The Purple Parade

Well, today was the 100th day of school at our school.  This is my first experience celebrating this special day, as the other grades I have taught the kids were too old to celebrate.  I had a blast!  Hopefully the kids had just as much fun.  We read The 100th Day of School by Angela Shelf Medearis. This book is a level H (Fountas and Pinnell Guided Reading Level) book so most of the kids could read along with me.  After we read the story we retold the story aloud by thinking of all of the activities the kids in the book did on the 100th day of school.  They absolutely loved this book.  We made hats for the 100th day.  I got the idea from this site .  It took about 45 minutes and some of the kids still didn't finish, so we just put them on their heads as is.  They were very proud of the hats and wore them to computer lab class and to music class.  I also got a lot of ideas from Erica Bohrer's 100th Activities and Printables book....

This week our first grade team analyzed some Fountas and Pinnell level G books to figure out what needed to be taught in reading to help our students get to that level.  We realized that many of the books contained contractions and words with inflected endings.  Our first plan of action was to immerse students in a word study of contractions. So, this week I introduced the word "contractions" to my class.  I first wrote the word on a piece of chart paper and had them turn and talk and try to tell their partners what the word was.  It was funny listening to them talk to each other.  After about a minute I had them turn back and tell me what they discussed.  I called on one child who then said, "We decided that we don't know what a contraction is."  Then, the rest of the class agreed with him.  I just had to chuckle at that.  It was so cute!  Then, I introduced contractions to the kids slowly using paint sample cards that I had made in a...

In order for the students to get actual practice counting change, I created this counting change activity.  I found the clipart from a free clipart site.  We only used pennies, nickels, and dimes to "buy" the items.  But, as the year goes on, we can play this game again and add on quarters and half dollars.  I have 12 price tags and 12 items to buy in the activity so I can use different items the next time we play.  The kids get into groups of 3 or 4 and go around to different tables to try to "buy" the item on each table.  You can have them try to use as few coins as possible, to make it more difficult.  There are so many ways to differentiate this activity to the level of your students. Counting Change Activity

Our class finished creating All-About books right before Christmas Break.  They loved writing these books, so much so, that I'm having a hard time transitioning them back to narrative writing.  Today we talked about how writers need to know about different topics in order to make their stories believable.  So, I'm trying to connect what we are doing now to the work they did in their All-About book.  For example, one of my students did an All-About book about mummies.  So, I used that as an example to the group to show them that he could write a story about someone who saw a mummy at a museum.  But, in order to make that story believable, he would need to use some facts he knows about mummies in his story. The point being that you can write stories about small moments in time but you need to use some factual information in order to make your stories make sense to the reader.  When we worked on our All-About books, we also read non-fiction books during r...

During our Readers' Workshop, students read from their Just Right Books.  Our district uses the Fountas and Pinnell leveling system for the books that our students read.  Students are frequently administered running records from The Teacher's College to find out our students' just right levels.  Every week the students shop for books to read.  They should be reading books from their reading level or 1 or 2 levels below.  For example, if the student is reading at a level G, then he/she can read level G books, level F books, or level E books to help build fluency, retelling skills, and inferential thinking.  I usually let them pick 3 - 4 books a week to keep in their book boxes that are at their just right level and 1 book for them to look through (look book) where the words may be too hard, but they could practice looking at the pictures and try to tell a story through the pictures.  I created the book shopping chart to keep us organized and ensure t...

In first grade, we have to teach the 2-D shapes of circle, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid, and rhombus.  For 3-D shapes we teach cylinder, sphere, pyramid, and rectangular prism.  To introduce these shapes, I created the following powerpoints.  They name the shape and also count the sides, edges, vertices, and faces.  My students really enjoy participating with the presentations.

I found the cutest money posters on Erica Bohrer's blog.  Here's a link to them: Touch Money Poems .  In the state of Missouri, we also have to teach the half dollar.  So, using Erica's posters as a guide, I created one for the half dollar.  Here's a link to it:   Half Dollar poster .

Our district uses the sight word lists from Lucy Calkins' Teacher's College.  You can view her site at:  http://tc.readingandwritingproject.com/ .  I created powerpoint presentations for the first 4 lists (A-D).  You can download them individually by clicking on the following links:   List A , List B , List C , List D .  I will be posting powerpoints for the rest of the lists later this year.

Well, this is it.  My very first post on my blog.  I'm not sure how this blog will go.  I'm not sure what to put on it. But, I'm going to try add things that I have made for my classroom and share ideas I found from other websites.  Hopefully this will be a useful blog for all teachers.