Valentines Day Recap & Vowel Pair Activity

Such cuties - they definitely have a part of my heart!

It has taken me a while to recover from yesterday's festivities! The kiddos had so much fun and my room mom and parent volunteers hosted a fabulous Valentines party. They even had a cute cupid arrow shooting contest using straws and Q-tips (the arrows) and aiming for different sized bowls. Genius! With all of the sugar draining from my system slowly - I still feel so meh - I thought I would post a bit of our vowel pair kinesthetic exercise from today.

Over at Learning with Mrs. Parker her kiddos were learning about vowel pairs by becoming a vowel pair. Brilliant, no?! So we watched the awesome Between the Lions clip and talked about how "when two vowels come a walkin', the first one does the talkin' and the second one says nothing at all." I paired each kiddo up and gave each student a letter from a vowel pair. Then, the students linked arms and the student holding the first vowel said the long vowel sound while his/her partner said nothing. Then they switched! They absolutely loved it!

So fun!

~ Katie

For the Love - A Sale on our Valentines Literacy Pack!

With Valentine's just around the corner, we are sending you all some love! First and foremost we are having a sale on our Valentines Literacy Pack. From now until Tuesday, it is a wonderful 20% off! Rather than $5 it is $4 - just for you!

Also, we are putting the finishing touches on our amazing march leprechaun/lucky pack. Once it is up we will be hosting our very first giveaway! Can't wait!

~ Katie and Rebecca

100th Day Celebration

We just celebrated our 100th day of 1st grade (I think we are a bit behind most elementary schools). Thankfully it fell on a Friday so we were able to really have a lot of fun!

The week before, we read "100th Day Worries" and I proposed the challenge to the kiddos to find a collection of 100 things. Boy were they up for the challenge! The students brought in collections of pennies, silly bands, cereal, jelly beans, etc. The cutest part was there were 5 students that brought in edible collections and they wanted to share it with the class. This is one of the many reasons I love teaching first grade - they are so sweet to each other!

After students traded collections, they counted their goods by putting them into groups of 10. When we finished this activity we decided to go on a mini field trip. I saw on one of the wonderful 1st grade blogs that they had this students estimate where they would end up if they took 100 steps. Clearly first graders have no concept of distance because I had students estimate that we would end up in China, Las Vegas (we are in Utah), one of the student's home, Italy and then finally the voice of reason, one student proposed we would end up on the playground. That we did!

As a parting gift, I gave all of the students this note with a Smartie attached to it. You can download the note here.

~ Katie

Before, Between, After - A Tic Tac Toe Adventure

To help our kiddos understand (and review) the concepts of before, between, and after, Rebecca had a stroke of brilliance! Why not do a Tic Tac Toe board with the numbers. This was a huge hit! The students loved it and he best part? They were practicing their math skills! Fabulous!

This game can be modified to fit what ever level of difficulty your students need. I have attached two versions. Just click the link and it is yours!  Let us know how your firsties like it!

What I Love - A heart-filled Link up

The lovely Kimberly at Funky First Grade Fun is hosting this adorable linky party! As I sit here with the hubs watching the super bowl I couldn't resist a little blog reading! If you want to join the link up, then head on over to Funky First Grade Fun and grab the picture and join the love!

I decided to join in the fun too! Without any further ado... here is what I love...

~ Katie and Rebecca

Channel the Animal Linky Party - Day 1

Unhook with a Book

Here are some of my favorite animal books:

A cute story about a goldfish in a bowl that gets too crowded, but the unlikely friendships he makes

A classic story to use about finding who you are - and great fiction text for a bat unit!

Amazing book to teach inference! Plus the kiddos get a good giggle out of it!

Anything by National Geographic or Discovery Kids - excellent for expository text and of course amazing photographs!

Mo Williams is a genius! The Elephant and Piggie series is an absolute hit in my classroom! These books are amazing for teaching expression!

~ Katie

Valentines Freebie - Scrambled Words Center

With only a few short days until Valentines, Rebecca and I decided we needed yet one more Valentines center. We found this really great Valentines heart-shaped eggs in the dollar bin at Target (is that a teacher's best friend? I'm sure by now my hubby hates hearing "oh, we have to check the dollar bins" each and every Target run we make).

We typed and laminated some Valentines words and cut them apart, putting each word into its own egg. Our kiddos are loving this new take on our scrambled words center. As an extension, we challenge our kiddos to see how many words they can make using the letters from just one egg. Download this freebie here or head to our TpT store to download it (remember to check out our Heart-y Literacy Centers Packet as well!)