Penguin Cam!!!

So it is super late and I should be going to sleep... but I promised myself that I could blog if I finished submitting all of my projects for my ESL class!! 3 classes down, 3 to go! Next is multicultural children's lit. I literally can not tell you how SUPER EXCITED I am. I will be sure to share any books with all my blogging friends!!

Anyway, back to the subject of this post...

Today I was looking at facebook before school started, and I saw that my boyfriend had written about the live penguin cam from SeaWorld San Diego. Have you seen this??

Amazing. I used it as a reward for my class today after they worked on their persuasive paragraphs. They loved it! I actually find it amazing that 2000 people were watching at noon and still at 12:30 in the morning there are 1300 people watching it! They are adorable.

Speaking of persuasive paragraphs, today when I launched this little genre, I started by reading this fabulous book:

It was PERFECT to introduce opinions and reasons! We are writing our persuasive paragraphs on healthy choices, so each kid picked a specific healthy thing to do and they are persuading someone to do it! I didn't think they'd be super interested in the topic, but they are loving it. Today I learned that we should get more sleep because if you're mad about something and you go to sleep, you "kind of forget about it." Haha! So there are your wise words from a second grader today.

Side note - still watching the penguin cam... so cute!!!

And lastly, I wanted to leave you with this Hey Girl. I have not left you one in a while because none of them have really grabbed me I guess! And I am only posting this one because it has Jude Law and I want to MARRY HIM even though he cheated on his fiance......... Jude, Jude, Jude. Shame on you! I don't know what wraparound services are but I hope if you do, that you love this one.

The Birth of Math Stations

This summer, I read Math Work Stations and sort of followed along with the book study that was going on in teacher blogland.

The book was great, Debbie Diller had some sweet ideas, and I was pumped to get started. However, it didn't take long for me to figure out that stations were going to be hard to implement because of my two grade levels in one classroom. I only have 20 minutes per week with each grade level separately, so I don't really have a lot of time to teach my students the games or stations that I want to set out.

Complaints aside, I know I need to do these because I don't know another way to keep my first graders engaged in meaningful work while I'm teaching the second graders, and vice versa. So last week I bought containers from Dollar Tree to house some of my newly born stations.

Today I showed a few new stations to the second graders during my 20 minutes of just-second-grade-time! And I have them all thanks to amazing bloggers.

First, I showed them Spin and Graph, which I just won from Kelli at Castles and Crayons

In this station, the students spin a spinner 10 times and make a bar graph of the results. Then they answer a few questions about them. I found that using a paper clip as the spinner worked well for me instead of the arrow. I'll probably have to adjust this for the second graders but they loved it so far!

Then, we played Boo Bump, courtesy of Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade!

They LOVED this, I can't even tell you how much. When it was time for the first graders to come back to our room, the second graders were not happy campers. My two girls who can't do P.E. right now (broken elbow and appendix surgery?) brought the whole tub to P.E. to keep themselves occupied. I have to give a shout out to Meredith for the heads-up about the Halloween erasers in the Target Dollar Spot! They complement Boo Bump perfectly because they're flat. The kids CAN NOT get enough of this game, which will hopefully be awesome for their math skills!

And I just threw it this now-favorite so we could all have something to do, Cupcake Facts, which I downloaded from Alisha at The Bubbly Blonde.

In this game, students match the addition problem on the cupcake top to the sum on the cupcake stump (yeah Seinfeld!). Since I don't have a color printer, I printed the super cute Halloween-themed cupcakes on colored cardstock. Unfortunately.... that makes the game a lot easier, since the pinks always get matched with the pinks. Note to self - print on the same color cardstock next time, haha!

And lastly, I just wanted to give a shout out (not that he needs one...) to the amazing Mo Willems because Happy Pig Day! was just released into bookstores today!

Can't wait to read it. :)

My First Open House

Last night was the Open House for my school! I was super nervous although I had met a few families previously, but everything went very well!

Out of my 12 kiddos, 8 families came! They were all very positive and excited about the room, and I got a lot of compliments on my BEE binders. I first heard about using them when I volunteered in a classroom in my old elementary school, and I loved how consolidated everything was. I took a copy of the BEE Binder explanation page to every interview I went on because I was so into it! So I was happy to know that the parents loved it too. :)

The morning of Open House I kind of panicked because I realized that I didn't have a whole lot of student work up... I mean, I have my Bravo board (thanks, The First Grade Parade!) and my little name mosaics outside, but I felt that it was a little devoid of other stuff. So in an attempt to clean out that black file cabinet you see in the corner, I found this OLD book about making cards with kids. The card designs were incredibly complicated and ridiculous, but I did find this pattern for a spiral card for Mother's Day, which I adapted to our mini science unit on hurricanes. After we studied hurricanes, talked about Hurricane Irene, watched a few hurricane informational and footage videos, and I ensured the kids a hundred times that we definitely will not have a hurricane, even though there are lakes nearby, the kids wrote facts about hurricanes on their spiral cards, backed them with construction paper, and cut them out. The kids loved them and they were SUPER excited to show their parents! Since they did it earlier in the day, they still remembered what they wrote... so I guess my procrastination paid off. ;) Here's a close-up. They turned out well!

As part of our mini hurricane unit, we also acted out a hurricane.... because I don't know about other first grade classes, but my students NEED brain breaks like every 5 minutes! This was a good way to get them up and moving. And it reinforced the idea of the eye of the hurricane!

And then here's just some other stuff that I wanted to show! First, my "about me" board featuring my new sign from Miss Kindergarten's Etsy shop!! My girls just LOVE it and they keep drawing peace signs on everything. I'll add some more stuff as the year goes on but I think this is pretty good to start.

I don't think that I posted my jobs board yet. I got the sign from One Extra Degree and just printed it on bright paper. Then, I borrowed Mrs. Lemons's idea of using library pockets for my jobs and I just cut up cardstock and wrote their names. I haven't switched jobs yet, but I think I will on Monday. Some of the kids' jobs are kind of lame... I didn't realize that until after we started school. This is featured on the lovely side of my huge desk!

And, lastly, I dipped my little toe into the Reader's Workshop idea today inspired by the awesome Debbie Miller. Have you read City Dog, Country Frog yet? It's by my bff (in my dreams), Mo Willems.

If you haven't read it, let me summarize - a dog and a frog meet up once a season and they just do their thing, playing around outside. When winter comes, the dog can't find the frog, and when spring comes around, the frog is still "missing" ... but the dog finds a new friend. It's a pretty heavy book, and I wasn't sure if my students would understand, but I had one friend who called out, "The frog's dead, you guys" when we were towards the end.

So, since we technically don't know what happened to the frog, we inferred together about what could have happened and why we think that - what evidence from the book or schema from our brains did we use to make those inferences? I was SUPER SUPER proud of my students for being so thoughtful! They came up with some really great ideas and some interesting ones, but they definitely were all thinking hard, so I had them kiss their brains. They just looooove that! :)

So that wraps it up! Thanks for sticking around until the end. :)

My Favorite Picture Book

It's day two of Clutter-Free Classroom's week-long Prompt of the day linky party!

Today's prompt is ... Complete this sentence: "Based on the illustrations alone, my favorite picture book is ___________."


This was an easy one for me. I really tried to broaden my horizons, and maybe bring a new book to some people's attention... but I just can not. Based on the illustrations alone, my favorite picture book is Knuffle Bunny!

I first heard of this book in my children's lit class in college. My professor was overly dramatic and made this book SO fun to listen to when she read it to us. I'm sure you are familiar with this book, but if somehow you are not, let me tell you about it!

A little girl named Trixie carries around her Knuffle Bunny everywhere she goes. In the book, we see her hanging out with it and taking it on errands with her dad until....... it gets lost!

The words in the book are so funny, Trixie's baby talk always makes the kids giggle, but the real highlight of this book is the amazing, creative illustrations! You see, Knuffle Bunny's illustrations are drawn and then superimposed onto real photographs of Brooklyn! We see neighborhood streets and little strip malls with Trixie and her dad right there.

And Mo Willems's command of illustrative expressions is amazing as always. I just can not get enough of him! But you will find that out tomorrow...

My question to you is... how do you pronounce Knuffle Bunny? I always pronounce the "kn" like "n" ... but when I went to Mo Willems's website today, the speaker kept saying the "k"!! I'll keep saying it like I do though. :)