A little bit of everything...

OMGoodness!!! So I haven't blogged in quite a while! Can you tell that school has started back, football season is well underway {so I see my coaching hubby, maybe an hour a day} and I have a 5 month old?!?! C-U-RAY-ZEE-NESS!! 

So much has been going on down in Room 109 in the first grade hallway!! Where do I begin?!?  

I told you on my last post I would show you my objectives boards after I hung them up... So here they are! 

Sadly I didn't get classroom pics before the craziness started.  I will hopefully take some soon!

Since school has started we have learned about the 4 seasons and the weather.  We made these adorable weather books and season trees! They turned out great!  

First we made a weather anchor chart using weather words the students came up with.  

Then they had to choose 5-6 weather words to use in their weather books.  The wrote the weather words and illustrated what that types of weather looks like.

{Sorry for the quality.  They were taken with my iphone and I couldn't figure out how to turn them for the life of me.}


For the season trees, they traced their hand and forearm onto brown paper for the tree trunk and branches.  Then, depending on what season they had they used construction paper for the leaves or cotton for the snow. 

We have briefly talked about contractions and made our contraction kites.  They write the 2 words that make up the contraction on the 2 bows and the contraction on the kite.

We have also been learning about schema and making connections in reading.  We have made connections using several books.  One being Chester's Way.  This is such a great book.  We use it every year.  Here is what we did last year.  Last year my students used post it's to write their character descriptions and connections.  As you know classes change every year.  This year my kiddos weren't quite ready for that so we discussed whole group and wrote them on our anchor chart together.  

{Anchor chart inspiration from the Inspired Apple}

Here are our anchor charts for character description using Chester, Wilson, and Lily.




{They completed this chart with a sub if you are wondering about the difference in handwriting :)}

In math, we have really hitting numbers to 99 and addition.  

Here are their tens and ones! They rolled a dice to get their number, then created their number with tens and ones.

We also made fall addition story maps.

First, whole group I told them addition story problems and they created a pictorial model with their story maps and then wrote a coordinating number sentence.  For example, I said "There are 6 pumpkins on the fence.  There are 2 pumpkins on the haunted house.  How many pumpkins in all?" They would show me that on their story maps then write the number sentence on their white boards.

{Sorry, but I couldn't get them to turn.}

Since we are learning addition I thought I would share a couple of my favorite addition math stations.  

This one is called "in and out".  The students simply drop a handful of cubes onto the in and out board.  They record the number in the circle for the first addend and the cubes outside of the circle as the 2nd addend.  Then solve the number sentence.  The kids really like it!

This one is domino addition.  The students pull a domino.  Then record the domino dots on the recording sheet.  Then solve the addition problem! So simple and so fun! 

WHEW!!! That was a lot!!! Hopefully now that school is underway  and things are starting to settle down I will be blogging more regularly. :) 

 Hope you have a fantastic week!