Our Week So Far (Work Stations and Patriotic Pictures!)

We had a great day at school today! I am loving our afternoons - I get two tutors in my room during our literacy work station rotations, so I'm able to pull a few kiddos for one on one work which is awesome! Unfortunately then the tutors leave for 1/2 hour and come back right before the end of the day from 3:00-3:30 pm to try to work on math skills. Not only are those poor kiddos wiped at the end of the day, trying to keep the other ones quiet and occupied wipes me out lol!

We are also starting to get the hang of working quietly in our groups - I just have a couple left who can't seem to modulate their volume levels appropriately. I haven't done anything mind blowing to get us to this point though - just consistency in expectations and being willing to shut stations down if they get too loud.

Something else we're loving are these fun "Trace it and Write it!" sheets from Peterson's Pad. I printed our spelling words for the week on them (remember, I'm 1st grade this year!) and placed them at a workstation with some markers. The kiddos love using markers, so they beg to get to come to this work station! Our rule is they say each letter as they write it, and then say the whole word once they're done, for example "h..o..p.. hop!" This way they're really focusing on the word rather than mindlessly copying. It is so cute to walk by and hear how seriously they are whispering their letters/words. We've had lots of conversation about how to train our brains to retain information, so they are getting into it!

Also, how cute is this picture? 

My kiddos love going to our reading center- here two of them are reading Pete the Cat and an Elephant & Piggie book.They are all very interested in reading - its the first thing they want to do as soon as they finish breakfast, and so far I haven't had to pull out any extra activities for kiddos who finish early since they are perfectly content to curl up with a book! I did have one little girl go into almost-hysterics though. The boy next to her chose a non-fiction spider book and she apparently has an intense fear of spiders! So now we all know that we have to read spider books far away from her lol!

I also finished applying baby oil to our patriotic, tissue paper hearts:

 

The heart on the left has baby oil rubbed on the back already, while the heart on the right did not. You can see how the oil makes the paper translucent and allows light to come through! It was hard to take a picture of the finished products in the window, but here they are:

 In case you're wondering, the white tissue paper had sparkles on it, that what those glints of light are!

And, on another patriotic note, how awesome is this bulletin board display??

The 2nd grade class across the hall from me dissected newspapers to find pictures of people and created this bulletin board for the Preamble to the Constitution. I love that it was made by the students - they cut out and glued the pictures, colored the letters and arranged the stars and words of the preamble! They worked on it off and on throughout an entire day as they had spare time - all the teacher did was print out the words, and cover the board with the blue paper!

Well that's our week so far! I am hopeful that I can post some new things later this week - it looks like my evenings are actually clear for a few days (semi-miracle since I had evening school activities Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday!) so I can buckle down and finish some of my projects that are in the works! Have a great Thursday friends - just remember, IAF (it's almost Friday!)

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