To end the last week before the Christmas holiday, we celebrated a Charlie Brown Christmas! First, I decorated the classroom!! The kids loved it! The balls hanging from the ceiling and the cut outs are from oriental Trading! They are very cute and sturdy! I also put up a Charlie Brown back drop and giant snow globe! This just added to the ambiance of the room! These are also from Oriental Trading! The tables were decorated with green vinyl tablecloths. I got these from oriental Trading and they come on a roll that you cut to fit your table or area you would like to cover! The trees I got from michaels as well as the garland and ornaments. The Charlie Brown cutouts in the tree are actually Charlie Brown photo booth props from oriental Trading! Of course, the kiddos need to have Charlie Brown pencils, erasers and crayons to use for this amazing day! And don’t forget a stocking for them to store them in. These stockings are so cute and the kids can decorate them! We used permanent sharpies and scentos markets!! I got the pencils, erasers, crayons and stockings from oriental Trading! For our day, we made reindeer food! Candy cane reindeer! Reindeer cookies using sugar cookies, frosting and edible reindeer parts made by Wilton! Of course we made Merry Reindeer Munch From the Kindergals!! For our ornament of the day, we made snowmen from oriental Trading! For some games, we played Charlie Brown plinko, bean bag toss and bingo! These are all from Oriental Trading! So there you have it! Our Charlie Brown Christmas! Merry Christmas from our peanuts gang to yours!! |
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Every year at Christmas, I teach my firsties about Christmas in Australia!! I love Australia!! I want to go there sooooo bad!!!! I fell in love with Australia when Steve Irwin was alive and I would watch him all the time! Yes I was obsessed with the Crocodile Hunter!!! Anyways I digress!! So I teach my firsties all about Christmas in Australia! We learn Australian Christmas carols and we read Australian Christmas stories! We read The Christmas Wombat and The Golden Kangaroo! But the absolute highlight of our day was Skyping with Rocking Dan down under! My kids loved it! We sang The Gingerbread Man Description song, The Friends of Ten, What Makes A Good Friend and they got to ask him questions! He also read The Christmas Wombat to us!! We love Rocking Dan and can’t wait to Skype with him again! September 19 is Talk Like A Pirate Day! This is a day that the boys love!! I also love this day. We learned about pirates, got some awesome pirate gear and of course got our picture taken!!! Check out our day below!
I love Dot Day! It is a day based on the book by Peter H Reynolds! It is an amazing book! It teaches the children about having a growth mindset! How important it is to have one and that they can do anything they put their mind too! It is such an important message! To set the stage, the room was decorated with dots!!! We read and discussed the book , The Dot! Then we made our mark everywhere with our dots! We made dots on coffee filters and watched them splatter! We made our mark on big white dots using our smelly markers. These are our reminders that we can do anything. These are hanging on our ceiling so when we start to feel like we can't do it then we look up and see our mark!!! The kids got dot markers and made a dot and created something with a dot! I found the old fashioned candy buttons so they got to eat a dot! They decorated their own sit spot and made their mark' And at the end of the day, they all got a certificate and a pair of polka dot glasses! I almost forgot and of course we got our picture taken!!
September 17 is Constitution Day! This is a day when we focus on and learn about the Preamble of the Constitution! The kids had a ablast! We read the book, We the Kids written by David Catrow. This book is the actual preamble but it is illustrated with kid friendly pictures so the children can understand what each sentence of the preamble means! After reading and discussing the book, we wrote our own class Constitution. We wrote and signed this wearing a colonial hat and using a peacock feather pen! We then drew ourselves as the signers of the Constitution and we hung our constitution and our portraits out in the hallway! It looks amazing! Pictures are a must in these kind of days! So we got our picture taken wearing white wig and a colonial hat! Of course we had the American Symbols in the background!!! to end our lesson, we each got a peacock feather pencil and a piece of parchment paper and we wrote the Constitution! It was a great day!
I have been trying to think of innovative ways to teach my Firsties! I loved the Dr. Seuss room transformation so much that I thought I would try it again. This time, with the help of Oriental Trading, I transformed my room into a pizzeria. First, I covered the tables with this amazing tablecloth roll from Oriental Trading. It is red and white checked! Doesn't it remind you of a pizzeria tablecloth!!!!! I used Melonheadz amazing pizza clip art to create all of my pizza props. First were the oven mitt supply holders. I took their pencil boxes away and enlarged the oven mitt from Melonheadzset and stapled a bag to put their supplies in to the back. Voila, they got to put their supplies in an oven mitt! For their pencils, I enlarged Melonheadz pizza cutter and taped it to the pencil because all pizza chefs need a pizza cutter! I bought pizza pans from the Dollar Tree! I bought one for each pizza chef to have at their place. So here is their place setting! I also decorated the morning message and their morning work sign with pizza clip art fromMelonheadz!!! Oriental Trading had children's aprons and chef hats so I got those in order for my Firsties to be pizza chefs for the day! I also got an apron for myself and my student teacher to be pizza master chefs for the day! Don't you love the hats and aprons!!! Of course we had to get mustaches as well!!! So that was the inside. On the outside, I enlarged the pizza topping clipart from Melonheadz pizza set to make my door into a giant piece of pizza!! Of course I had to have a photo booth outside! So I took a piece of the awesome tablecloth fromOriental Trading, Melonheadz pizza chef enlarged to 500 and an awesome banner I found atTarget and created this awesome photo booth that I later turned into a writing display!! But first, here it is as a photo booth! So our day was centered around pizza. We learned about pizza using a nonfiction text and then they did a follow me activity and made a pizza chef. They then used all of the new knowledge and their personal experiences and wrote a how to writing piece on how to make a pizza. I love how they came out!! They then worked on sentence creation centers and they also did a pizza read the room! All of their centers were put into real pizza boxes that I received from a local pizza parlor!! Then we went into Math! I just love Melissa and Doug products and Oriental Trading does cary them!!!! They had the amazing chef puppet, so of course I had to get one to teach fractions and pizza math with!!! So we used these amazing stickers from oriental trading that looked like real pizzas to practice our fractions. So we made a fraction book, showing a whole pizza, a pizza cut in two halves and a pizza cut into fourths. Then we did a quick assessment by holding up the correct flap and showing the correct fraction when asked! We then used pizza sticker scenes from Oriental Trading and built our own pizzas. We then cut them in half and in quarters. We were asked to come up and feed Chef Charlie different fractions because he was hungry! They loved this activity! Pizza Number Bonds from oriental trading were a big hit during small group time! They also did a pizza skip counting small group activity and a fraction activity! To end our Math block, they had a challenge. I gave each table a different amount of pizza erasers from Oriental Trading!!! They were asked as a team to make as many pizzas as they could before the timer ran out or in one minute! Then they had to show me half of their pizza and a quarter of their pizza!!! During Math RTI, My kids did a pizza one more, one less, ten more, ten less read the room activity! The Pizzeria was a hit! My kids loved it and were so excited to learn!!! Thank you Oriental Trading for being amazing and I can't wait to share my next room transformation with you!!!! I Today is an awesome day!! The best day of the year!!! It is Dr. Seuss' birthday or Read Across America Day!!! To celebrate this day, we did many activities! We had two awesome guest readers!!! Mr. Bryson read Green Eggs and Ham!! Mr. Gibeault read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish!!! Our room was transformed into Seussville!!! We made Green Eggs for a snack!! We had a photo booth!!! We read books about Dr. Seuss and learned so many things we never knew before! Today was an amazing day!!!
Tuesday, February 28 was Mardi Gras!! I wanted the kids to learn about this celebration so I transformed the room for the day. Everything was purple, gold and green. They listened to New Orleans jazz and blues music, read books, watched a National Geographic short video and even ate King Cake! The kids really enjoyed wearing their masks and beads as well as doing the different activities throughout the day!!
To learn about text features, we are focusing on polar bears this week. We have read several books on polar bears and have discussed several text features such as table of contents, glossary and labeling.
We are also using polar bears to teach key details and topic sentences. To focus on facts we made a banner and a lifesize polar bear paw! The kids were excited to make these and couldn't believe that their paws were the size of a frisbee! This is one of my favorite units to teach. I love to teach about Ing words. To teach the children about ing I use the King of Ing! They learn a song about the King of Ing and I have hats that they wear in front of the class. The King's hat has the letters ING on it. We sing the song and then add a letter in front of the ing on the hat. the kids have to read the new word. We do this over and over again. Then we make a King of Ing out of paper and write our ing words on it. Here are a few pictures of the kids in the hat and our King of Ing pictures! Then to teach them that you can have two ings at the end of the word suxh as singing and ringing, two stand at the front of the room with the hat on, shoulder to shoulder and we repeat the song but when we add the sound at the beginning we also add an extra ing!! The kids love it!
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