We Love Text Spelling

I need to take a break from checking two weeks' worth of first and second grade math papers... so I will share something fun that we did this week to practice our spelling words!

First, if you haven't heard of Teacher Tipster, you seriously are missing out. I probably could watch his videos all day... here is a little sample for you!

This week, I tried out my first Teacher Tipster tip! I saw this on someone's blog (I can't remember whose!!) and followed it back to the Printables section of the Teacher Tipster website. I printed out his Blackberry-like templates for the kids to practice their spelling words. I have a very chatty and noisy class, but you would have been amazed at the focus they had during Text Spelling this week.

If I could get them to be that engaged all day, I would just hug myself. Oh also in this picture, you can see one friend who had his phone taken away because he was whining that he didn't get the color he wanted. We don't whine in first and second grade. :)

I'm going to add this to the Word Work station of Daily Five, if I ever get around to introducing it... I really fell off the Daily Five train. Maybe I can get myself back on again!

You Can't Say You Can't Play

We are having an issue in first and second grades.

Maybe not a major issue, but in my brain, and in the brains of my kiddos, it is pretty significant.

At least once a day, and I'm lucky if it's less than five times a day, one of my students comes up to me and says, "___________ says he's/she's not my friend." You can fill in the blank with pretty much any student, because none of them have been uninvolved in these situations. Mostly this happens after morning recess and lunch recess. And I am just at the end of my rope because I don't know what to do, other than pulling kids aside and saying, "Do you see how this person feels? Will you please play with this person outside next time?" It obviously is not working, as this continues and I continue to get more and more frustrated.

So, I decided to do a bit of reading, and over the weekend I read this little book, You Can't Say You Can't Play by Vivian Gussin Paley.

Have you read this, or heard about it? Vivian Gussin Paley was a Kindergarten teacher in the University of Chicago lab school when she wrote this book in the early 90s. She saw what I see - kids getting rejected by other kids during play time. After an incredibly long process, which she detailed heavily in the book, she and her students created the You Can't Say You Can't Play rule. It's pretty self-explanatory - if a kid asks you if he can play with you, you have to say yes.

I'm thinking this might be something that I should try out in my room because we are having some overactive tear ducts (and I feel like I'll be one of those criers soon). Do you have a policy like this in your school or classroom? What are your thoughts?

Going Postal

My students are moderately excited about our postcard exchange that will be happening this month. I don't think they really understand how SUPER AWESOME this is going to be. I think (and hope) this changes when our postcards come rolling in!

I was able to get all of my postcards for half-price (thank you, Chamber of Commerce!), and one afternoon when we had a few extra minutes, the students stamped and address-labeled the postcards. So if you're in the exchange and notice that your stamp is upside down... I promise it wasn't me, haha!

To kick off our postcard exchange, our class took a field trip to the post office. Before we left, we read two books that helped us get in the spirit. We read I Miss You Every Day and Mailing May.

I Miss You Every Day, by Simms Taback, is a cute story about a little girl that misses someone, so she packages herself up and mails herself. It gives a brief overview of the process of mailing something - from dropped it off the post office to putting in the truck, and so on. The illustrations were very cute, and we loved how the girl cut out eye holes and foot holes for herself. It was fun to find her in all of the pictures!

Mailing May, by Michael O. Tunnell, wasn't as big of a hit, but it was still a good book! This was a (mostly) nonfiction story about a girl in 1914 who wants to visit her grandma, but her parents can't afford the train ticket. Due to recent postal law changes, her parents are able to put stamps on her coat and "mail" her to her grandma's house. The pictures were lovely, the kids thought it was an awesome story, but it was a bit on the wordy side, and they didn't understand some of the vocabulary. With a little help from me, it was all good.

Then, we made an I Wonder/I Learned chart. I wanted the students to go on the trip ready to ask good questions. They also completed their own Wonder/Learned chart. Our post office is about two blocks from school, so we walked there together. We brought our postcards so we could make sure they made it into the mail!

The wonderful man at the post office was very patient with the students and answered many questions that he probably thought were crazy, such as: can girls and boys both deliver mail? What do you do with mail that you can't deliver if the address is too far away? He took us on a tour of the back area, which I thought was really interesting! I forgot to take pictures until we got outside to the lifting device, which he let the kids ride on as he lifted them up and down.

Everyone also got to sit in the mail truck!

Lastly, we officially mailed off our postcards. We took turns dropped the postcards in the slot and watching them fall into the basket. You would've thought this was the most fun thing they had ever done. They probably could have sat there all day watching mail come in!

And the post office was also nice enough to give each student a coloring book about the states! The kids were just beside themselves with excitement.

Overall, it was a great day and an awesome field trip (not only because it was free)! I definitely recommend it if you're able to go to yours. The students learned a LOT and I think it really kicked off the exchange well. :)

Fun with Leaves!

This week, since Columbus Day is quickly approaching, it was only right that we learned about Columbus. However, I am very hesitant to do Columbus Day read-alouds, as I have a really hard time telling the first and second graders that Columbus was a cool guy and was bffs with the Native Americans.

Scholastic News came to the rescue with one of this month's issues for first grade!

If you have a subscription, you have access to their little preview videos, which are awesome. They're about 3 minutes long and are a great hook to start that week's issue. For some reason, my kids are obsessed with them and we usually watch each one at least 3 or 4 times. Anyway, the video for this issue focused on Columbus being an explorer, and it showed examples of other explorers - underwater explorers, cave explorers, and space explorers.

This issue was a reader's theater where I played Columbus and the students were the sailors. We learned that the sailors had to sleep on the deck while Columbus slept in a bed, that they had dirty water, that they were scared, and that their trip took 71 days, which is twice the amount of time we've been in school so far!! All good and factual information. Thanks Scholastic News!

The next day, I extended on the "explorers" theme and told the kids we were going to explore the neighborhood! We are lucky enough to back up to a nice quiet neighborhood, and I love to take walks, so this went well. I asked the kids to grab at least 3 different kinds of leaves for an activity later. They ended up each grabbing like 15, which was perfect. It was a BEAUTIFUL day in the Chicago suburbs, so it worked out perfectly!

After lunch, we did a variety of activities with our new gigantic leaf collections! We counted them and ordered the numbers. Then we sorted them by a variety of attributes that the students chose. I always hear about doing open sorts with students but I never have done it. It was awesome! Most of my students worked really, really well together without fighting (which is pretty rare in my class...). The attributes they chose were: color, size, number of points, pretty and unpretty (haha), and shape.

After everything was done, we debriefed about how we worked together. I told them how SUPER PROUD I was that I didn't see a lot of fighting or crying. We talked about what worked (people took turns, they listened to each other's ideas, no one said mean things) and things we needed to work on (some people were too bossy). I really haven't had them do a lot of group things like this so I was very happy to see that they really could work together.

I forgot to say that we also did leaf rubbings! They turned out nicely and I need to hang them up soon! They tell me I don't have enough Halloween decorations in my room................ so hard to please 6-year-olds.

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. :)

What I'm Loving ... Thursday?

I just realized it isn't Wednesday. I mean, I knew it all day, but the whole way home from school I was thinking about what to write for WILW this week. Apparently it's Thursday so today it is WILT!! Wilt!

I'm loving my class, again. They're a handful and we have a lot of emotions running through our 12 little bodies, but they are funny and I like being their teacher. Today, as I was setting my phone timer for an activity in Math, the first graders asked if I was calling my boyfriend. I said, "Why would I call him now? We are in the middle of math!" And one girl said, "You could call him and say, 'I'm teaching the kids! Don't talk to me!'" (said in a very angry voice). They make me laugh a lot.

I'm loving the baby steps I'm taking towards Math Work Stations! Finally! It only took 32 days of school!! I want to have my management board set up by Monday because I forgot to finish taking pictures of the kids. So far I have 3 stations set up, so over the weekend I should come up with 3 more so they can have a little variety in their lives. I will keep you all posted because today we (sort of) did them and it worked out really well! Except - I have an odd number of first graders and an odd number of second graders. Do you all make groups of 3? Because my groups of 2 worked together way better than my groups of 3, but I don't want to isolate anybody... hmm.

I'm loving that I learned how to use the little laminator at school today! Now I understand why everyone loves personal laminators. I think I should probably buy my own sleeves so that I don't get yelled at for depleting the resources.

I'm loving the post office down the street from my school! Our class is participating in the postcard exchange hosted by Primary Graffiti and The Techy Teacher, and today I called to see if my class could take a field trip there next week so we can be more invested in our postcard sending. They were cool with it and we're going in a week! There are definitely perks to teaching in a small town.

I'm loving Adventure to Fitness!!!!!!!! A lot!!!! Since I'm in a private school, I can't sign up because my school is not a choice. I've probably sent them 5 requests and they are just ignoring me. So, I asked my wonderful sister to sign up on my behalf and now my kids LOVE running with Mr. Marc! We've already had 3 days worth of indoor recess this week and this has saved me in a huge way.

I'm loving these super cute apples we made yesterday!

I got the idea from The First Grade Parade. It was really easy (I used contact paper) and the kids really liked it. Sadly we haven't had sun to shine through the tissue paper yet but they are so beautiful regardless. :)

I'm loving another thing about my students. They are really good at making up excuses for stuff in their own lives, so whenever something goes wrong in my room, they always come up with a reason for it. For example, we watched a little video about the planets today, and the audio kept skipping. It was super annoying. One of the kids was like, "It's fine, it's just because the planets are so far from the radio tower." I was like, "..... I'm sure that's it." They never get upset about anything! It is so funny.

Oh - I need a bit of advice. I have a student who literally will not do anything unless I stand there and tell him to. Like, he won't even write his name on his paper unless I prompt him. Today we did dictation, and at the end I collected their papers, and he literally wrote nothing. The whole time! My first graders are very dependent as a whole, but this is confusing to me. Any words of wisdom??

Fantastic Ocean Books!

If I could teach every concept, all day long, every day, with children's books, I would! For whatever reason, my students are always SUPER engaged in books, where, if I sat there and said the same things to them, they would lose it. So children's books play a huge part in my teaching. I love them and so do my kiddos!!

When I student taught, I had to plan a major unit, and between my cooperating teacher and myself, we decided to do an ocean unit and pull it all together by going to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago!

We studied a different underwater animal each day, and I remember two books specifically that I loved using!

First, we have Surprising Sharks by Nicola Davies.

My first graders LOVED THIS BOOK! There are no photographs of sharks, but the very detailed and cute illustrations serve as an appropriate substitute! Not only does this book include a ton of information on many different sharks, but it tries to combat the idea that we should be afraid of sharks by giving information about how many sharks are killed by humans every year. It's a super informative and fun book, and I think my library copy came with a CD?

And second, I liked A Safe Home for Manatees by Priscilla Belz Jenkins.

This book might be better suited for a habitats unit, as it describes how the habitat of the manatees in Florida has shrunken over the years. Again, it was very informative and child-appropriate. I like to read books about how people can really affect the world through situations like this. I want students to be concerned with things other than themselves... which can be tough sometimes. :)

Check out Teaching Blog Addict's Science Week linky party today to find more awesome science books!!