Who Stole Our Candy Corn?!

We had a Candy Corn Bandit steal our jar of candy corn today, as I'm sure you have already been informed.  The jar was sitting on our blue round table when we left for lunch, and when we returned from recess, it was GONE!  The bandit had taken it and left a note and a clue in its place.  Can you believe that?!

We were quite upset and shocked that someone had taken our candy.  Before going on our search, we made some predictions as to WHO we thought stole the candy and WHERE it was hidden.  Once our predictions were stated, we tiptoed down the hall toward our first destination.  You see, our first clue said to look in the place where we eat a meal.  Once we found our second clue under a cafeteria table, we were off again!  The bandit's clues led us to the gym, playground, library, and then back to our classroom, where we found the last clue and our jar of candy corn (thank goodness!).

Racing from the playground to the library!

Tiptoeing from the library back to our classroom...

SUCCESS!

The kids were really into the whole adventure.  They were curious as to WHO took their candy and were intent on finding it.  Now, the candy corn bandit did not only strike in our room, but in Babbling Abby's classroom as well.  Mrs. Mullins shares her class's adventure HERE and HERE.  Thanks to her, the bandit made its way to our room... ;)

We enjoyed our candy corn at the end of the day and still have more left!  I'm sure we will continue to enjoy it until the BIG DAY on Thursday.  Oh, the excitement is building, for sure!  Don't worry, there will be a post recapping all of the spooktacular Halloween activities!

Miss Kearns :)

Lesson Learned... Don't Make Promises You Can't Keep

Wow... time really got away from me last week and this past weekend, so I was not able to post.  My research grad class and wedding planning on top of school has proven to be quite a challenging juggle for me.  I hope to get it together eventually.  I really enjoy blogging to you all about what your children are doing in class, so I apologize for the lack of blogging this past month.

Okay, so, we have learned all of our short vowel sounds.  If you have driven past our room, you may have noticed the various shapes hanging in the window.  Well, those are our visual resources and reminders of the short vowel sounds.  Here is what they look like from the inside of our room...

Short a apple tree

Gilbert's short i fish bowl

Short o socks

Short e eggs in Betty Bird's nest

Short u bugs

**Yes, it's dark outside this window... I really do live at school... ;)

All of these projects were made by the kiddos.  They had to write the short vowel word on their object.  These will eventually come down once we begin learning long vowel sounds, so that we can put up new resource reminders. :)

We also made anchor charts that will stay up all year.  The students gave me all of the words to write on these charts...

 

In science we have been working with matter and describing it with all of our describing words, or adjectives.  We have especially been using our senses to describe the matter around us.  It was absolutely PERFECT when Gianna came to school with a big bag of freshly picked apples.  I cut them up and as we sampled the apple slices, we used our senses to describe the apples (matter!).  Here is the anchor chart of their observations....

Thank you Gianna and family for this impromptu yummy matter describing lesson!!

After describing matter, we dove right into the three states of matter: solids, liquids, and gasses.  We will be doing many experiments and observations to fill our brains with these three states.  Here is the anchor chart we made together to summarize the three types...

You can only imagine the excitement when I blew bubbles out of our bubble bottle that inspired this chart... :)

In math we have been immersed in adding and subtracting.  As a visual resource and reminder, we made Gus the Plus and Linus the Minus posters full of words that tell what each sign does (the children provided all of these words :))!

 hmm... I see to have never taken misplaced the Linus the Minus poster... I'll have to snap that picture tomorrow and insert it here later... oops!

Also, we have been practicing our math facts, as I am sure you have heard.  The kids are SO loving Gumball Math Facts.  I cannot take the credit for this idea though.  I found it on this blog: Made for 1st Grade.  I linked the post about their Gumball Math.  In fact, I bought their Gumball pack to add to our fun!  Here is our Gumball Math Fact wall...

This is the fact booklet that the students will use to study.  We add a new page every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  However, your child should only study the page he/she needs to pass.

Last week we were working with ten-frames and parts of ten.  We used daubers (always fun!) to make parts of ten in our ten-frames and wrote the number sentence to go with each frame.

Last, but not least, a few weeks ago we did this amazing lesson that I found on my favorite blogger's blog.  It was so touching (I had teary eyes!).  Here is the post from my other blog where I shared it...
So you know that saying, "Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"???  It's false.  I mean, yes, words will not actually break your bones, but they DO hurt.  When I found this little think before you speak activity on Cara Carroll's blog HERE (at the bottom of her post), I was thrilled.  Sometimes kids know exactly what they are saying, but sometimes they do not realize the hurtfulness of their words.  This touching lesson really makes the lils think about their words.
I began by telling them the sticks and stones saying.  Some had heard of it, but most had not.  I explained what it meant, and we discussed how mean words can hurt our feelings.  They all said they have experienced hurtful words... :/  Then, I explained that we were going to read the story Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes and gave a short summary, describing how the other characters are going to make fun of Chrysanthemum's name.  Earlier, I had cut out a BIG heart from red bulletin board paper.  I told the lils that we were going to crinkle and crumple up the heart each time someone in the story made fun of Chrysanthemum.  As I read, we passed the heart around and crumpled it up for each hurtful word said to Chrysanthemum.  They were amazed at how wrinkled it was becoming!  Then, at the end of the story, the characters start to say kind things about her name.  We tried our best to smooth out the wrinkles but to no avail.  One lil was actually pretty upset that he was unable to straighten out the wrinkles... aww!!  We discussed that even though the other students started being nice to Chrysanthemum, her heart was still wrinkled from their unkind words.  To end the activity, we wrote our names on band aids (pen worked best on the fabric band aids) to try to help heal Chrysanthemum's heart AND as a little pledge to think before we speak.

This was such a beautiful lesson.  My lils really took it to heart, pun intended.  ;)   As they were patching up the heart with their band aids, I heard them say, "Let's help her!" and "Let's make her feel better!"  So sweet! I will hang to heart in the room as our visual reminder to think before we speak.

So there ya go, a little recap of this past month.  My next post will have to be about all of the center games/activities that we have been playing.  I keep the popular games on our blue center shelves for the kids to play during free (say what?!) time and when they finish early.  These activities are really motivating for them, and they have taken charge of the center games, which leaves me some time to work one-on-one or in small groups to review other skills.  It is FABULOUS!

Well, I hope you are enjoying fall so far and gearing up for Halloween!  I can't wait to see all of these costumes I keep hearing about!  Also, the kindergarten teachers and I may be planning another costume collaboration like our Rock, Paper, Scissors from last year... :)

~Miss Kearns

Welcome to the New Blog!!

Hello everyone!  Welcome to the new blog.  Hopefully, this will work and I can update easily.  I will post soon.

Miss Kearns :)

Some Anchor Charts and Such

Hello!  So, remember when I said I was going to take pictures on Monday (9/16).  Well the batteries decided to die...oy vey!  Therefore, I took the pictures today (9/17) of our anchor charts and some other projects we have completed.

Last week, we learned about the short a sound.  Here is the anchor chart we made of short a words that will hang up all year as a visual resource.  

Here is the short a apple tree that will hang in our window for a few weeks as another visual reminder.

Here is the BIG tree with our short a apples!  You can see it in our window if you drive by our classroom.

Short A and Thank You Target!

We had quite the busy week last week (Sept 9-13).  It was our first week carrying out the new Journey's reading program.  We mixed seat work with center work.  Sometimes we worked out of our Reader's Notebook, and other times we worked in groups rotating around the room to visit various centers to do activities that reviewed short a words, spelling words, vocabulary words, reading, ABC order, etc.  Here are some pictures (finally!) to see what we have been up to...

This center was called House of Sticks.  The kids had to search for the popsicle sticks hidden in the sand.  Then, they had to write the word from the stick on their paper to build a house of sticks.

Here is our spelling center.  I posted the lists, and the kids spelled out the words from their list with foam letters.

Creative way to make a 't' there... :)

In this center, the kids had free choice from the leveled readers bucket.  Also, they got to use our phonics phones, which magnify our voices so that we can hear ourselves read and blend the sounds.  I made these 2 summers ago using PVC piping from Lowes.  (another lovely find from pinterest)

Here we had the opportunity to use highlighters to highlight the short a words and then write them in the frames below.  Using something other than a pencil is always cause for excitement!

This is our Boggle board (yes, pinterest again!).  The rules aren't necessarily the same as the Boggle game.  Here they can use any combination of letters to make short a words.  They do not just have to use the letters that touch to spell words.  This center was a BIG hit!  Also, they are able to return to this center during free time or if they are an early finisher to make more words.  :)  

To help us learn the short a vowel sound, we met the Scraggles!  Scraggles only have short a names and only like things that have short a names, like crackers and apples.  We came up with a HUGE list of short a names on the SmartBoard.  Then, the students chose a Scraggle, wrote its name on its shirt, and then colored it in bright colors (because Scraggles are also brightly colored creatures!).  

Hmmm... having trouble with Google Sites again!  It is not letting me upload anymore pictures!  If anyone knows how to troubleshoot this, please let me know.  :)  Well, I wanted to take some pictures of a few anchor charts we made and our BIG short a tree in our window, so I will have to make another post tomorrow.  

In other news, a good friend of mine, Ryan Shedlock, works at the Mt. Nebo Target as an Executive Team Leader.  He knows of my addiction love of the Target Dollar Spot.  I decorate the classroom for every season solely with the products sold in that section.  So anyways, a few months ago Ryan asked me if I would like all of the leftover back-to-school items from the Dollar Section at his store (for FREE!) when they switched it out for the Halloween/Fall items.  I'm sure you know what my answer was.... YES!!!!!!!  Well, last week (Monday) Ryan texted me during school and said there were 17, yes 17, boxes of Dollar Spot goodies ready for me to pick up!!!  So, later that evening, my mom, dad, and I drove out to the Mt. Nebo Target to pick up the very generous donation.  The next morning you would have thought Christmas came early!  The teachers were so excited to unpack it all and use the items in their classrooms.  After school that day we did just that.  We unpacked, sorted, and "shopped!"  We still have items stored away for safe keeping to continue using them throughout the year.  Ryan and the Mt. Nebo Target did not ask me to promote them.  I chose to share their extreme generosity on my own.  It's too amazing to not share!  So again, thank you thank you THANK YOU!!

Our First Week in First Grade

We had a great first week!! We learned a lot of rules and procedures in our classroom so that it can run smoothly for the rest of the year.  Since we were having such a fantastic week, I decided to introduce center learning.  There were 5 centers spread around the room that the students rotated to and completed various activities.  The centers included a capital and lowercase letter matching game, putting three letters in ABC order, finding letters in a letter collage, and identifying the letter after the one shown on the card.  For our first time doing centers, we did wonderfully!  Here are some pictures of what we did: 

First, we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to review our letters and letter sounds.

Fishy Bubbles Game: match the lowercase fish cards to the uppercase bubbles in the aquarium

Here we put the letters in the coconuts in ABC order.

Here we had to find the letter in the collage and circle the color of the letter on the worksheet.  This helped us review our color words too!

For this center, we had to identify the letter that came next and record it on our worksheet.

Sometimes we finished early and got to make words with magnetic letters.

We also did some other activities that are displayed in the hallway.  We read NO David! and then made our own David book but switched it around so that David was following our classroom rules, hence, Yes, David!  In addition, we made a Who Am I book to learn more about each other.  On the front side of the page are clues about a classmate, and on the back is the name and picture of that classmate.  We read through the book together to try and guess who was who before we put it in the hall.  

Yes David! book page

Who Am I? book page

We have been working with alphabet mystery codes all week, so we decided to make mystery codes with our names.  I was impressed with their creativity on these!  They had to draw pictures that started with the same letters in their names.

Can you figure out whose name is hiding under the blue paper?  

Did you guess right??!!

Here are their Alphabet Project letters.  I'm loving these!  They really did a great job on them.

Here are some up close.

Okay, so, hopefully you made it to the end of this very long post!  Enjoy the extra day off and I will see you next week when we will start getting into our first grade curriculum.

~Miss Kearns :)