We had a wild 100th Day! Our morning was spent on a hidden picture 100 Chart from Katie @ Little Warriors- my students loved it! I adapted it to be more appropriate to our grade level by calling out the numbers by tens and ones - so 68 was 6 tens and eight ones. They were a bit thrown at first but soon caught on. It was such a hit that I will be creating more for them! We also counted to 100 using this video that my kiddos love because at the end it shows 1,000 all the way to 1 billion! I really tricked them by asking what number was in the one's place while I had the video paused on 1,000,000,000, so now I know we still need a bit of work on that concept!
We had to fit in a timed math test and a visit to the library before lunch too! In the afternoon we had a power outage - at one point there was talk about sending the kids home! We just rolled with it by opening our blinds and leaving our bathroom door open a crack while using it (it was pitch black inside it since there's no window) but we were having way too much fun to let a little lack of electricity send us home! Here's how we spent most of the afternoon:
Each group was 4-5 students and had a leader that moderated the group to ensure cooperation. I purposefully chose my peacekeepers for this task as I knew they could successfully negotiate any quarrels among their teammates. Each group had to trace and cut out the shapes for their project, making sure to keep count. We got a little overzealous on some, and had to remove a few pieces, but that was just another chance to use our subtraction skills! I think our finished projects turned out wonderfully!
I took a stroll down the hallway to see what the other 1st grade classes had done, and saw that one of my teammates had her students do the 100 object homework project. She had about 70% participation which is fabulous for our school! Here are my 3 favorite projects:
I have another observation next week and I am going to be preparing for it this weekend, so be on the lookout for some freebies! And finally, one of my favorites moments of the day:
Student A: "Who wants to be dumb?" (being silly at lunch time).
Student B: "Not me! I want to be as smart as I can be!"
Student C: "I want to be the smartest man in the whole world!"
Wow, we crammed a whole lotta groundhog into out day today! We had a lot of fun and our room now has some cute decor. Our day was almost ruined though when the music teacher began to announce Puxhataney Phil's prediction during our before school assembly! I had to quickly call out and let her know not to spill the beans so that it didn't influence any of our predictions and writing. She gave me a bit of a dirty look and told me that it was all over the news anyways, but fortunately (or unfortunately!) none of my kiddos listen to the news in the morning.
So, here's what we did today: we graphed our predictions (and of course I forgot to get a picture of it!) and we were 10-7 in favor of more winter. We watched a video of a groundhog whistling and then graphed how many students could whistle versus those that couldn't. We read "Groundhog Weather School" and timed ourselves holding our breaths for 1 minute (since groundhogs only breathe once every 4 minutes while they're hibernating) - it was hard to hold our breath that long! Here's the super cute groundhog peekers from Cecelia over at I love 1st Grade.
We also made these adorable groundhogs that are now gracing our back wall. This was an exercise in following directions (for them! for me it was more like an exercise in frustration!). The template actually said that the arms were the legs and vice versa, but when I was putting it together I accidentally flipped them and decided to go with it. My poor literal kiddos had a hard time believing that it was really going to turn out okay if we use the leg pieces as the arms! Oh, and I usually don't require my kiddos to color anything a designated color so we have quite a rainbow of woodchucks! I remember observing in a kindergarten class once when the teacher made a little girl redo a whole paper because she had colored someone's hair purple. Even though she had stayed inside the lines and obviously did her best, the fact that "Real people don't have purple hair." made the paper unacceptable! My tongue was practically bleeding afterwards, I was biting it so hard! So, anyways, here our are groundhogs which are from Leslie's TPT unit (Life in First Grade)
Oh, remember I mentioned that our school got a grant to give the students a snack of fresh fruit or vegetables every Wednesday through Friday? We have been having so much fun with it the last two days! Each time we try a new fruit/veggie we look it up to see where it's grown, how to eat it etc, then we each draw a picture and write a few sentences about whether we like it or not. Here's the binder where we keep all of our opinion pieces:
Yesterday we had kumquats! Did you know you're supposed to eat the rind? Luckily our class had looked it up and could inform everyone else as the kindergarten teachers were trying to figure out how to peel 26 kumquats for their students! The rind is the sweet part while the inside is sour - think grapefruit. Here's one of our papers about it, this little guy was not a fan, although several others asked for seconds!
Today's fruit was Forelle pears. We learned that they originated in Germany and "forelle" means "trout" in German. Apparently the speckled color of the pear led to a comparison to rainbow trout! It is very small, which means it's generally only a snacking pear. It was firmer than most pears and sweet. My kiddos ate them down to the core! Here are two of the papers we wrote about them. Can you tell they enjoyed them?
Here'a picture of the pear and a kumquat side by side:
Have I told you how much I love teaching in Oklahoma? I'm not from the state originally, but I have to love it because living here means I can show this video and justify it as Social Studies!
Yes, that is Hugh Jackman! Who knew that he did musicals, right? My students love this video - we know it so well that we can sing it from beginning to end, even though only the middle part is actually our state anthem!
Since I'm on the topic of videos, the other day we were reading a Mr. Putter and Tabby book and I was actually showing it on the Smartboard under the Elmo. This allowed my students to notice that Mrs. Teaberry had two pictures above her bed. One said "Home, Sweet Home." and the other said "There's no business like show business!" Hmm, was Mrs. Teaberry an actress when she was younger?! Well, anyways, my students had never heard the phrase so I quickly pulled up a video of the Muppets' rendition of the song. Gotta build that background knowledge right?
By the way, if you teach K - 2nd and haven't read the Mr. Putter and Tabby books yet, you are missing out! They are great for teaching prediction - we look at the title page and read the chapter titles and try to figure out what is going to happen at the beginning, middle and end. My kiddos are so tickled when their predictions are correct, and they're really picking up on story sequencing! My hands down favorite so far is:
In fact, when I think about it, I play music almost all day long! If it's not a video teaching my kiddos addition, it's a song about digraphs. I usually play a book on cd during lunch, but often my students will request songs instead. Our deal is that they eat silently during the songs or story and then afterwards they get to talk. This means that most of their food gets eaten so I don't have to deal with hungry, cranky children in the afternoon!
It's also great to get the kids up and moving, especially during the afternoon slump when they start zoning out a little and need to get that blood pumping back up to their brains again! Some of our favorite dance songs are from these two cds:
We really like Jack Hartmann's "The Silly Pirate Song" (great for sequencing!), "The Cowboy Dance" and "The Hip Hop Tooty-Ta"! Oh, and if your kiddos are learning to rhyme, his "Make a Rhyme, Make a Move" song is great! Stephen Fite's "Okie Pokie" is hilarious (although that may be a regional thing :) and I love his "Old MacDonald's Blend Farm" too!
When you're ready to have them settle down again, this song always works like a charm - it's so pretty and the students love to watch Jack Hartmann do the sign language and try to follow along. We did it for our kindergarten promotion ceremony last year and it was a big hit!
Oh, and just for fun, when we have a few minutes to fill between activities:
If you don't have youtube access at school (ours gets turned off during testing time since the middle school and high school students need the bandwidth for their online tests) you can always download them at home to play at school on a thumb drive. Here's an article form PC Worldabout an easy way to download youtube videos.
One of the best parts of teaching the little ones is that they always think you're a great singer, so I often break into song just because I can. In fact, when certain children are not listening, again, singing the directions always gets their attention! It also breaks tension quite nicely, so whenever I start getting frustrated (and let's be honest, teaching a roomful of 5 years olds does get frustrating at times) I start a little song and soon we are all in a much better mood. Music soothes the savage beast and the cranky kinder!
Last year I has several students who still needed a nap, while others didn't. My solution was to play quiet videos like this one - the children who needed to slept, while the children who couldn't sleep were at least quiet and still:
They loved watching the fish and were enchanted by the diver in the aquarium!
Anyways, this is a long post that is probably going to eat up tons of bandwidth, but I thought I would share the music that makes me smile. I'd love it if you'd rustle up a response and let me know if you have any go-to songs too!
