Egg-stra, Egg-stra! Ready for Spring Break?

Has Spring Fever set in yet? Um, yeah, Rebecca and I are feeling full force. And it's not just us, but the littles too! So, with one day left before break, we decided we needed social time a fun buddy activity to reinforce nonstandard measurement! 

With loads of plastic eggs, some big and some small, we combined classes and paired up our kiddos then set them off to measure different surfaces and objects. Brilliant!

How tall is my buddy?

"Can we measure you Mrs. Walker?" Sure!

Super brave kiddos wanting to measure the room!

Measuring the doorway

"The book is only 2 eggs!"

Miss Kunz being oh so brave!

Uno, Dos, Tres...Three Days of Classifying Animals

Day 1
Prompted by one our science methods course we took last year as part of our Master's program, Katie and I start our animal and habitat unit with an interesting exercise. We give each student pictures of a variety of animals (including a human) and plants. The students are instructed to independently sort and glue the pictures into animal and not animal categories. I think it makes my kiddos crazy when they ask if they are correct and I tell them, "you decide, it is up to you...we will talk about it together in a bit." I enjoy listening to their reasoning as they do their sorting. One of my favorite quotes this year was, "the girl is a mammal and mammal and animal rhyme, so that has to be it." Haha!!

We then have a student driven discussion where we sort large versions of the pictures into animal and not animal categories. Through guided questions, we help the students arrive at the proper conclusions. We LOVE this exploration activity!! If you have ever wanted to get inside the brain of a firstie, this activity is for you!

After the sort we use a webbing activity to create a definition to articulate what an animal is.

Day 2
I started this second day with another "get inside the head of a firstie activity". I laid out all my animals in the middle of our circle. (They came from one of those bulletin board punch out kits that I purchased at Lakeshore a few years ago. I think it was a habitats pack.) I asked how could we sort or organize the animals into groups. Of course my first graders had lots of ideas.

After they shared some ideas, I told them that scientists wondered this very thing and that they have sorted animals into categories based on some traits. We discussed the meaning of the word classify. I introduced the categories of vertebrates and invertebrates and the sub categories of birds, arthropods, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish.

Day 3
I shared a PowerPoint with the kiddos that explained the traits of the animals in each category.

We then sat in a circle and sorted our animals again, this time according to the scientific categories.

I made this page for independent practice. Thanks DJ Inkers for the clip art! (Note the picture in the middle is a salamander, not a lizard..I needed another amphibian.)

This is one of my favorite units to teach because the firsties just eat it up!! I also love it because it is a great way we can heavily use informational texts!!

~Rebecca

Fry Phrases

After our CBM testing (anyone else use that?!), Rebecca and I noticed that some of our precious kiddos were struggling with their fluency. Everything they read...was...so....slow. (Like what I did there? hehe). Well after some searching we found these wonderful fry phrases. At first, I had my kiddos reading each group of words. But that was a bit boring. Don't get me wrong, the kiddos were doing great, but it didn't have that something extra. So Rebecca and I brainstormed and we decided we would shrink the words, print on golden cardstock, laminate and find a fry container and something to put the fries in!

Brilliant! So we found this cute fry container clipart from DJ Inkers (but you could easily use a real one too!) and we laminated it then cut a slit at the base of the fries. We put a snack baggie behind it (it is just small enough to let the fries poke through the slit). Then we made a mouth, because, well, who doesn't love eating fries?! Rebecca put hers on top of a bowl, I made a brown paper bag. Both have worked out great and we have sooo many students who want to do engage in this activity! We have students pull a fry, read the words, and then feed it to the mouth (adding a fun sound like, "yum" "mmmm" or "num, num, num" also puts a smile on the students' faces!) Love it!

What do you do to help build your struggling readers' fluency?

~ Katie and Rebecca

Weekend Round Up & A Jellybean Subtraction Freebie

Photo courtesy of Picky Palate

Well Sunday has come to an end and I can't believe how fast it went! The Hubs and I worked so hard on our yard and figuring out the car fiasco, I feel like I am ready for another weekend to start. But at the same time, I am so happy with all that we accomplished. Work is kinda funny like that, right? We get so exhausted but so fulfilled with all that we do.

Anywho, in honor of our hard work this weekend, and the fact that the Hubs is feeling a bit under the weather, I tried a new recipe: Chicken Pot Pie Bowls with Puffy Croutons. Oh. My. Stars. This is super tasty! Definitely the feeling of comfort food, but with a twist. We definitely recommend it. :)

In preparation for teaching math tomorrow, I thought playing a Spring Themed game was in order. Hop on over to our TpT store and download your copy for free!

(click the picture to download the copy from our store)

~ Katie

Happy Weekend and An Inflectional Endings Freebie...Whew!

Wow, I can't believe Saturday is practically over. Can I just say that Spring Break needs to be here! Only 5 more days. I can make it, right?! I was so jealous when most of you wonderful girls were having Spring Break, but now that it is actually Spring here in lovely Utah, I think the timing is just right!

I made this quick game on Thursday night for my kiddos to play and review inflectional endings. Then I thought I would clipart it up a bit and make it more Spring-y (if that's a word?) for centers this next week.

My students loved playing the game. It was super cute to hear some of my stellar students not only adding the right inflectional ending to the verb, but then use the new word in a sentence. Can I just say that my kiddos make me smile so much!?

Oh, and here is the freebie part. All you have to do is follow our TpT store here and leave a comment on our TpT site with your email address, then I will gleefully (yes, gleefully) email you the game! Fabulous, right?! I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend and fingers crossed I keep my Spring fever in check for one last week!

~ Katie

Egg Fact Families Activity

Ok, so clearly my sense of time is not quite right as I meant to write my follow-up post, oh um, on Tuesday! Can I just say, this week has been a week! I have been dealing with insurance stuff from a car accident 2 weeks ago - just when you think things are going smoothly then you get the call "Maam', your car has been totaled." Not the call I wanted.

But this is when you start counting all of your blessing - great hubby, cute puppies, 19 awesome kiddos willing and wanting to learn! So yes, stress is there, but I am all smiles today in my classroom!

Ok, ok, onto the math activity. On Monday, we did a jelly bean math activity focusing on fact families. On Tuesday, we stayed with the spring theme and did an egg race. This is how we did it:

• First, put I bought the small Easter eggs, the tiny ones that will fit on a plastic   spoon.
•  I put a number in the egg, and the student teams were challenged to write a fact family using that number as the whole (or we call it the daddy number).
•  The students had to bunny hop to the bucket, put an egg on a plastic spoon and tiptoe back to their team. 
•  Each member of the team wrote a fact family on their own white board (you could use a paper recording sheet if you would like).
• Once all members had their fact families written down, they raised their hands in the air and I checked their work. If it was correct, they would tiptoe back to egg bucket and put a new egg on their spoon. If they were not correct, they would fix and then head to bucket!
• It was a blast!

What do you do in math to help combat Spring Fever?

~ Katie

Jelly Bean Fact Families, A Freebie and Updates

This is the Hubs and mine impulse buy of the night!

Ok, so within the last 12 hours I have sampled 3 brands of jelly beans (um, can I just say this is not an addiction I recommend - man my tummy isn't feeling so smiley!) and I must say that the best I have tasted is the Starburst ones. But the Mike and Ike are close runners up!

Enough talk about jelly beans and on to what the kiddos and I tackled today. To help make Monday Math a bit more exciting, we studied fact families using tasty manipulatives. I made up this practice page (click the picture to download) as our recording sheet. The kiddos ate up this activity! ;)

Tomorrow we are going to have an fact family egg race. More on that tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Now updates: Rebecca and I posted our Sounds for Long A packet on our TpT account. So many fun activities that help our sweet lil' ones practice the 3 main ways to make the long a sound. Check it out here!

Question of the day: Do you follow the new Reading Street program from Pearson? Our school is switching over to it next year and we are wondering what to expect! :)

~ Katie