Monday Made It: Contraction Shakers!

Happy Monday! Today marks the first day of my sailing lessons!!! I hope I don't regret this adventure... I'll let you all know tomorrow. :)

Time for Monday Made It, yeah!

Here is what I made this week: contraction shakers!!!!!!!!

This idea has been cooking in my brain for a while, and I had the empty bottle collection to prove it. :) A while back, Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade posted about her synonym shakers, and I was totally in love with them! I knew my class would for sure love them, too.

Our reading series puts a TON of emphasis on contractions, and for some reason my class was really into them this past year, so I decided to make contraction shakers!

And you can make them, too!! I put my word lists and labels into a little document-o for ya.

When I looked up the Common Core standard for this activity, I noticed that it did not exist in the first grade set. So, question for you today: in which grade does your school teach contractions?

I teach one set of contractions in first grade in the fall and then the other set in the spring.

How about you?

Silly Sentences

Today I was staying after school to tutor one of our ELLs. He stays after once a week for an hour because we are trying to boost his reading level. However... you can only read so many Reading A-Z books before your eyes start to glaze over. So I usually throw in a game toward the end to wake us both up and to get him conversing with me in English. Also, so he doesn't hate tutoring! :)

I pulled out Silly Sentences today and it was a hit!

I've used this with my own class and they love it! The game gives you little puzzle-type pieces with nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, articles, and punctuation. Each of the pieces has a little notch in a specific spot, so you have to create a sentence in a specific order. This prevents ridiculous mish-moshes of words.

You can use the words to make sentences, either "silly" or normal. However, who wants to make a normal sentence when you can say, "A blue firefighter jumped on a happy cat"?

All of the nouns have pictures to accompany them, and some of the adjectives do also. It's great for vocabulary building!

I haven't used it to teach parts of speech, but you can definitely do that too since each different part of speech is color-coded.

We had a good old time with this today and my second graders play it a lot while the first graders are doing Reading! Definitely worth checking out. :)

Would You Care for a Pair of Pears?

Hi friends!

How was your Monday? Mine was pretty good! Less stressful than a normal Monday, so I feel good about that. :)

I have had this idea brewing in my mind for about a month now, and on Mondays I have about 2.5 hours of uninterrupted time with the kids, so it finally came to fruition today!

Around Christmas, we learned about homonyms in second grade. The first graders overheard the lessons and since then I think I've heard someone come up with a homonym pair every day. I even heard one in Spanish - adiós like goodbye, and a Dios, like to God!

So today, we brainstormed tons of homonym pairs and then got to work illustrating them!

Roll like bread, and roll like rolling a bowling ball!

Horse like an animal, and hoarse like when your throat is sore! This illustration is based on a true story.... you may be able to see that this illustrated person is "tossing its cookies", so to speak. We had a vomiting incident at Mass on Friday... yeah...

I even made the pear template into a PDF for you if you want to do this activity too!!! This is the first thing I am sharing and even though it is really nothing major, I am psyched. Click on the little preview to go!

And lastly, holy moly, I was tagged in question things four times. So I will just add my answers to the bottom of my posts for the next 4 days!! :) I'm not going to share 12 things about me because I think I have already shared like 24 things about me and I can't think of any more random trivia!! Sorry!

First, Chrissy's questions from Buzzing with Ms. B!

1. What is the best part of teaching? I think the best part of teaching is that I have a fun job and I get to spend like 6 hours a day with hilarious little kids. I also love when they learn something TOTALLY new to them and they feel so smart!!
2. What's your favorite holiday? Hmmm... I think Christmas. I like seeing my fam and it's fun to give and get presents. Today we listened to Silent Night in my class because our Religion lesson today was The First Christmas, haha.
3. Who is your best friend and why? Besides my boyfriend... my best friend's name is Nicole! She and I met at Bradley and then we both transferred to NIU and graduated from there. We were roommates for two years and really we were great together! We had a lot of fun. Now that we are grown-ups, she is always there for me even though she is in the western suburbs, 90 minutes away!
4. What did you want to be when you were a kid? In Kindergarten, I wanted to be a ballerina. Since then I've wanted to be a teacher. :)
5. What's your favorite outfit? I really love wearing leggings but I hardly do... so I will say this teal sweater dress things I have and my black leggings and boots!!
6. What's your favorite breakfast? I love sausage burritos from McDonald's, but I also love when my boyfriend makes me scrambled eggs with cheese or a cheese omelet! Yum, eggs and cheese.
7. What's your favorite TV show of all time? I love Seinfeld! I also love The Office and lately I have been getting into 30 Rock.
8. What weird habit or behavior did you have as a kid? I am a big explainer/justifier... I will try to explain away everything. As a kid, I would make up stories for things I didn't understand. For example, I told myself that stoplights took so long to change because there were little men under the street who had strings they would pull to change the lights. The strings were really heavy so it would take forever to pull them all the way down; that's why you had to wait so long. I have a good imagination.
9. Siblings? How many? I have two half-brothers and a half-sister, and then one regular brother. My dad was married before and my half-siblings are 20ish years older than me. My brother is two years younger than me.
10. Beatles or Elvis? I will say Beatles. My boyfriend's fam is in love with them.
11. Beach or mountains? I live near neither. I've never been to the mountains and I guess I don't really care to, so the beach!!
12. What's the BEST trip you've ever taken? I went to a few weddings of my cousins' in the San Diego area and it made me want to marry California. I also went to visit a friend of mine in New York City and I loved it there too!! 

Ay yi yi. One set down, three to go! By the end, you will know way too much about me. :)