101st Day of School

What a busy week we've had! After Valentine's Day, we started preparing for our 101st Day of School. We wanted to do something different for our first graders this year since they celebrate the 100th day in Kindergarten. We wanted to get the students excited about learning, kinda of re-ignite the fire they once had. We've had a lot of testing lately and thought these ideas would work to get them in the spirit again!! 

We decided to have three different rotations. One teacher did Reading Stations, I did Math Stations, and another teacher had writing.

In the math room, we had three stations: Fast Math Facts, Frisbee Toss, and Estimation Station! In Fast Math Facts, a parent volunteer showed the students a math problem. When the students were ready to solve, they tossed a ping pong ball into the correct bin. 

The Frisbee Toss game was SO EASY! My husband made a stand out of foam board. 

 I went through my math flash cards that I already had and pulled out addition and subtraction problems with the answers of 10, 15 and 20. I set it up in the hallway so the frisbees wouldn't be an issue for the other games :)

My kids LOVED this game! 

Last, we had Estimation Station. This was SO easy to prep and the kids LOVED it. I'm going to use it again next week with different items! 

For reading, we also had three stations. We put the kiddos into groups of three before rotating! 

At the first station, the kids played "Toss A Digraph". The ping pong balls were labeled with ch/th/wh and ph words. They had to read the word and toss into the correct bin. 

Who knew reading could be SO much fun!! *wink, wink*

Next, the kids moved over to "Toss a Sight Word". The same concept, except just sight words on the balls and one bin to toss it into. For some reason, I guess all of the excitement, I didn't get very many pictures of this game :(

Next, the kids moved to the Build a Tower Station. This idea from the fabulous Cara @ The First Grade Parade. We jut modified it a bit because every station had to have a specific SOL or standard tied to it. All I did was add sight words to the towers. We also had students who built sentence towers. The kiddos loved doing this activity. 

You can get all of the signs and game cards for the activities shown by clicking here!!

For writing, my next door neighbor used Deanna Jump's 100th Day writing project.

This was so.much.fun. The kids were so excited about WRITING which is so hard to do with firsts. 

All and all, it was such a great day! Our students were engaged and learning at the same time!! 

Here's a few goofy pictures of some of my team members and I!! Love them! 

All About Shapes and Patterns

The past two weeks we've been diving into shapes! I tell ya, this is not my favorite SOL to teach. Just because it seems to be so easy and there's only so many ways you can describe a shape!!! Maybe that's just me :) 

I had to find some different ways to teach geometric 2d shapes. We used Linda's Product "What Does The SHAPE Say". I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of the anchor chart! So CUTE! The kids loved it and I feel like it really help spark their interest in "shapes". We were always saying "What does the SHAPE say" and then that high pitch lithe noise that goes along with it haha. 

The kids really enjoyed this activity. We essentially just built  the  2D shapes with q-tips!  The kids really enjoyed bending the q-tips to create the shapes. Couldn't believe how much fun the kids had with this!

You can get this for free RIGHT HERE!

Next, we learned about sorting shapes by different attributes. Sorting is such a hard concept sometimes because they often only want to sort by color or size. Our standards require that students are able to sort the shapes by color, size, thickness and shape.

I created this little sorting center for my kiddos to get a different approach to sorting shapes. 

You can grab your FREE  copy HERE!! 

We use read alouds in EVERY subject, every single day! While I think it is important to use read alouds, I often can only find a few books on the topic verses enough for 10 days. So I made my printable books to give my kiddos exposure to different types of print.

We used my printable Shape Book. This packet comes with some printables to link literacy to math. I'm all about using cross circular items!!

Since I just posted this book, it's on SALE until tomorrow :) Check it out right here!

 Pattern Math Centers

We are now diving into patterns.  The kids are loving making their own patterns. At first, we just used the cards to create our own patterns. But the cards would fall and they'd lose them. I feel like the kidods just needed some guidelines. So I laminated a sentence strip and applied velcro! Ohhh my goodness! What difference this made! They were actually making patterns, touching them, and then labeling them with a expo marker! I was in love! Something so simply yet made SUCH a difference. 

You can check the cards and much more out right here! My Pattern Kit is also on sale! 

Spicing Up The End Of The School Year

Hey friends! I wanted to take a minute to chat about our last few weeks! The last two weeks, we've done Cara Carroll's Camping Unit! My kids LOVED this unit. I actually didn't even get to my favorite part--the skunk creativity! I wanted to take this time to review all our writing traits that we've learned this year. 

We made these adorable little camping books! My kids LOVED doing this. It was a win-win because I gave them several prompts and they just had to pick three to include in their books! You can get your free copy here

 I left a few pages blank so that you can use this product to fit your classroom needs better :) 

To spice up our guided math centers-- I whipped up these easy bottle cap math mats. I used different colors for odd and even numbers for spiral review. I have the students draw their math sentences in their journals and write a sentence telling me which numbers are even and odd.

Click HERE for your guided math freebie!

What are some ways you spice up the end of the year??

Guided Math: Word Problems and Spiral Review

The end is near friends! We have about 15 days of school left! I'm currently in that review status..but I wanted to talk a little bit about guided math and the benefits.

We have benchmarks twice a year. Our first one was in the fall (pre-guided math). My kiddos did not do well at all! It was very sad. I hadn't yet started my "guided math". In fact, I'd only had the kiddos for about two weeks (remember, I started in November). But I still hated seeing them struggle so much. So around Christmas, I implemented a full guided math program. 

I have five or six stations: technology, math literacy, manipulatives, spiral review, puzzles and hands on centers are just a few of the staples I use. 

 For one of my spiral review centers, I used my data to decide which centers my kiddos needed more of. I went with word problems. This is an area that my kiddos struggle with consistently.  What I loved, is that my kiddos were reading and doing math at the same time! I love being about to combine the two subjects! You get more bang for your buck that way! My kiddos loved using my word problem cards in guided math!

These cards are a great tool any time of the year! I'm working on a second set that I intend on sending home for summer review :)