St. Patty's Poetry & FREE Measurement Printables

Well.....I suppose I'll do just one last blog post before I throw in the towel! 

Because we won't be in school for St. Patty's day (hello spring break!!), we "celebrated" it for the past two weeks with some simple themed activities, literacy centers, and poems:

You may remember the above poem that I used last year as well.

I put each of my firsties' names on a sticky note and each time we read the poem throughout the week, a new set of students got to be "in" our poem.

We also finished up our short-and-sweet linear measurement unit with a couple simple activities. My firsties worked hard while I pulled them for some one-on-one assessments.

For this first activity, the students used little cubes to measure and record the length of each ice cream:

Download this freebie HERE!

Next, they could draw any object/picture they wanted and then they measured the length and width of their drawing with snap cubes:

Download this freebie HERE!

After seeing my kiddies *flip* for my (FREE!) Dr. Seuss flip book, I knew I wanted to create some more. So over the week, I worked on putting together a little bundle of 7 different fiction & non-fiction reading response and comprehension flip books:

I have so many plans of how to use these with my firsties: from simple follow-up activities to various shared and guided-reading texts, to comprehension and story element assessments.

(As seen in the two pictures above, the books can be printed on either coloured or plain white paper)

If you think your kiddies would enjoy flip books as much as mine do, check out my new obsession in more detail :P

And now I am *officially* on spring break!!! Here's to a slightly productive and excessively lazy week ahead ;)

Tables, Anchor Charts, Gingerbread, OH MY!

On Thursday, something mind-blowing went down...MY TABLES ARRIVED!!! I ordered them about a month ago and, because I was incredibly impatient and could not wait until the custodian moved the desks on the weekend, I took matters into my own hands:

I spent my night moving desks out, and tables in. Great exercise, let me tell you! 

Ah, the finished product :) Already, the tables have solved so many little problems that were making my life (and the kiddies' lives) unnecessarily difficult: Now everyone can reach the supplies, goodbye silly arguments! And most importantly, I can easily sit and work with the groups that need one-on-one assistance during periods of independent work. Plus they increase walking space and generally look awesome.

Anyways, enough of my obsession with my new tables. On to some learning! First up: Science!

We have been learning about energy and this week was all about energy sources and outputs:

(sorry for the quality...I had to use my phone since my camera wasn't charged!)

We also completed a couple activities from my Science Pack. 

 Moving on now to literacy; First thing every morning, after morning routines, is our shared reading and literacy centres. This week we explored Ezra Jack Keats' infamous book, The Snowy Day:

I love this book, and so do the kiddies! I realized that way back when, we talked all about nonfiction but I kind of forgot about exploring fiction...oops! So this book was the perfect opportunity. We built on this anchor chart all week: 

(please excuse the horrible printing...especially at the bottom :S)

For our Oral Language Centre, I stole this awesome idea from my team teacher: The kids take turns giving each other instructions of various details to add to a blank colouring page. But here's the catch: I put up a screen between them so they couldn't peek at each other's drawings. The point is that they had to give very clear and detailed clues {shape, size, colour, location} so that the pictures would be as similar as possible at the end of the week. You can print off this worksheet and others like it HERE (scroll down and make sure to click for the B&W versions). These two did really well!

Next up, after literacy centres, we have shared/modelled whole group writing and independent writing. We are now finished with Making Connections and are moving on to Descriptive Writing. After our diagnostic assessment earlier in the week {describe one of the four seasons}, I'm starting off this unit with adjectives! First, I read the kiddies a couple pages from this FANTASTIC book to help them understand what adjectives are (I found my copy at a Miko Toy Warehouse Sale back home in Toronto, but you can grab a copy HERE)

 Here's the anchor chart we built with this book:

Kids love to talk about themselves so what better way to introduce adjectives than to have them describe their awesome and unique personalities?! This activity is included in my Writing Focus #3: Descriptive Writing unit:

(I love it: "I wrote clumsy bumsy because my mom calls me that!")

Next we were given an impromptu challenge to decorate gingerbread people for a contest held by the Canada Post Office. So after a busy day of hard work, we had a little holiday fun and decorated our gingerbread with markers, pencil crayons, sequins, stickers, and tinsel. I ended up with some gingerladies, gingercats, and even a gingerzombie! And of course, I forgot to take pictures of the finished product (blame it on my foggy Friday brain) so this will have to do for now:

And that's it for now! The snow is falling and I'm off to hunt for my first real Northwestern Ontario Christmas tree!!! God bless us, everyone :)

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November 11th, etc.!

TGIF!!! Actually, TGIMMF to be exact (Midnight Madness!). Which means after this post I will be heading out with my lovely sister to spend way too much money downtown. Anywho, here's a quick little update on some of the things my firsties have been up to this week (I apologize in advance for the mini post: I kind of slacked off in my picture-taking this week. I promise to get back on track next week!)

Of course we had Remembrance Day not too long ago so my kiddies did a little activity to honour the day:

We talked about Remembrance Day, read some stories, and I tried to help them understand what it means to THEM. November 11th is a tough day for young children to understand so I connected it with our "special" O Canada song that we sing only on Fridays, "God Bless You Canada" (you can listen to the song on YouTube HERE). Boy, oh, boy do my kiddies LOVE this song. They sing SO loud whenever I play it. 

Tangent: At the end of the song on Friday last week, one of my little darlings got down on both knees, arms spread wide, eyes closed, and head to the sky (it's a very dramatic ending), and I swear it took all of my might not to burst out in hysterics. BEYOND adorable, I'm laughing just thinking about it.

ANYWAYS, I had my kiddies write about why they were proud to live in Canada, and then we did a little poppy craftivity with crunched up tissue paper:

"I'm proud to be in Canada because the flag stands for freedom..." *precious*

Next up we did yet another activity to practice our understanding of Daily & Seasonal Changes. The kiddos had to  draw a picture of each season and include a picture of what they would wear. Then they had to put the seasons in the correct order and we made a little film strip and TV box to bring it all together. They turned out super cute:

Last but not least, I have one of our centre activities to share: During our "investigation station" (often my oral language centre), I had my firsties use old book orders to cut out and sort book covers into the category of fiction or non-fiction. They had to talk about each book and help each other judge which category the book fell into based on what we have talked about in the past. If they finished early, I gave them the added challenge of looking through our classroom library and writing the titles of books that could be sorted into either category:

That's all for now! Have a fantabulous weekend everyone :)

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Get teaching tips, ideas, and FREEBIES every now and then.

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