters by Julie Dannenburg on the first day of school and I also found First Grade Jitters by Robert Quackenbush - how perfect is that? I will start with this First Day Feelings survey and class graph after reading one or both of those books. The picture of the graph is just an example to show what it might look like. We will also make Jitter Juice from Babbling Abby's Fun with Firsties to ease the nerves and have a little snack break =) We will compare our summer with school like this example from First Grade Honeybunch. We will reminisce about our summers *tear* with a little summer writing (which is really my teacher way of getting a quick writing sample to see where they are at). We will HAVE to finish on a high note and not get totally depressed that our summers are over, so we will then come back together and talk about all the amazing things we will be doing this year in first grade - like learning to READ!!!!!! That's a big one! I will give some beautiful, could hear a pin drop, speech about how reading opens the doors to anything you will ever do in life like driving, traveling the world, and of course social media like texting, Facebook, etc. (I'm not totally serious, but I know they will think this is the best part =( Next, we're going to need to break up the sitting, because I don't know if you know this or not, but kids (and adults too) who are just coming back to school after a summer vacation are not so good at sitting for long periods of time and their attention spans are mere minutes at best. So it is extremely necessary to plan for multiple breaks in the day. My Find a Friend activities will give us that opportunity to get up and walk around. These are perfect for any student because there is no reading involved - just pictures. I would introduce this by going through the pictures and pointing out what they are and what they might think of when they see them (a little inferencing on the first day of school - take that Common Core!) Then they walk around and get other kids to sign their names next to a picture they like. When we come back together to share I have students share what they picked and why. For example, I might pick the dog and say that I have a black lab named Molly and tell a little about her. There are 4 different versions of this so I can do 1 each day to get up and moving. The next thing that I think we probably all do is some getting to know you activities or All About Me. I created an All About Me banner that will be perfect to hang up in the hallway or on a bulletin board. So excited to do these this year! There are a couple variations to choose from. I will probably choose this one I also have this super cute Math About Me craftivity that I like to do with the kids. We discuss how math and numbers are everywhere and how we can even describe ourselves using numbers. The craftivity above is a freebie in my TpT Store, but I also just wrote a poem to go with it. You can download the poem HERE if you'd like it. To finish off my pack, I also have included a Back to School interactive mini-book and some printables/coloring pages to fill time or use as morning work. In addition to all this FUN, I also need to take care of some business. That business will be ROUTINES, ROUTINES, ROUTINES!!!! I will be modeling like a crazy woman and pointing out when students are following rules. I will be positive and upbeat, but when needed we will stop what we are doing and go back to the carpet to review a routine or a rule. Here are a bunch of books I plan on reading those first few days as we discuss rules and routines and make anchor charts. I don't have any formal plans for these yet, but I am working on a few things to go along with some of these books, and others will be just discussions and connections. We will work through our class rules that first week (more to come in a later post on that) and more routines. So I hope you got some good ideas from my First Week of First Grade plans. I'd love to hear what you are doing in your own classrooms (or are planning on doing), so leave me a little note =) Click HERE to go to part 2 of this post - I Survived the First Week - Now What? Some more freebies and a chance to win!!!

Some of my students struggle with reading. Looking around the room, looking at the back cover, looking at the front cover, looking around the room again, etc….sound familiar to any of your students?So we decided to create mini anchor charts on what reading looks like and what it doesn’t look like. They did great with […]

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This was a fun flip! I teamed up with a colleague and that made it even better. Mrs. B and I came in on Sunday and got this done to my room ...

Head back to school with The Kissing Hand book by Audrey Penn. Pair it with activities and crafts to go along with the theme of the book or even buy Chester

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Well…I did it. I survived the 2nd week! HA! In all honesty, I have a pretty sweet little class. I feel like they’ve picked up so much in just a short 2 weeks! I’m so excited and anxious to see how much they progress this year. This is one of the reasons I love Kindergarten …

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I wanted to stop by today and share some a few of my “go-to” activities during the first week of school to build our classroom community and set expectations for […]

With the first day of school right around the corner, I've been trying to get the first few weeks planned so I'll have one less thing to worry about when the frenzy begins. Of course, we all know that the earlier you plan the more time you have to change your mind 87 times, but hey, I like to live on the edge. I just finished my Kissing Hand Unit (phew!) so I have some good ideas ready to go. For those of you brave enough to whip out the paint on the first day - nuts, right? - here's a project you might like. The kids paint a handprint next to a Kissing Hand poem and stick a foam heart or sticker in the middle. Then they fold their paper into a booklet and color the cover and glue in on the front. It's a cute little keepsake for them to bring home on the first day. Let me know what you think! Next, I have a request for some help from my awesome followers. I've been working on this unit for quite awhile and I've been looking at it for so long that I'm worried that I might be missing some typos or formatting issues. I would love to have a few more sets of eyes take a look at it for me before I post it on TPT. So, if 2 or 3 people would be willing to proofread it for me, I'll send you the whole 90 page unit for free. I'd really like to post it in the morning, so please only volunteer if you have a little time to look at it tonight and send me any edits or suggestions right away. (Don't be scared off by the 90 pages, most are games, picture cards and emergent readers that don't have much text.) It has some cute stuff that you could use to kick off your school year, so I think it will be time well spent and I would be really grateful! Just leave your email in your comment and I'll send it out to the first 2 or 3 people who can help. Thanks so much - you guys rock! Click Here to Download

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I can hardly believe we are in the fourth week of school! Since I had most of my kids last year in kindergarten, on the first day of school we jumped right back to where we left off last year. This is the time of the year when looping is awesome! :) Even though we have been in school for almost a month, I wanted to share a few of the things I used for the first week of school. Most of the ideas came from the fabulous Fun with Firsties unit from Babbling Abby. We started out by reading the book First Grade Jitters and reading a poem called Jitter Juice. We talked about how sometimes we feel nervous coming to school, and how to get rid of those "jitters." I had the kiddos circle all the sight words they knew and draw themselves drinking jitter juice. We then made jitter juice by using the recipe in the Fun with Firsties unit. It's basically sprite, sherbert and some lemonade powder. The kids loved it! :) We did a lot of all about me activities. Even though I have my kids from last year, my class size went up from 16 to 18 so we had a couple new students. I did several of the activities from Deanna Jump's back to school unit. The kids drew themselves on the first day of school, and of course, I had them draw me. :) I also included an assessment (phonics and math) in the packet to show parents at beginning of the year conferences. My favorite activity of the week was making our paper mini-me's. Here's mine! The kids had a blast decorating them. I left them go to town on the face and hair and BOY did they turn out adorable. The kids also decorated an all about me book and we stapled it to their mini-me. For reading, we dove straight into launching the Daily 5 . If you have not read the Daiy 5 or CAFE books, you should check them out! I have absolutely LOVED implementing it in my classroom. Basically, the Daily 5 fosters independence in young students during the literacy block. Each day the kids get to choose from read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, word work and work on writing as their literacy centers. During the first week of school we worked on building our stamina in read to self. We started out doing 3 minutes of reading and have worked our way up to 20 minutes. We have also started work on writing and reading to someone. Next week we will add word work and finally listen to reading. For math we started our calendar binders and worked on an all about number packets that showed many different ways to make the numbers 1 through 10 (tallies, number sentences, time, ordinal numbers, etc.) For writing, I had the kids write about what they did over the summer. I always model writing before I send the kids off so I wrote about my fun day at Sea World with my teacher friend Katie. Here is a couple examples from the kids: (First story: This summer I went to New York. In New York I went to the beach. I loved it. I had a great day. The end. Second story: I went to Sea World. I saw a killer whale. It was good and they got water on me.) At the end of the week we worked on a my first week in first grade book from the Fun with Firsties unit. Here's a few examples from the kids: (It was my birthday during the first week of school and the kids spoiled me rotten.) (translations: hand print fish - the kids LOVED making the hand print fish for our ocean bulletin board) (translations: warm and fuzzies - i have a jar I fill up with little "warm and fuzzies" when the kids do something awesome. if they fill it up, they get a prize. this girl put worms instead of warm...haha) Hope you enjoyed our first week of school! Stay tuned for posts on our weather unit and plants unit!

First off, I picked a winner. I just closed my eyes and scrolled. Congrats to Tania, I landed on you! I have sent you a copy of your Spider Fact Booklet! Enjoy :) You guys, we finally started our pumpkin unit!! I am so excited because in my mind it means that the holidays are coming! Yesterday we started our unit with a KWL chart. Our kids had great schema about pumpkins, but were so excited to learn more. We listened to Life Cycle of a Pumpkin in our basal reader. Yay for good nonfiction text! Today we reread the story for fluency, and really dug deeper into the text. Today was also our fun pumpkin investigation day! We sent a note home asking students to bring a pumpkin to school, in hopes of getting 15 so that our kids could work in groups of 3 {remember, I team teach, so we have 45 kiddos!}. Well, we got enough pumpkins to have a mini pumpkin patch in our classroom. Our families rock! So our students were able to work in pairs, which made for happier teachers :) I love the variety they brought. To conduct our investigation, we used this freebie from my little store! Can you tell this is from my early TpT days??! :) Students had to make estimates/predictions before they began. There were 5 stations in all. They counted the lines on their pumpkins, weighed their pumpkins, measured the circumference, measured how tall their pumpkin was, and found out if a pumpkin sinks or floats. Our awesome Watch D.O.G. helped out with the sink or float station :) I looooved seeing how surprised some of them were to learn that a pumpkin floats! Here are some pics from The Great Pumpkin Investigation! This afternoon we put a pumpkin at each table. Students used their senses to come up with adjectives to describe the outside of a pumpkin. There were some great discussions going on! I think our kids are really understanding adjectives, PTL! Then... drumroll please...We. Opened. The. Pumpkins! And they got to observe the inside! As in they got to TOUCH the inside. Say what?! It was better than Christmas morning! At least they sounded that excited. Again, they came up with adjectives to describe the inside of a pumpkin. We made this anchor chart {which will come in handy next week with our inside/outside craftivity!} The last thing we did today was compare pumpkins to apples. We set out a real pumpkin and a real apple to help them out. We filled out this venn diagram together. Please excuse the scribble on my chart. Anyone who knows me knows that it really, really bugged me and I really, really wanted to whip up a new anchor chart. But, there was no time. Our kids did an amazing job comparing and contrasting pumpkins and apples! We ran out of time, so tomorrow I am having the kids fill out their own pumpkin and apple venn diagram from my Fun with Pumpkins! pack! I will be posting some more about pumpkins sometime in the next week or so, so be on the look out! We will use lots of activities from the pack below!  Happy hump day! We are halfway done!