Starboard!!!

A while back, I mentioned that my principal had ordered some interactive whiteboards for our school and one was for me!

I now present my new best friend!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamazing. Before today I didn't even have an overhead in my class. This is a big deal in my life.

Basically we played on it all day in between doing stuff we REALLY HAD to do. Only Scholastic News games though!!! All CCSS aligned. :)

I haven't actually used the software yet that came with it (it's a Starboard) and it seems sort of confusing. I'll figure it out though!

Moving on, in first grade we are learning how to add and today we worked on number stories!

We were only technically supposed to be learning how to write a number sentence based on a word problem, but they really wanted to draw out the problems. Definitely doable!

Do you like our little chalkboards? In Scholastic News this week, we learned that "long ago" kids wrote on slates with chalk. It made me laugh because I have a whole stack of these bad boys in the closet and the kids love them!! Not to mention the erasers I made. :)

And last, today I gave the first graders an emergent reader that I downloaded from Mrs. Wills. They went crazy over it! Our reading program is designed to be very challenging, which is fine for my high students but painful for anyone who doesn't read way above grade level. My kids felt so good and confident to be able to read the emergent readers! On the back page, they had to write something that they like to do, and I felt really happy when saw this:

I like to gow to the porc! Otherwise spelled as "go to the park", haha. Anyway, I feel absolutely PUMPED that my first graders are applying letter sounds to write phrases!!!!!! I think Writer's Workshop is paying off big time!!