Marvelous Matter

We wrapped up our matter unit today! I think I saw some tears. Haha! The first and second graders looooove matter.... it's a little strange, but I'm down.

So here are a few more things we did this week!

Yesterday, we played Matter Scoot! I saw this activity on a few people's blogs so I tried it out. If you've never played before, I will fill you in! On each kid's desk there should be a question (or task) and a number. You give the students a paper with an answer space for each numbered desk, and they move from desk to desk filling in their answer sheet. For my matter scoot game, the students looked at pictures and had to write whether the object in the picture was a solid, liquid, or gas and a property of the object.

They looooved this! I even took a video for you!

Today we took our end-of-the-chapter test. Part of it was the traditional paper-and-pencil situation (which they all did amazingly on!), and another part was completing a states of matter foldable.

They did well with this! I asked them to cut out 3 solids and 3 liquids and just try to find a gas. If they couldn't find one, they were allowed to draw a picture and label it. They had a good old time. I didn't grade these yet but based on my circulation around the room... I think they all rocked it. :)

And I'll leave you with something cute. As I said yesterday, we had indoor recess for both the morning and lunch recesses. At lunch recess, since it's almost 30 minutes long, we do Adventure to Fitness, but in the morning I let them do whatever. I have some games or they'll play on the geoboards.

Anyway, 3 of the kids came up to me during recess and said, "Look! We made solid, liquid, and gas out of legos!!"

The big white part is ice. There is a little blue because it's melting a little bit, haha. The big blue part is water. The little white part is a chimney with air coming out of it! We had just talked about how the heating or cooling can change the state of matter, so this really made my day!!

Learning With Snow

I am realizing that everything I've talked about lately in my blog has concerned snow ......... it's hard to ignore.

Good news though - today was our first day of indoor recess!! Perhaps because the wind chill was below zero. I did Adventure to Fitness WITH the kids today, instead of working on other stuff, and it is quite the workout!!!!

Yesterday, I was scheduled to teach about changing states of matter through heating or cooling. My science book suggested freezing water overnight, recording the temperature in the morning, and then re-recording it throughout the day to show what happens when matter is heated.

Instead, we did the same demonstration with snow!! We definitely have enough of it.

I found 4 thermometers in my room, so I got out 4 cups and went out to recess with the kids (in the 10 degree weather..............) to collect our specimens. They packed the snow up to the top but by the time I took this picture, it was allllll water.

Then we recorded the temperature. I meant to check it on a regular basis but it totally slipped my mind so we just wrote it down every so often. Please note the strange variation in temperatures between the 4 cups... How did one get to 50 and one was only 25?? And I double-checked the thermometers! 

I'd like to leave you with a pair of sad pictures.

Here was the temperature in my car on my drive home today.

And here was the temperature in our classrooms........ that's a 61, people.

It's so weird - 61 feels amazing when you're outside in the sun. But inside your classroom in the middle of January, it's like being in a freezer.

My MLK Day

Warning! This post is not so much related to teaching! :)

I had a great day off today! I went to visit my boyfriend in the city. While I was there, I went to the beach down the street from his apartment.

I wish that was a white sand beach. However............ it is just a beach covered with snow. :(

I wasn't so much interested in standing on a snow-covered beach, so off I went to the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture! My ESL grad class this term is Cross-Cultural Education, so as part of our requirements, we have to visit cultural and ethnic places (like museums, religious institutions, etc) so we can broaden our horizons and learn more about our students. I am lucky to be in Chicago where we have so many different groups of people! The museum was interesting, and they even had a children's section!

I am really excited to go visit some other places. Next stop: Chinatown!!

Also today I made my first worksheet! Well, the first one that I made with a cute font AND a frame! I would share it with you but it is really specific to my reading program. Plus I think it is way too hard for my students but I just do what they tell me to do............... and there is no clip art. :(

I am excited for this week! We should be done with our matter unit by Friday. This week, we'll learn that heating and cooling can change matter and ..... something else. My lesson plan book is upstairs! This week's Scholastic News is on snow monkeys so I will throw that in somewhere too. :)

Time for bed. Have a good start to the 4-day week tomorrow!

A Day in My Shoes

Before we begin... another threaded commenting update!! The extremely wonderful Kristen at Ladybug's Teacher Files posted a video how-to so that people who are having trouble with getting threaded comments can make it work! If by some chance you missed her post, or you are the only person on earth not following Kristen, please check it out!! And let me know if she made it work for you. Please. :)

Moving on, a few people I follow are doing this linky party about mapping out your typical day! I like this idea. I will try to add pictures so you stay awake!!

Here we go!! Oh wait, let me say that NONE of my days have the same schedule because I have specials at random times every day. So this is a representation of a typical Thursday. :)

6:15-6:45 - My alarm goes off and I lay there for a long time. Sometimes I think about how warm my bed is... sometimes I think about what I am doing in school that day.... but at no time do I think about arising.

6:45-7:10ish - I get up! I get dressed, put some dry cereal in a container for the drive to school, pack my lunch (unless I can stomach the kids' lunch - we can eat for free if we want to), and get ready.

7:10-7:40 - I drive to school. I take all back roads where I see maaaaybe 5 cars. I listen to the all news AM station so I know what is going on in the world. Sometimes I get a little teary when I hear stories like this one!

7:40-8:10 - I get to school and start getting stuff ready. Normally I just have to write the Chit Chat message and think of a journal prompt for the first graders. My next-door neighbor teacher comes in and we talk about how we are tired. Haha! If it's Monday, I have arrival duty so I watch the kiddos as they come in from 8:00 to 8:10.

8:10-8:25 - The kiddos come in! It has been really cold in the morning so they wait in the cafeteria until school starts. They make their lunch choice and get started on morning work. First graders have to write 3 sentences in their journals on whatever topic I chose, and second graders started cursive this past Monday so they do a page in their cursive book. I fill out my lunch and attendance sheet and listen to 100 stories about new shoes and kitten scratches and Girl Scout meetings (I also buy like 10 boxes of cookies during this time, haha!). At 8:20, we have morning announcements and morning prayer. I say a hundred times, "Susie, stand up. Bobby, stand up." Party time.

8:25-8:35 - We come to the carpet and do our Chit Chat message and Calendar time. If something unusual is happening, I tell them so they're ready.

8:35-9:30 - Reading time! I take the first graders first. The second graders take their basal reader and workbook to their desks and essentially teach themselves a lesson while I work with the first graders. We go through our scripted program which reaches a few of the first graders. Some are way ahead of where we are and some are poking holes in their books. You understand. At 9:00, two of my first graders see the Title I reading teacher. Side note: we are a Catholic school but the public school (I think) has to send over their specialists if we need them. We JUST got a Title I teacher to come starting this past week. Which means my first grader who reads at a beginning Kindergarten level missed out on a semester's worth of intervention. ......................... Anyway. The first graders get a worksheet at 9 and go to their seats to do it. I tried doing Daily 5, but when my reading program consultant came, she was adamant that I give them the program's practice sheets instead of having them read to themselves. So... here we are. The second graders come. We check their work that they did by themselves (usually they're all great) and we do the next lesson together.

9:30-9:45 - Bathroom and milk break! Our deal is that if they don't "make a peep" in the hallway on the way to and from the bathroom, they can have a straw for their milk. It is the best motivator ever!!

9:45-10 - Morning recess. I go out with them on Wednesdays and some Fridays depending on the month.

10-10:30 - Writing time. We are working on descriptive paragraphs about our friends. So far we have planned out our writing and this upcoming Monday we'll actually write.

10:30-10:50 - The second graders go to P.E. with the Kindergarteners. I do some fun reading thing with the first graders. Usually Reading Rods or a game/center I found in my room or on the blogs. This only happens on Thursday. On Tuesday, the first graders go to P.E. during this time. Other days, they're all in the room.

10:50-11:20 - Science (right now, sometimes Social Studies). We are working on matter and loving it! We start by singing our It's Made Up of Matter song, read some pages in the book, and take off on an application activity!

11:20-11:25 - We get ready for lunch! We say the pledge and the prayer before meals, then we sing a washing hands song and someone hand-sanitizes everyone.

11:25-12:15 - Lunch time! I have recess duty on Thursdays from 11:50-12:15, otherwise I eat for a bit and then go to the tech lab to get the laptops ready for Xtra Math after lunch.

12:15-12:30 - The kids come in and we go upstairs to the tech lab to do Xtra Math! We have a laptop cart but we have to go to it since it is on the second floor and we don't have an elevator. Everyone logs in and plugs away. I walk around and say, "Yay!" when they get 30 smilies in a row or 2 smilies in a row. Also I make sure that my really high kids aren't just pushing random numbers for fun...... yikes. But for the most part, everyone loves it.

12:30-1 - Math stations time. If they were quiet walking downstairs from Xtra Math, they can pick their own partners and stations. I take 2 groups of second graders. We do the same lesson but I grouped them homogeneously to better meet their needs. We stay for about 15 minutes each. Right now we're doing shapes, so if we finish our workbook page, we play with geoboards. I'm getting ready to put these in a math station so we're doing different fun things with them together so they have options later on.

1-1:30 - P.E.! Everyone freaks out - "But we didn't finish stations!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I say, "It's okay, we will finish after P.E.!" This exchange has occurred for approximately 85ish days.

1:30-2:00 - We finish stations! I take two groups of first graders.

2:00-2:20 - We quickly write in our planners and then we have religion.

2:20-2:30 - We get ready to go home. First we play Find It Fix It. Whoever wins gets to lead our goodbye rhyme! After that, we stand in a circle and play Reagan's skip-counting game. Whoever says the magic number packs up. They say their numbers and I police the coatroom!

2:30-2:40 - We listen for afternoon announcement and afternoon prayer. The bus kids line up at the door and the principal picks them up to take them to the buses. The goodbye rhyme is said. Then I choose what to do... sometimes I read a book to them, sometimes we play Schoolhouse (Hangman in disguise) with new vocabulary words, sometimes we just make a concept map of what we're learning in science.

2:40 - Adios first and second graders! On Mondays, I go outside with all the pick-up kids to wait for their parents. The parents are pretty timely so it's not a pain. Also there are probably less than 50 sets of parents out there so that helps.

And donezo!! On Mondays, I have a mentor meeting (because I'm a first-year teacher) and on Wednesdays we have staff meetings. On Thursdays, I work with a third grader for an hour who just came into school this year from the bilingual program at the public school. He's learning English and I'm teaching him how to read English! I usually stay until 5 or so, grading and eating snacks and making copies, so on and so forth. Except on Tuesdays, when I run into my car and drive for 1.5 hours to get to my night ESL class!

Thanks for reading!!!! That was definitely a mouthful. Go link up! I want to know what your day is like!! :)

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!

January Math Quilt!

First, thanks for all your thoughts on the threaded commenting post! It appears that lots of people are having issues with it. Now..... I didn't make it and I don't know anything about it so I am not super helpful. BUT! I looked into it and found out that people with custom templates will have a more difficult time getting threaded commenting up and running and that they are going to put out a guide soon to help out!! I guess it's good that I haven't sprung for a blog layout yet. :)

In other news, on Monday we did our January math quilt. Here we are, hard at work!!

And here is our almost-finished project! We hadn't glued onto the paper backing when I took this picture. I actually rearranged them to make a 4 by 6 rectangle before I hung it in the hallway. Now that I look at this again, I sort of like the 6 by 4. Oh wells, next month. :)

They can't WAIT to see the design for February. One girl said, "Maybe the picture will be a heart next time!!!!!!!!!!" Smartie pants, haha!!

Thanks again, Reagan. :)

Also!!! Thanks to Kelley and Lisa for prepping my quilt!! Love my cousins.

Threaded Commenting!!!

I just posted like... 2 hours ago or something? But something amazing just happened and if you don't know, I want to tell you!

Blogger just introduced threaded commenting!! So now when someone asks you a question, you can answer them specifically and directly so your response makes more sense and doesn't get lost in the craziness!!

Here is an example!

Pretty sweet! Also that comment back was incredibly long... geez louise.

Can you see this making a difference to your blog? I so can! Props to Hadar for commenting so I could learn this awesome thing!!