Clouds!

Hooray! We are so close to finishing our weather/seasons unit. Today was our last day of clouds and we push into the water cycle starting tomorrow.

The kids have done SUPER AWESOME with clouds, especially the pronunciation of the cloud names. They are so darling... every time there's a cloud in the sky they are staring up deciding which type it is, LOVE IT! To finish off clouds I had a tone of ideas, but a short week + a release day = less projects :(  So, we did a cloud accordion book with cotton ball clouds and a little black (which was to turn out gray, but you know those heavy handed first graders!) watercolor paint for that "stormy/fog" look.

Not super fancy but the kids adored it! After we finished the "art" aspect, we read they book to our buddies telling them all the facts we knew about each cloud. A fun way to end clouds!

Tomorrow is turkey day and I am excited! I made a new turkey pattern and I think it will be super cute, plus we have been talkin' turkeys all week, so their stories should be good, fingers crossed!

A Turkey Time Freebie!

Happy Sunday!

I have been been out and about this weekend in awe of all of the Christmas goodies making their way into stores (LOVE this time of year), but we can't forget about the turkey! So, in honor of the gobbler himself, here a little game I made called Turkey Time. We are reviewing time to the hour and half in class so this will fit in great this week. Click the pic to download and enjoy!

Weather Tools, Clouds and Pilgrims!

Okay, here we go.

This week we have been doing district benchmarks so, keeping up with classroom goodies has been tough. So here is a recap of some highlights from our week!

We are closing in on the final stretch of our weather unit. We finished up talking about tools to measure weather and completed these pages in our science journals.

You can get the weather tool pages HERE!

We also began learning about clouds. I took some tips from Cara at The First Grade Parade and Abby at The Inspired Apple to get our cloud week in gear.

And using my limited tech skills I managed to connect my desktop to the document camera and projector to show a powerpoint presentation I made about clouds. I amazingly found one pic of clouds over the Golden Gate Bridge... the kids were in awe :) If you think it might be useful to you, click the clouds to download the presentation.

The font wouldn't transfer, so hopefully you can change it to something cute when you download!

Next week we will do our cloud accordion books and It Looked Like Spilt Milk writing and art. Stay tuned for pics.

Yesterday we did our first "November" art of the month. We cranked out our Pilgrim boys and girls for our literacy quilt and compared and contrasted Pilgrim kids to 2011 kids in response to our literature, Sarah Morton's Day.

And a random, because I love my kiddos work... We reviewed short I this week and we made these short I pigs. I gave a directed art lesson on how to make the pigs and they filled them with short I words...SO cute :)

lengthy right?... well I'm glad you stuck with me. Have a very happy weekend!

Why Thank You :)

Thanks to sweet ol' Marcy over at Buzzin' on Cupcakes in 1st grade, I have been awarded the Blog on Fire Award! So to play by the rules, here are seven things about me and few blogs to check out...

1. I love cold, winter weather! It doesn't happen too often in Cali, so when we get it, I relish in the crispness of it all.

2. I am an avid crafter... cards, scrapbooks, and my latest adventure holiday decorations.

3. My husband and I desperately want a dog, but feel bad to keep him cooped up in an apartment all day.

4. Red is my favorite color! I mean ALL TIME FAVORITE! One Christmas when I was young I actually requested RED THINGS from Santa!

5. I am addicted to the DVR. Who knew life could be so blissful without commercials?

6. I want to visit every national park before I die... hello bucket list!

7. I love Disneyland, especially at the holidays!

Alrighty, you now know 7 random tidbits about me. Here are a few blogs I have come to adore:

The Teacher's Cauldron
Color Me Happy in Kindergarten
Pencils, Glue, and Tying Shoes
Rowdy in First Grade

Have fun checking them out! Stay tuned for some weather and cloud activities!

Double Facts!

This past week we worked on strategies for addition. One of the more fun ones is using the doubles. I teach doubles four a couple of weeks so that the kiddos get some BIG time practice and hopefully start to memorize them!

We always start out with The Doubles Rap. I learned this when I taught SAXON math and have incorporated it ever since! The kids just love it... and we add some pretty funny movements to reinforce (video would be hilarious... me, getting my rap on, boy oh boy!). I have changed the words a bit from the original version, so that it would work for my kids. We have it poster size in  the room and they have a copy to keep in their desk for practicing. Click the pic to get your copy!

The doubles were easy to recognize when we compared it to a double scoop of our favorite ice cream! We made these ice cream cones in our fave. flavors and put a doubles fact of our choice inside. As you can see, no template was provided...but they came out pretty darn cute anyway!

In math tubs we did some more doubles work with an ice cream matching game... and any time ice cream is involved the excitement factor goes way up... the kids were pumped! I didn't get a pic, but I'll grab one this week and add it in later :) Click the pic to get the game and HERE for the recording sheet!

All this talk about ice cream is making me want some, ha! Have a happy weekend.

It's Pumpkin Time!

We had a pumpkin week this week; it was all pumpkins, all the time :)

We jumped off by reading some great non fiction pumpkin books to learn about the life cycle of the pumpkin. We made a fun project out of paper plates courtesy of Michelle at Fabulous in First .  We especially loved the paper plate pocket. I think they turned out fantastic!

We did a fun sink or float activity. Can I just say that I love to mislead them in this activity... awful right?, but it is just more fun when they are SO surprised that it floats...

We completed an investigation worksheet to go along with our sink/float experiment and you can have it too! Click HERE to download!

Then we investigated the pumpkin. We did this with the apple a few weeks ago. My kiddos really liked it, so its a reprise! We did the outside first and did some expository writing to go along.

Later we cracked open the pumpkin to count seeds in groups of 10 and carve (all thanks to Cara's great ideas over at The First Grade Parade!).

There were 315 seeds!

The finished pumpkin

Have a happy Friday night!

For my fast finishers...

Have you seen these? If you haven't check them out now!

I have such a split level class, that after our math lesson there are 15 kids done almost instantaneously! It is ridiculous... now don't get me wrong, it is fabulous that I have kids high in math and it makes me available to my kiddos that need the extra small group time, but what to do with those fast finishers? Wrap ups are my answer. They help the kids with their math facts and can be self checking, but I have them run it by me first so I can keep track of their work :) Best of all, the kids are IN LOVE and silent cheer every time I allow them as a finisher choice. Nice, right?

Have a peek at my firsties working hard with their wrap ups!