Odds and Ends ... and a Dilemma

Just some random stuff to share tonight! I'll make a list.

1. I took a few new pictures of some winter-y things in our room!

I already wrote about our snowman comparing activity, but since then, a few people at school were boggled by the display, so I added a title and took a nicer picture for you! I just printed out letters in a bubbly font and then cut them out. It was a little tedious but I am happy with the outcome!

 Here is our door right now. Nothing too fancy but it is okay. The kids love their mittens for some reason.

 And I never posted a finished picture of our January math quilt! Please don't mind that aquarium underneath............ ay yi yi.

2. I have been slacking on the Clutter-Free Classroom Project BUT I did want to update that I cleaned an area of my room!!!!!! I am super proud of myself.

Here is the before picture...

 And here is the after!!

That corner by the file cabinet has legit been messy since like week 1 of school. So it reeeeeeally makes me happy to see it clean!! I pretty much just threw everything away. I did relocate the linking cubes to a math area.

I am happy that this week in CFCP is working on our teacher area. Mine needs some help. :( My students tell me that almost every day....

3. I'll end with my dilemma. Today we started our new unit in Social Studies, which is Our Government. Because I teach at a Catholic school, my students come from very conservative families. That, in and of itself, obviously is fine! We did another vocab visit, like I did with matter, and I had printed a picture of President Obama, since he is our president. As soon as I put the sheets out to write on, I had a few students saying how much they hate Barack Obama, how their parents hate Barack Obama, that he doesn't want to have any schools anymore (???) and how he is a bad and terrible person.

This frustrates me on several levels, but mainly because regardless of how you feel about a president or his tenure in office, I think it's very important to instill in children that we respect leaders. So basically that's what I said... you can have your opinion, and that is totally fine, but we are not talking about how we feel about President Obama. He is our leader and he is important to our country.

Have you dealt with something like this? Or how would you have responded? I know I am going to be hearing this every day until I can figure out what to do. :(

Snow Snow Snow!!

Every time I go to write a new post, I click "New Blog" instead of "New Post"... just wanted to tell you that.

So we FINALLY got snow in Chicago. I took a picture of our calendar area to remember the day. The weather person was SO EXCITED to choose "Snowy" as the weather for yesterday. Also look how close we are to 100th day!

So last night, as the snow drifted from the sky, and the people on the radio assured me that there would be a snow day, I couldn't decide if I wanted one or not. I know that sounds weird. It's just that I had everything ready to go for today and I didn't want to push it back! Also I don't want to push back the 100th day party for logistical reasons!!

But the plows were ready and we had school! Here are some of my kiddos playing outside while I froze to death during morning recess. I swear those 15 minutes go slower than the entire rest of the day.

Instead of math stations today (much to the chagrin of my students), we did this fun comparing numbers activity that I pinned from Mrs. Patton's Patch!

Each student gets a white circle for each letter in their name. For example, I'd have 4 circles because my name is Jill. After writing one letter in each circle, they stack the circles up to make a snowman and make a few decorations. Then, they take a speech bubble and write a comparing sentence. They compared any name to any other name and had to write something like, "Jill has 1 more than Jim." They were really into this!

And this snowman cracks me up. All of the other snowmen had huge smiles and arms, and this one looks a little disturbed.

I was really happy with how easily they wrote their sentences! I only had to help one student with the "how many more" concept. Yay!

It's Almost Party Time!

Only half of a day left until break time!!!!!!!!!!!!

These past few days haven't been horrific, so I am grateful for that! All I have left is the Christmas party tomorrow, yeah!

Here are a few other Christmas-y things we have been doing. :)

Inspired by this pin...

[source]

We made some junk mail snowflakes!

Ours look a little more like junk mail with holes in it BUT they loved it and it didn't take a lot of prep!

We also made Christmas gifts for our families! After perusing 154 blogs and looking all over Pinterest, I went with a gift idea that my first grade teacher did when I was in first grade! I would show you the kids' finished ornaments, but their pictures are on them. So I'll just show you mine!

We just painted popsicle sticks with either red or green tempera paint, and then I hot glued the popsicle sticks into this sled shape! There are two sticks hidden in this picture that would support the sled if you were to lay it down on a table. But it is meant to be an ornament. I am super happy with how they turned out! I just have to tie on the ribbons when I get to school in the AM.

I'm not sure if I showed you the sweet tiny Christmas tree that I found in my closet last week.

In their free time, the kids make paper snowflake ornaments for the tree and we just shove them onto the branches, haha!

And lastly, over the weekend, I found First Grade Garden and this CRAZY cute writing activity! Amanda provides the rough draft PDF as a freebie!!

And here's how they look on the bulletin board!

Soooooo cute!!!

Wish me luck for the partay tomorrow! All of the stations are set and ready to go, my presents for the kids are wrapped, and I am pumped!