Tears.

There were many tears today as it was our last day of school :(  This year marked my first official year of teaching, so naturally I became attached to my class. It was emotional saying good-bye to them for the summer. As I told them all how much I love them, tears came to my eyes and I couldn't help crying as I thought of how I wouldn't see their faces for the next few months and feel the love from their many hugs each day. I felt horrible, then, when 4 of my precious little girls started crying and didn't stop! I was heartbroken to see them leave today. On the bright side, there is a chance I may looping with them to 2nd grade next year and would be their teacher once again! I won't know until summer what God has in store for me here at our school, as it will all be based on enrollment numbers [we just keep growing and growing!] but I know I will see their smiling faces again soon :) I'm praying for whatever He has for me, whether it be to stay in first or move on with them!

I did give them their Scrappers tickets [mentioned in an earlier post - Counting it Down] and they are all so excited to come visit me at a game! I also gave them each a piece of baseball themed writing paper with my address attached so they could write me a letter telling me about coming to the game and all they are doing this summer. I certainly look forward to receiving some great pieces of mail soon!

I hope you all have a blessed summer, or rest of the school year, whichever applies. I'll be writing soon!

Counting it Down!

We have only 9 more days of school left!!!! and boy, can I tell! The kids are crazy with excitement and chatter going into the homestretch. I was so happy to complete my last bulletin board for the year yesterday too! I have to share with you, because it's probly one of my faves! I found the sunglasses idea on Pinterest here and just ran with it! The sunglasses have pictures the kids drew of what they "visioned" for their summer. I decided to make it more of a "craftivity," if you will, and added the thought bubble (from Microsoft Word). They wrote about their "visions" in the bubble and that's what they had to draw. I simply drew out the sunglasses and cut them out for them. They drew on small white papers that looked like sunglass lenses and we glued those onto the black sunglasses. I took their pictures and put the sunglasses on them and put the thought bubble coming off them like they were thinking about their "visions." They had such a good time doing this, I decided to do one too! [sans picture of course! :)] The title just came to me and is a perfect fit for it - as I said, one of my favorite boards for the year! What do y'all think!?!

We also had another fun activity added to our room a la Pinterest [man that site can get me in trouble!] I found the idea to put up balloons to countdown that last few days of school. The idea I found here counted down the last 20 days. However, my little munchkins would go nuts for that long [and so would I!] so I trimmed it down to 10 days. I hung the balloons in my room this morning and we are popping one per day to find the fun activity inside. Here's what I listed to help with ideas:

Day 10. 10 minutes of free time

Day 9.  extra snack (cookies and hot cocoa :)

Day 8.  sit wherever you want today\

Day 7.  extra recess

Day 6.  dance party!

Day 5.  surprise guest (probly my sister for a craft/read aloud)

Day 4.  field trip (love how that worked out!)

Day 3.  popcorn and a movie (we are reading Charlotte's Web so we will watch that)

Day 2.  hat day

Day 1.  school carnival and class "baseball" party

About the "baseball" party... I work for a Minor League baseball team in the summers, the Mahoning Valley Scrappers [Cleveland Indians affiliate]. This will be my 9th season there, so as an end of the year gift I am giving each of my little learners a free ticket for any game of their choice, along with a coupon I found in the phone book (LoL!) for buy one, get one free tickets. They can come visit me as I sell "ice cold pop!" all around the stadium.  I have worked there for going-on 9 seasons now, so I can't give up the fun job of vending! I have had many former students from where I worked in the past come visit me there, and wanted my kiddos to have a chance to come visit too. I made a fun "Have a BALL this summer!" letter telling them about it, along with the ticket. I am going to find some baseball pencils and suckers to give out too, and we're going to munch on some peanuts and cracker jacks (of course!). Hopefully there will be a time and place on the last day for us to play baseball as a class also!

We had a great time popping the balloon for Day 10 today! I think it was more exciting than the activity listed inside!

Hope you found some inspiration today!

Have a blessed day :)

-Tami

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!