All About Clouds

This week is all about CLOUDS! So many fun things planned for my class this week.

Today we read:

Then, they students learned about 3 main types of clouds -- stratus, cumulus, and cirrus. By using gestures and the Whole Brain Teaching technique of Teach, Ok....my firsties were able to distinguish these 3 types of clouds.

We are working on this poem all week....I love how it introduces the other clouds as well because when we start cloud watching this week, they'll need this information! Our class motto is "We Can Do Hard Stuff!" If I teach the hard "college words", they just eat it up and love it!

Types of Clouds



Then we had a lot of fun painting puffy clouds! Combine equal parts of Elmers Glue and shaving cream.....use a spoon or popsicle stick to glob on the "paint" onto blue paper. This dries with a puffy texture and just looks too cool!

I have more cloud activities that I will post later this week! Happy Monday!

More Pete the Cat LOVE!

Thank you bloggy friends for introducing me to this super cute cat! My firsties LOVED I Love My White Shoes!

We wrote our own version of the story and made it into a little iMovie. A little online story of our adaptation of Pete the Cat. To view this, please go HERE. (linking to my classroom blog)

Happy weekend...woot!

This and That in First Grade!

This post is going to be full of randomness!

Our author study for this month is David Shannon. We've been loving all of his books, especially the David books! The kids drew David. So cute, right?

During the Daily 5, we've been talking about how important it is to select books that are a good fit. We compared hard, easy and just right books to riding a bike. We also worked on retelling and what a good retelling sounds like. The retelling anchor chart I adapted from Hello Literacy.

we

In math, we've been working on Tally marks! This little poem helps the littles SO MUCH when figuring out when to cross the 5th mark.

Finally, in Science we are learning about weather and the water cycle. We made these super cute rainbow-clouds to hang from the ceiling. They took all of 10 minutes to make and really brighten up the room! I found this water cycle song on proteacher.net. We sing this to the tune of She'll be Coming 'Round The Mountain.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Apple Art

It's my favorite time of year --- the air is cooler, I can wear my boots, and anything pumpkin and apple makes my heart sing. I LOVE everything about fall!

My class made these pretty stained glass apples last week. I make them every year and they are one of my favorites! Our room just looks so bright and cheery with these hanging in the windows.

If you haven't made these before, you'll need wax paper, half and half white glue/water mix, tissue paper squares, and a shape as a base. Tape the shape base to the wax paper. Pour some glue on the wax paper and have the kids spread it around with a Q-Tip. Then they can start layering on the tissue paper. I have my kids do two layers of tissue paper....this gives it a bit more durability.

After they dry, peel the art off of the wax paper. This does take a little bit of time so you don't rip the tissue paper! But the end result is worth it.

Happy Fall, ya'll!!

Daily 5! How's it going?

Check this out!

We reached our goal of 20 minutes!! YAY! I love hearing comments from the kids like "WOW! That did not feel like 20 minutes!" or "I could have read a lot longer!"

We are also focusing a lot on schema this week. We made the following anchor chart...and this is terrible, but I can't for the life of me find the originator of the content of this chart. If it was you, please let me know and I'll give you credit! I just loved the wording!

I taught my students actions to go along with this chart....

"Good readers ACTIVATE (throw your hands in the air) their SCHEMA (put your hands on your head) to understand what they READ (open hands like a book). Our SCHEMA (put your hands on your head) GROWS (use arms to show expanding) and CHANGES (roll arms in a circle)."

I also made this poster that we will use all year. It's at the height where a student can stand under it. Before reading, I have a student stand under the poster and we write the schema they have about the book. AFTER reading, the same student goes up and we can see how their schema grows and changes!

I'm just LOVING the Daily 5 -- it's my favorite part of the day and the kids love it too!

How To Record Lessons in SMART Notebook

Hello everyone!  One new thing I'm trying this year is posting reviews for tests on my classroom blog. To do this, I use the built in SMART recorder in my notebook software. An easy way to record lessons and reviews to post!

To find your SMART recorder, go to your SMART Board Tools, or you can do what I did, and click the gear under your floating toolbar, then drag the recorder to your tools. Makes it handy for you in the future:

Then, open up the SMART notebook lesson that you want to record. Once you have it open, click the recorder and it will come up like this:

Now press record and conduct your lesson. The recorder will not only record everything on your SMART board, it will also record your voice and anything you do on your desktop. So this means, your can open documents, open internet browsers and all of it will be recorded. So cool! 

Here is an example of a StudyCast I did to help my first graders review for their math test. I got the idea from fellow techy teacher, Mr. Coley. I received a WONDERFUL response from parents, so I will be doing many more StudyCasts in the future. So yeah, I know I'm almost 30 *gulp*, but I sound like I'm 13 in the video. :) Hope you'll try out this feature in SMART notebook! I'd love to hear how you use it in your classroom!

Eight Planets Around the Sun...

Happy Monday, everyone! Hope everyone is having a great start to their work week!

Last week, I posted a poem titled Planet Roll Call. You can find that printable HERE. I decided this would make a super cute little Reader's Theater for my firsties. 9 different parts...I can get all of my students participating if we do it 2 times through. Perfect!

I made little planet hand puppets....I guess you can call them puppets, but they don't do anything but slide over the little hands of my firsties. :)

We will use these for our reader's theater. I think overall they turned out pretty cute! The kids love them and that's all that matters!

I modified the Planet Roll Call poem to be read as a reader's theater. Feel free to download! It messed up the original font I had, but it works. :) Enjoy!

Planet Readers Theater

We also read this book today:

And made this graphic organizer about astronauts -- inspired by Abby at The Inspired Apple!