L'Shanah Tovah!

Today we learned about Rosh Hashanah in our classroom!

In Social Studies, we've been learning about families. One of our lessons was about holidays and how every family celebrates them - but that different families celebrate different ways or even different holidays all together! So the timing was perfect. :)

We started by reading a great book - Celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It's a National Geographic book, so it has beautiful pictures and the text was perfect for my class!

Afterwards, the kids colored a Rosh Hashanah picture while I sliced up some Gala apples and poured out a few dishes of honey. We dipped our apples in our honey and decided it was the best snack EVER! Tomorrow we'll graph whether we liked or didn't like apples and honey - we didn't get to it today. :)

I love celebrating multicultural holidays with my students!

Delicious Sea Monsters

Today was our last full day of school!

I am a little sad... that might sound crazy! I didn't have a class of perfect angels this year, but it was my first class by myself, and we went through a lot together!

Part of our last day was spent by us making a little snack together. We found this recipe in the nonfiction magazine that comes with our reading program. This is one thumbs-up I will give to my program... these magazines are actually pretty sweet and the kids really like them.

We made under the sea monster things!

Here's what you need to make these...

A package of Goldfish, a box of raisins per child, a tub of whipped cream cheese  (one was just enough for 12 children), and one mini bagel per child! Plus a plastic spoon, knife, plate, and bowl-like dish per child.

First, each kid got some cream cheese in a cup. Then we added 1-2 drops of blue food coloring and stirred it up to make water!

Then, we spread it onto a plate. It was really supposed to be much thicker than this (so it actually looks like flowing water), but we rolled with it.

Next, you cut your mini bagel in half. Set half aside and cut the other half in half again. There will be three pieces of bagel. Arrange them like so:

Last, use cream cheese to attach raisins for eyes, and place the goldfish wherever your heart desires. Ta da! A delicious sea monster.

The kids LOVED THIS PROJECT. It was especially fun when they realized that the bagel is supposed to be the sea monster going in and out of the water. It just blew their minds, haha!

If it wasn't the last full day of school, I so would have thrown in a how-to writing activity. However, I let them off the hook and we just snacked instead. :)

Move-Up Day

Friday was Move-Up Day at my school!

Do you have one at your school? For 30 minutes, all of the students visited their classroom and teacher for next year. Since we only have one teacher for every two grades, the kids know for sure who their new teacher will be.

So the second graders left, I kept my first graders, and the Kindergartners came to see us!

I spent a LOT of time thinking about what I wanted to do for Move-Up Day. I wanted to give the Kinders a little taste of what we do normally, I also wanted to work in a few of our procedures, and I wanted us to have some fun too!

When the Kinders first came in, the first graders showed them the carpet area where we sit for read-alouds and found a spot for each of them. They even offered to share their own spots! I didn't even talk to the first graders about being polite and welcoming - they just did it on their own! First graders, I love you so much.

Then we went over our rules, which are based on the Whole Brain Teaching rules (a few are adjusted). We taught them the hand signals and very briefly discussed each one.

Then we moved into the main attraction... one of our FAVORITE read-alouds this year - Wodney Wat!

The first graders cheered with joy! The Kindergartners just sat quietly (they really took the rules to heart!). I read the book, using my very best Wodney voice - which is award-winning, or so I've been told. :) The Kinders did not understand the funny parts at all, so the first graders and I had explain every page, haha. At the end we talked about how you shouldn't make fun of people for how they talk and that we should be nice to everyone! They all were cool with that idea.

Then we made strawberry mice, inspired by this pin! (I would show you mine, but they look the same...)

Source: repeatcrafterme.com via Jill on Pinterest

And here we are, first graders and Kinders, together!

No fighting. No name calling. No hiding in the coatroom. No screaming in anyone's faces. (Not that any of those things happen on a normal day in my classroom......................)

I know I only had the group together for 30 minutes, but if first impressions mean anything, next year is going to be A-MA-ZING!

\

Noodles and Bagels!

Happy Mother's Day - at least for a few more hours! I really have no idea how teacher moms do it. At the end of the day, I am legit exhausted! If I had to go home and still be on my game, it would be disastrous. So, I am really in awe of you all. :)

Just a few things tonight!

First, let me show you this cute little thing we did this week. We are going on a field trip to a nature museum tomorrow (ahh!!) and part of our time at the museum will be observing butterflies. So we learned about the butterfly life cycle and made this little crafty thing.

This is a printable from The Mailbox so I can't share it with you... but it would be pretty easy to make your own version. We used different noodles for each stage of the life cycle. I didn't have anything for the egg, but I would have used orzo or ditalini. For the caterpillar stage, we used rotini, for the pupa stage we used medium shells, and for the butterfly stage we used bow tie pasta! Or I think the box said farfalle... whatevs.

It was a good assessment because I would hold up a pasta and ask which stage it represented, and I was able to figure out right away who knew what was up with the butterflies!

I've also seen it where you use the noodles to make a little necklace of the life cycle. So there you go!

Second, my natural resources post was featured on Bagels and Blogs today!

Bagels and Blogs is hosted by Donna at Math Coach's Corner. She highlights 5 blogs a week with creative ideas that usually come with freebies! You should look at today's edition as well as past Bagels and Blogs posts!

Third, if you were paying attention above..... we are going on a field trip tomorrow! I am feeling very anxious about it. We are taking a train AND a public bus so I just hope everything goes well. Keep me in your thoughts tomorrow!

Hope your week goes well!

Math With M&Ms!

I am coming to you in the midst of my weekend full of church.

Yesterday we had school Mass, as usual. Today I went to my twin nephews' first Communion. And tomorrow is one of my second graders' first Communion. The other four have theirs later this month.

Here's a picture from the first Communion after-party today!

Onto what this post is about!

Yesterday was M&M Math Day. While looking online for good ideas to use, I found a bunch of great M&M Math activity pages! There are a lot of different ways you can use M&Ms for math (graphing, probability, mean/median/mode, and so on), and the activities are written out super well. They aren't the cutest sheets ever, but they fit a TON of different things on each work page.

For first grade, I used Math Activity Page 1, which focused on sorting, counting, greater than/less than, and adding. With a little help from me to get them started, they were able to do the sheet very independently. And they had a lot of fun!

For second grade, I used Fraction Fun with M&Ms, which was a good review of fractions of a set. It also covered greater than/less than.

For both grades, we also did Math Activity Page 2, which actually focused on division with remainders. It didn't use those words, but that's what they were doing. It made me think that next year when I introduce division to the second graders, this would be a good way to do it. They were really into it! They all LOVED this page, especially because at the end they got to eat a few and write how many were left over. :)

I don't think the students expected to do quite so much math with their M&Ms... but they did really well with all of the activities.

One last little story...

My reading curriculum focuses on... I think 10 kids. All the stories are about those 10 kids. In first grade, there isn't an overarching plot that connects the stories together. There are just a bunch of stories about random stuff the kids do. The last unit I'm teaching is about the kids going to Super Happy Fun Land. In second grade, the stories take place within the context of a school year and it follows the trials and tribulations (and drama) of the kids in school.

Recently in our soap opera reading book, the kids' teacher got the flu and they had a substitute. The substitute had the students write get well poems for their teacher, and in my students' workbook, there was a little section for them to write their own get well poem for the pretend teacher.

One of the girls came up to me afterwards and said, "Read my poem I wrote... but don't read it out loud..." and I was like, "Okay?" So here is what it said:

Aw, I'm the best teacher in the world!

Hope you're having the best Saturday in the world today!!

E is for Experiment!

I haven't been very diligent about updating you all on our ABC Countdown!! :(

So far we have gotten through A - Animal Day, B - Buddy Reading Day, C - Clean-Up Day, and D - Dancing Day. Dancing Day was definitely the best and reminded me that I NEED to incorporate movement breaks into my day on the regular!

Yesterday was E, Experiment Day! I was looking for something quick and fun, so I looked around online and found this cute little experiment using only a few materials: Skittles, bowls, and water!

Before we started, we each made a hypothesis about what would happen if we put Skittles in water. Some thought the Skittles would disappear, some thought they'd dissolve, and one wishful thinker thought they'd explode. Haha!

What really happens is that the colors come off and make a beautiful little display!

Here we are in our little experiment circle!

I gave each of the kids 3 Skittles. Then I filled their bowls with JUST enough water to cover a Skittle (so, hardly any). Then I instructed the kids to carefully place their 3 Skittles equally apart so they weren't touching in the bowl. And that was it!

It will take a few minutes to start dissolving, so don't despair if you don't see the color instantly start to spread! I was a little worried at first, but it just needed some time.

The kids are still talking about it excitedly today! Super fun, super simple, and hardly any cleanup. :)

Mini-Paleontologists

Yesterday we started our fossils and dinosaurs unit! We filled out a little schema chart, which includes such things as:

• Dinosaurs are all dead.
• Birds are dinosaurs.
• Dinosaurs run fast.
• Dinosaurs eat people.
• Fossils are from old dinosaurs.
• Dinosaurs are all big.

And so on. We have a lot to learn!

Today we learned about how fossils form and how they can teach us about the past. We also briefly discussed what a paleontologist does. To make it real for them, the kids dug through chocolate chip cookies to get out the "fossils"!

First, they used a toothpick to VERY CAREFULLY remove the chips. We talked about how real paleontologists don't just dig with their hands; they use tools. Also that if they just chip away at the fossils, everything will get messed up and they won't be able to figure out what they dug up.

After the chips were removed, they used paintbrushes to brush the crumbs off. This totally did not do anything but they were bound and determined to brush off all the crumbs. Haha!

At recess, my class found a "fossil" that they had to show me.

I'm guessing it is just a little concrete bump but who knows? Maybe it is a worm fossil. Haha!

I'm planning on doing a few more dig things as we move forward. Tomorrow we are going to make fossil prints in playdough to show how we can learn things from fossils.

Lastly, I voted today!

Illinois people, get out there and vote!!!