Nouns, Verbs, & Sweet, Sweet Adjectives

So, we are still in Valentine candy leftover land in my classroom.  After our party, we had sooooo many leftover conversation hearts, with no real plan for their use.  At our party last week, we did the old favorites: we estimated how many will fit into a large heart and graphed how many of each color were in our bag.

But there were bags and bags of these suckers left and these little hearts were really starting to bug me.  I just couldn’t decide what to do with them, until….Voila!  It hit me! 

I gave each student a bag of hearts and their assignment was to read the fun messages on the hearts and find two nouns, two verbs, and two adjectives.  They L*O*V*E*D this activity.  There was giggling all around as hearts with phrases like, “Shake it,” and “Let’s Boogie,” were read. 


This activity was part of a week spent learning about adjectives.  Yesterday, we watched this School House Rocks video on You Tube about adjectives and I still can’t get this song out of my head.  My kiddos are humming it constantly too!

Then I gave each student a word card with an adjective written on it.  I gave out words like cold, fuzzy, clean, fancy, etc. and the students had to put it with something in the room that could be described by their adjective.  Again, they L*O*V*E*D it. One student left her vest on her desk, which was subsequently labeled with the words soft, plain, and smooth.  Another student had her desk labeled as clean and her water bottle labeled as fancy.  And here’s the best part...today when we discussed this activity from yesterday, every.single.student remembered their adjective and the noun it described!  LOVE those moments!  I have definitely added all of these activities to my bag of tricks when teaching about adjectives.
Click on any of the pictures above to head to links for these activities.  Have a great weekend friends!

Would you like fries with that? & A Super Sale

Hi bloggy world!  These last few weeks have been so hectic for me.  I’ve wanted to post about a thousand times for a thousand reasons, but tonight is one little post with only two little things to share with you.

First of all, this week we learned about the long i sound.  I LOVE to introduce long i by turning it into a lesson about *junk food,* my favorite of all the food groups! 

I gave my students a set of words, some French fries, some chips, a fry holder, and a chip bag. 

The students cut out all the pieces and glued the long i words on French fries and the short i words on chips.

Then they sorted their fries and chips into the correct bags.  What a cute, fun activity this was!

This activity is part of my First Grade HM Theme 5 Home Sweet Home Resource Pack.  In that pack it’s available in both color and black & white.  That pack will be 20% off Sunday, Feb. 3rd in my TpT store because tomorrow is

Everything in my store with be 20% off.  Then, don’t forget to enter the promo code SUPER when you check out for an additional 10% off your entire purchase. My wish list is stocked and ready to be transferred right to my shopping cart.  I cannot wait to shop!

Thanks to Ashley Hughes for the cute button design.

A HUGE Giveaway

Great news!  My bloggy friend Erin is having a great big, ginormous, 100 follower giveaway!  Erin from the sweet blog, Sample’s Superstars, has hit the 100 follower mark and she is giving away a TON of a*w*e*s*o*m*e products to celebrate. 
Having you been eyeing up by Parent Teacher Conference Packet?  If so, enter Erin’s giveaway for a chance to win.  Click the pic below to head on over to her cute blog.  Be sure to spend some time checking out her awesome blog.  You may remember I participated recently in the magical product swap and was lucky enough to be paired with Erin.  She rocks!

We’ve Hit the Halfway Mark!

It’s all downhill from here!!!!  Tuesday was the 90th day of school, which is officially halfway through the school year.  Hooray!  To celebrate, we had Halfway Day in our little classroom all day long.  I started this celebration last year and my littles just L*O*V*E*D it (~their teacher did too~).  This will definitely be a celebration I continue throughout the ~many~ years I have ahead in my career. 

Here’s the banner that greeted my firsties, and lots of surprised, too tall adults, on Tuesday.

The previous week, I sent a letter home asking parents to help their students create a project for halfway day that shows the concept of one-half.  This year’s projects were great.  Some of our projects included half of a hard boiled egg, half of a bar of soap (the box it came in was cut in half too:), half of a baseball, half decorated cupcakes, etc.  The students had to complete a questionaire about their project as part of the assignment. 

Once we were proudly displaying our projects, we had a gallery walk and chose our favorites and asked questions of their creators.    We did lots of other halfway day activities too.  We planned and carried out a design for half of a decorated cupcake and half of a cup of juice.  We read books about one-half.  We completed a fun center called, “Will that be Pick-up or Delivery?” which as you can guess was all about pizza. 

You can check out all of these activities and more in my new packet.  Just click the picture below to check it out.

 

Now it’s only 7 more school days until we celebrate again for the 100th day!  Wow!  It may seem like a lot of days full of fun (also educational) activities, but during the long, cold, snowy months of January and February, sometimes we need a little nudge to get us out of bed and excited about school in the morning! 

Meeting my Goals & Improving Positive Parent Communication

I have to start by shouting from the rooftops that I am feeling so organized thanks to the changes I’ve made so far in 2013!  My first goal was to have all planning and prep work done by Friday for the following week.  Yay!  Last week, I finished every.single.thing. on that list.  It felt incredible to leave on Friday know I was prepared for this week!  It’s only Monday and I’m already almost finished with Tuesday’s to do list.  What a great feeling!

My second goal was to better organize the way my students hand in their completed written work.  I created a system of labeled baskets and switch these throughout the day according to subject area.  It has been an amazing transformation!  I anticipated a little confusion on my students’ part, but I wasn’t giving my little sweeties nearly enough credit.  They caught on right away and even had a little chuckle when I mentioned I needed a new system. Ha!  I left school every day last week with all work corrected!  What a huge change from having a cluttered pile of papers on my desk with absolutely no rhyme or reason.  Again, it’s such a good feeling to leave at the end of the day without that mountain of paperwork weighing on my mind. 

This week’s goal is to increase positive parent communication.  I feel that I communicate with parents rather regularly through both a weekly report card for each student as well as the weekly newsletter I send home.  However…I feel that the only parents that receive unplanned notes or phone calls are the ones whose children experience some sort of problem throughout the day.  I feel that ALL parents should hear about what their children are doing well throughout the week.  I want to start a system in which I can keep track of these notes and phone calls and can tell at a glance who could use a positive note or phone call.  Here’s what I came up with:

I will keep a new log each week (but I’ll save the old ones so I can refer back to them) to track how and when I communicate with parents.  My goal is to improve positive communication with ALL parents.  I’ll tally the number of communications I make each week.  For each communication I make, I’ll tally whether it was a note or a phone call and whether it was positive or negative.  Click on the picture to head to google docs for your free copy. 

The adorable border is from