It's a Monday... (Farm Freebies)

Today was Monday. I think that pretty much sums up the whole day. Nothing too bad happened, but I don't think my firsties got enough rest this weekend, they lacked energy today. We kicked off our Farm Theme by making a graph of our favorite farm animals this morning, and just a note for the future: don't have "horse" as one of the choices lol. We had 10 horses out of 17 animals. That left a lot of blanks on the graph!

After the graph we had to draw and write about which animal we picked - first we practiced with Heidi's Farm Animal Guided Drawing. I drew them on the Smartboard and the kids followed along with markers on dry erase boards. I have to say that the drawings turned out a lot better than the writing. This group seems to struggle with coming up with original writing, they are more comfortable just copying what is on the board. Part of this stems from the fact that a good 1/3 of them do not have a solid grasp on letter sounds yet! Hopefully we will get our budget soon so we can hire tutors. Right now I have about 4 who are above grade level, about 5 who are below grade level and 8 who are right about where they should be.

On the other hand, we're a bit closer together in terms of mathematical competence. I just finished giving the Title I math test and only had 1 child score extremely low. Most of my firsties are becoming experts at subtraction. Since this is my first year teaching 1st grade, I wasn't quite sure how to proceed, but I went for subtraction before addition because most of the class had a pretty solid grasp on addition already from kindergarten. I found some fun subtraction games for the Smartboard, we played this one today.

I made a Farm Subtraction game, but I thought maybe some of you could use addition too, so I made an addition game as well. Feel free to grab one or both :) I'd love a comment if you do find them useful!

Addition Farm

Subtraction Farm