I'm probably biased...

...but I have the SMARTEST students ever!  Today, I gave my students some "free" time after testing, but told them they had to either read from their book bins, or do a Word Work activity [I wanted to be certain they actually did something worthwhile for 15-20 minutes!] My usual suspect finished first and found an activity from my Word Work bin. Well, he thought he found an activity. He pulled out an envelope filled with sentence strips of nouns. He wasn't sure what to do with them, and then told me he wanted to put them in alphabetical order. He then noticed he was sitting on my alphabet rug and decided to use the rug to put the words in ABC order! I loved his sudden inspiration to challenge himself! To be honest, I was a bit jealous I hadn't thought of it myself! What a smart kiddo! Hence, the title of today's post. I loved the idea so much, I took a picture and made sure I wrote a post so everyone could see his awesome idea! Cheap dollar store noun strips and an ABC rug is all you need!

SALE TIME!

With standardized testing taking place all this week and next, not much fun has been happening in our classroom. Well, scratch that. One thing did! We planted our bean plants this week to finish up our science curriculum, and are really enjoying watching them grow! We're recording our bean plants in My Plant Journal that I created. Every few days we illustrate how our bean looks, measure it in centimeters (eventually it will be in inches) and write what we notice about them. They have grown a lot already this week. It's amazing what you can do with store-bought lima beans, wet paper towels, and Ziploc baggies!

I hung them across the windows on yarn with clothespins so they get more sunshine. I added some questions we had about our experiment with window chalk!

And now to the title of this blog.... SALE TIME!

School will be over in just 32 days (for me anyhow!) and I know many of you are even closer to being done. So, to celebrate I am throwing a sale at my TpT store! Click the word CELEBRATE under the sale tag image below starting Saturday, April 21 and purchase ANY of my items for a whopping 20% off!! The sale lasts until Monday, so check it out! If you like My Plant Journal I described above, you can get it even cheaper this weekend and have your own plant experiment in your classroom too! Your students will love it!

CELEBRATE!

Success! and Easter Break....finally!

The Phonics Egg Hunt was a success!!! Everyone did an awesome job, and it was much-less chaotic than I thought it would be, and it took about hald the time I had planned too! I will definitely be doing this again next year! The kids LOVED it and loved the treats I hid inside for them too :)  Please comment below if you tried this out! My Pinterest was blowing up after I posted it on Monday and got a ton of views, so I know someone else did it too! Please let us know how it went!

I got it to work! Here's a picture of a student looking at his clue and the egg to see if he found the right word:

In other news, the countdown to Easter break is on! Just one more school day after today and we are off for a WHOLE WEEK! When I went to school growing up, and even where I worked for the past 2 years, we only got Good Friday and Easter Monday off, but now I am so blessed to be off an entire week! With the weekend it totals to 9 days of freedom! I'm going to walk my dog, ride my bike, start training for a fun 5K race in June I'm doing (more about that later!) and repaint my bedroom! Plus, this Saturday my husband and I are FINALLY getting our new bed delivered that we ordered about 4 WEEKS AGO! I can't wait for my beautiful, queen-size sleigh bed! (We had a full size now and it's way too small!) and (of course) it's coming the same day I get to babysit my adorable 2 1/2 year old nephew. Oh well, we'll make it work! I am so excited because I haven't seen the Cubster (our nickname for him) in ages! We're gonna have fun eating fruit snacks, playing with my pup Reagan (she's so cute, I had to post a picture below!) and playing outside in the gorgeous weather! What are y'all up this weekend!? Are you off school too? Comment below and let us know!

Come on now, you have to admit shes's the cutest! :)

I also need to work on a Plant Unit I have been conjuring up in my head for the past month. Myself and the other 1st grade teacher are going to plant bean plants after we come back for break to finish our Science curriculum when we study plants. So I'm working on a Plant Observation Journal (which I need a much cuter title for) and other fun activities to integrate other content areas. I will definitely post some FREEBIES when it's finished and put the link up to my TpT store.

Well, thanks for reading and have a blessed Easter!

Tami :)

Happy Spring!

Happy Spring everyone! I love this weather! We have been *SO blessed* here in Northeast Ohio with AMAZING summer-like weather for the past few weeks! Yesterday we welcomed Spring with 80 degree temperatures and it continued today! It is just gorgeous out! So, to help get in the mindset of Spring, we did a little journal activity to incorporate Spring words.

We thought of as many Spring words as we could as a class.

Then, students drew a sky with 10 fluffy clouds in their journals and wrote 10 Spring words inside each one. They had lots of fun drawing, coloring and writing! It was a short, fun activity to integrate Spring into our day!


Have a blessed day and Happy Spring! :)

-Tami

Capacity

Today we worked on learning about capacity! It was kind of a tough day, considering all of the new lingo that goes along with the concept [quart, pint, gallon, cups - even capacity itself!] So, to help my first graders get at least some grasp of the concept, we made Gallon Guys and Gallon Girls!

As you would assume, the boys made Gallon Guys and the girls made Gallon Girls. I had used this in the past when I worked as a Title One Math Coach for third and fourth grades, and didn't think I would be using in first grade, but when we came upon our measuring unit in our curriculum this year, it was a perfect fit to teach my little ones! It worked really well and was a great visual for how many cups in a pint, pints in a quart, and so on.

We'll see how they do on some assessment worksheets, but with the answers they gave me to verbal questions today, I'm confident they all will do fabulous!

Word Work Mania!

One of my favorite parts of the Daily 5 is Word Work time! I love finding new ways for my students to practice our words and phonics sounds any time they can.  Today, we had 2 students absent, and it's Friday, so I decided to delay my math activity to Monday and break out lots of materials for the remainder of the day (which really was only a half an hour).

Some students used alphabet stamps....

I created a sheet to accompany this activity. My students were using regular computer paper or writing paper and it was such a mess! I had to create something scaffolded and more organized. This is what I came up with! [Spelling Stampers is available in my Word Work Activities packet].

Other students used bendy stix to create letters and words...

A bunch used letter tiles (their favorite!)

I found that the tiles can be noisy on their desks, so I bought felt and cut it into large squares for themt to lay them out on to reduce the noise (a little!)

Other students broke out spelling words I had used when I taught at a different school last year.

I just recently introduced these and they are becoming a fast favorite of the class! They were quite labor intensive when I first made them (printing, cutting, mounting and laminating - I'm particular!) so I'm glad they are putting them to use!

One other student broke out my latest addition to our (quite large) Word Work section... I saw this on Pinterest and modified it a tad...

Using clothespins to spell out spelling words. Another growing favorite!

Lastly, some students used puzzle pieces to spell words...

I can honestly say this was my own idea! I didn't find and adopt or modify it from anyone! It hit me one weekend when I was off scrapbooking with my mother-in-law (yes, we get along QUITE well!) Anyhow, I was just sitting there and saw her puzzle punch and it just hit me! Why not let students make spelling puzzles.  I have tons of letter stickers that are just left over, not enough to spell out one whole word any more, so I used those and lots of scrap paper to make tons of puzzle pieces! It's one of my favorite, but it's not a huge hit with the kids :(

They seem to go in waves of what they like to use during Word Work time. The bendy sticks were a hti for a while at the beginning of the year, then fizzled off and almost NO ONE used them, and now they're a hit again! Oh well. As long as they are loving to make words, I'm okay with that! I can definitely say that there is a plethera of choices in my Word Work section and my students LOVE it :)

Hope you found some new ideas!

Into the Unknown...

As you can see, my blog is a bit, well, plain.  I've NEVER blogged before! This is quite the work in progress, and to make matters worse I don't have internet at home (yet!) I've been following blogs, like The Inspired Apple (LOVE her!) and creating fun activities on TpT so I thought it was about time to create a blog of my very own. Here's a little bit about me (in case you're wondering!):  I am a 1st grade teacher and LOVE what I do! I say that teaching is my lifestyle, more than it is my job, or even career. This is my first year full-time, so it's a bit overwhelming but I am loving every second of my life right now. I teach in a Christian school (which I had never really considered in college) but it's better than I could have ever imagined and the people are fantastic. I love having the opportunity to minister to children about Christ!  I am married to my best friend, Dave, and we have a puppy dog named Reagan (the cutest pup ever, if I say so myself!) We live in Northeast Ohio and strangely, we love it here! We have 15 acres and a small house (in progress!) I'm super excited to share my journey with you into my first year with my own classroom and all the fun things I do with my 14 fabulous little learners!