Spring Fever.

Is every kid in America getting spring summer fever like my class?!? With only 19 more days left the kiddos are getting a little stir crazy. But who can blame them right?

One of my favorite things to teach is parts of the plant and the plant life cycle. I started the unit this year with a little foldable. They drew a flower on the outside, then cut to separate each part. Underneath each flap, then recorded each part and what each part did to help the plant grow.

We also did a little craftivity that I used as a little assessment. They created their own flower using construction paper and then labeled each part including the things a plant needs to grow. Love how they turned out!

Towards the end of the week each of them got to plant there own little cup of grass. I let them draw a face on their cup before we planted our seeds. Right now they are just beginning to grow. After they get a little taller, we will give them a "hair cut"! The kids are soooo excited about the hair cut.

Hope you have a fabulous week, sweet friends!

Chicks and toads!!! Whatcha know???

Once again... I have been a bad blogger. It's hard work managing an itty bitty, classroom, husbands who's a coach AND a blog! Whew!! I really hope to stay more on top of it! I can not believe May is around the corner!! OMGoodness, where has this year gone? Has it flown by for anyone else?? Speaking of this year flying by... My little 5.11 oz baby girl will be ONE next Saturday! Yes! ONE!! Wow! Where did the time go??

Any whoooo these past couple of weeks we have been learning about my favorite science topics!!! The frog life cycle and the chicken life cycle... And plants are to come!! I love teaching these!!

I started off with.."what do you know about frogs??" and boy let me tell ya! They went crazy! Blurting out is my biggest pet peeve and I usually have no tolerance for it...BUT for this one time only I let them just tell me everything they knew and there was no containing them. One of my littles said "if you kiss one he will become a prince!!". Oh to think like a first grader!

After our little "whatcha know session" we started getting to the facts. I made this {not so cute} anchor chart of the life cycle.

Then using the life cycle the students did a little writing craftivity. One of my faves! We do it every year.

We teach both life cycles in a big 3 week unit so right when we wrapped up frogs we moved straight to chicks.

We started off by watching "The Magic School Bus: Cracks a Yolk". They loved it!! {I love united streaming} After we got a little insight on what all goes on in an egg {because that cool little magic bus takes you inside of one} we made our own little life cycles.

They did so well!!

And I course like with everything else, we had to have a little craft! So we painted paper plates, stuck a beak not there with some legs and colored on some eyes and...VIOLA! You have yourself a chick!

I think by the end of the 3 weeks my Firsties loved frogs and chicks about as much as I love teaching it!! So that means it was a success!!

Now on to plants!! Yay!! We are about to start our 3 week plant unit which includes planting and growing a "Harry the caterpillar"!!!! Can't wait for their reactions when we make this and plant or own plants!!!

Have a great week y'all!!! This week I'm going to be knee deep in "LOOK WHOOO's TURNING ONE" party decor!!! :) 

Whooo loves main idea??

For the past 2 weeks we have knee deep in non-fiction main idea. Not going to lie, in the past I haven't always been the biggest fan of teaching this concept because it has always been one the most difficult for them to understand. This year however, they rocked it!! Seriously! They are so good at finding facts and details and figuring out what they have in common.

It's a goal of ours to teach our kiddos "text evidence". Trying to teach them to go back and prove their answers is difficult especially when they are learning to read, but they have done so well. I was very proud of them.

Of course we started the 2 week endeavor with a little of "I do" then toward the end of the first week and start of the 2nd we moved to "we do". Then by the end of this week THEY were doing it! And doing so well!

We of course read the non-fiction stories together because my reading levels range from a rigby level 7 to 25. One of my favorite resources for non fiction is our Kids TIME magazines. They LOVE looking through them and all you hear is "Oooohhhh, awwwww, LOOK AT THIS!!! "

We started with an article called "Whoo's A Wonderful Bird". It was of course about Owls. They had to find 3 facts and then restate the main idea.

Another article we used was called "pond Life" about all of the things that live in ponds. Her are their little facts and ponds. :)

During the middle of all of this we had a few short lessons about questioning. How good readers ask questions. Again, using some TIME magazines, this time posters we asked questions then read to answer some questions and recorded facts and details along the way.

And lastly, in working with words we have been learning about contractions. Of course we did Cara Carroll's crocodile contractions! LOVE IT!!! And so did my kiddos!

The crocodile chomped on 2 words and turned them into contractions.  They recorded contractions on their little crocs.  {forgot to get a close up}

Happy Friday! Hope you all haw a wonderful weekend!

holiday throwback {from before Christmas break}

Getting kind of sad...only 3 more days left of my 2 week long Christmas break! I have thoroughly enjoyed spending so much time with my family, but I am excited to see my littles. I have missed them. I can't wait to hear about their Christmas stories. From Santa, to presents, to us having a WHITE Christmas! Yes, Y'all! A white Christmas in east Texas! Crazy huh?!?

Before we got out of school we were drowning in Christmas/Holiday activities. So much so I didn't get pictures of everything.

We started learning about graphs the week before break and I have to say they are pretty stinkin good at creating and analyzing graphs! Yay! Throughout the week we made LOTS of graphs, but by far the Starburst graph was their favorite!

Sorry about the poor quality. I took them with my iPhone after I hung it up.

I gave each kiddo a starburst and of course they chowed down! I could not believe the amount of smacking that was going on! I made sure to tell them to not tear their wrapper because that is what we used for our graph!

We talked about the labels, title, etc. then we got to sticking our wrappers on!

Now on to a little reading/writing connection. One of my favorite wintry books in Snowman All Year. Love it!

When I saw those precious little snowmen from Cara over First Grade Parade last year it gave me a great idea to do with my kiddos to go along with our book.

We made these snowmen {like the ones from First Grade Parade} except we made them with chalk on construction paper. They loved it and they turned out precious. They wrote what they would do with a snowman if they had a snowman all year! So cute!

I hope you all enjoy your last few days of your vacation and Happy New Year!

holiday cheer at home.

I have been anticipating Our first Christmas as a family of 3 since the day I found out I was pregnant. I was looking forward to all of the family time, presents, traditions, and wonderful memories.

Aubree's first Christmas was so wonderful and memory filled, so much so I can't wait till next year!!

One of the traditions of Christmas is making cookies for Santa. I couldn't wait to do this with Aubree, and of course she had to help!

Since I was little we have always gotten to open one presents on Christmas Eve and it was always new holiday pajamas. So Aubree had to get in on the jamma time fun! :) Her Christmas pajamas were precious! Love the ruffles.

I knew Aubree was going to get TONS of presents, but OMGoodness!! she got so much cool stuff! The mound of gifts was a reassurance of how blessed we are to have the family we do.

Oh! And she was a pro at opening them!

This is one of her favorite toys... Ellee the Elephant that blows balls in the air. :)

This Christmas was so wonderful. One of my favorite quotes comes to mind when I think about it.

"Don't cry that it's over, smile because it happened."

Pattern, coins and adjectives... OH MY!

I promise I haven't fallen off the planet. :) You all know that my hubby is a HS football coach and that I have a {now} 7 month old... YES! I said 7 month old. I can't believe it! Hopefully now that football season is over in our house things will start to slow down a little. {yeah right, huh?}.

We have been OH SO busy in first grade. SOOO busy that I have not been good at taking pictures and blogging about our learning. :(

These past few week has been a lot of fun. We have been learning about coins, patterns, adjectives and much more, but sadly that is all I have pictures of.

So here it is! Lets begin with patterns. I started off by giving all of my firsties unifix cubes. I simply stated that I wanted them to make me a pattern. I didn't care what kind... I just wanted to see what they could do! I was pretty impressed! When then made several different kinds of patterns and then moved to labeling them.

We made this little anchor chart as they made patterns and they helped me label them.

After a few more pattern activities with different manipulatives, we made the adorable little snowmen with {pattern} socks!

I love all of their patterns!

We also spent some time introducing the coins... Penny, nickel, dime and quarter. We made the bubble map anchor charts to {anchor} our learning.

{excuse the chart paper tape, for some silly reason I put Theodore Rooselvelt first.}

And today we continued talking about adjectives. Because I am in the Christmas spirit I decided to use a Christmas tree to help my kiddos with adjectives. First, we looked at our class Christmas tree. We brainstormed some adjectives to describe our tree. We then recorded our adjectives on Christmas ornaments and glued them to our {paper} tree. They loved it!

Hopefully it won't be too long again before I share some more of our learning. In the mix of the business {craziness} my sweet baby girl had her Christmas pictures made. I just had to share!

Happy Friday! YAHOO for the weekend!