Election Day 2012

Since presidential elections only happen every four years here in the U.S. I thought I'd take advantage of the occasion and make it a learning experience for the kids. The lesson that I wanted the 1st and 2nd graders to take away from all this is that they have a voice and that their voice can help to make a difference in our government. In addition, I wanted to help teach them the importance of being involved in the community (which, by the way has been our theme for social studies over the past several weeks). The class was pretty disappointed to find out that they can't vote in real life for another 10-12 years. However, they were excited that we were going to have our own mock election. I hope you enjoy these photos as much as we enjoyed the voting process!

Here's a photo of our ballot box, campaign posters, election themed books, and some fun decor!

We used our privacy screens as voting booths. After all, voters have a right to keep their votes private!

Before casting their votes, students had to present their Voter Identification Card. After voting, they each received an "I Voted!" sticker that they proudly wore for the rest of the day. (Isn't this self-portrait of one of my 1st graders THE cutest drawing ever? The missing teeth - that's my favorite part!)

After we tallied the votes we did a fun graphing activity. I am sure that some of you are probably curious . . . Obama won by a landslide in our classroom and after the announcement was made two Romney supporters were in tears.

Kudos goes out to the all the teachers out there who created mini-units specifically for the election. There were so many creative resources out there, it was hard to pick which ones to use! Here's a list of the resources I used:

• "Hooray for Election Day!" by Gladys of Teaching in High Heels
• "Pint-Sized Presidential Fun" by Cara Carroll of The First Grade Parade
• "Let's Vote!" by Christie of First Grade Fever

Goodbye October, Hello November!

The first quarter of school flew by so fast! The class learned so much in the first nine weeks of school, and there is so much more to look forward to.

We have been busy learning about communities for social studies over the past couple of weeks. The kids really enjoyed this "Me on the Map" activity that I found on Pinterest. (As always, my favorite site never lets me down in the idea department!) Quote from one of my 1st graders while we were working on putting our projects together, "This isn't work! This is fun!"

To download the template for this project, please visit the blog "Pencils, Glue & Tying Shoes HERE. Ideas for other activities (also found on Pinterest!) that the kids really enjoyed can be found HERE and HERE.

This past Wednesday, all EPAA students had a special assembly. Coach Casio presented 10 health and wellness principles of "The Green Body Pledge" to the students.

Parents, and anyone who is local to us, our school is having a Scholastic Book Fair. Proceeds from this fundraiser will be divided between the classrooms. About 80% of our classroom library is actually comprised of books from my own personal library. Don't tell my husband, but I purchase books for our library each month! If anyone would like to help purchase books for our classroom library, we have a classroom wish list at the book fair. The book fair runs through November 7, and hours are 3-4 P.M. We also have a wish list on Amazon that can be found HERE.

Have a great November!

Art: A Lesson in Pointellism

Last week's fall-themed art lesson was inspired by one of my favorite paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jette by Georges Seurat, as well as THIS ART PROJECT I found on Pinterest. The children created fall trees using pointellism, a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. (Definition from Wikipidia.)

Image from The Art Institute of Chicago's website

The kids had so much fun creating leaves with tempera paint and cotton swabs. There were many groans of disappointment when it was time to put our art supplies away. Parent, if you're interested in seeing all of the class' most current artwork, please stop by! Our art is hanging up int he hallway of our building.

For those wondering about the hat that one of our artists is wearing, she earned enough U Bucks to purchase a "Cat in a Hat" coupon. More about our behavior/classroom economy system in another blog post!

Daily 5 Choices

We have successfully trained in all but one of our Daily 5 choices! Daily 5 provides the structure for our Reading Workshop. The kids have really worked hard on building their stamina in each of the rotation choices over the weeks. I love that even in their "free time" they are taking it upon themselves to work on one of the choices.

For more information on The Daily 5 structure, check out out the 2Sisters' (creators of The Daily 5) website HERE. I must point out their tag line, "Work smarter, not harder." I am totally on board with that work ethic!

For "Read to Self" the most popular choice of seating are the classroom laundry baskets. Since I don't have enough laundry baskets for each student and plenty of other choices for seating, students go through a seating rotation. One of my 2nd graders got tired of waiting for her turn in the laundry baskets, so last week she offered to bring in her own laundry basket from home. Too funny!




We finally got our Writing Center up and running for our "Work on Writing" choice. Three students are allowed at the Writing Center. However, since all our paper supplies are located here, anyone can write and in any spot in the classroom. It helps that each student has a clipboard in their Book Bins. We use those clipboards in the Math Corner during Calendar Time as well.


Here's a close-up of a few reference books. The most popular one is the baby naming book. This is to help the students select names for fictional characters in their stories. The runner-up in popularity is the rhyming dictionary. I'm sure that when we have our unit on poetry, this one will be used even more. Another reference book that's sitting in my Amazon cart waiting to be purchased is a dictionary of idioms. We had a discussion on idioms closer to the start of the school year, not a full-blown unit, mind you, and for awhile they kept saying, "That's an idiom!" many, many times during the school day (and at home according to several parents).

Writing center kit "I can write a . . ." can be purchased HERE, and is created by Teri whose blog "A Cupcake for the Teacher"is an incredible resource for lower elementary teachers.

Not only did we get our Writing Center up and running, the "Word Work" stations are also in business! These stations are full of activities that help us practice our spelling pattern words and sight words. I ran out of drawers, and ended up purchasing another rolling cart to fill up with more goodies for stations. So many ideas, so little time - and room!

And what are "Word Work" stations without a Word Wall? Our weekly Spelling words are in the small box on the left. Students are tracked into two groups. Five of the spelling words contain the spelling/phonics pattern that we are studying for the week. The other five words are high-frequency (sight) words. These words are from the Fry Word List. As a reference for their own personal writing, the big box on the right lists sight words, also from the Fry Word List.

Word Wall kit, created by super teacher Erica Bohrer, can be purchased HERE.

I usually decorate with borders from the teacher store, but I happened upon this fancy polka dotted duct tape and fell in love. I used it to create our Word Wall.



And finally, my last Daily 5 choice to share is "Read to Someone." We are still in the process of building our stamina for this rotation. Isn't this the cutest photo of two our our 2nd graders doing "Read to Someone" and sporting our very fashionable reading glasses?! Yes, the lenses have been punched out, and they are available in fun jewel colors at your local Dollar Tree.

So that's it. Four of our five rotations. Our last choice to learn is "Listen to Reading", and once we've got a handle on that rotation I will share photos and news.

"Lollipop Trees"

The class has been studying non-fiction texts with a fall theme. During Friday's art class, I had the kids work with pastel chalks on construction paper. The goal was to create fall trees with a fun, modern twist. The kids decided to call our creations "lollipop trees." No matter what, I think they all did lovely work!

Happy October!

Here's a look at some of the things we've been doing over the past few weeks.

One of our writing lessons taught the students how to label. Some of the kids have really enjoyed labeling, so much that they now label everything. Anchor chart and lesson inspired by this blog post at the Inspired Apple.

We had a health unit for Science that focused on healthy eating and getting active, I think I mentioned it in my last post. One of our culminating activities was filling up a food plate with healthy food choices. Some of the kids even labeled their foods which goes to show that they were paying attention to our labeling lessons. Hooray for that! (Activity from this unit at TpT, created by the teacher over at T.G.I.F. blog.)

Here is one of our literacy anchor charts. The students are really getting the hang of what questions they should ask to help them them become better readers. Lifted this anchor chart HERE from one of my favorite teacher blogs, The Inspired Apple. 

Over the past two weeks we have been learning about nonfiction texts. Inspired by this wonderful anchor chart over at 2nd Grade Shenanigans.

The nonfiction texts we have been studying about over the last two weeks have been science books with fall themes. Topics included leaves changing colors, animals preparing for hibernation, fall temperatures, pumpkins, and apples. Last week we took a virtual field trip to Libby's pumpkin farm, the company that makes canned pie filling.
    

On Friday we studied apples. I brought two types of apples for the kids to taste - Gala and Honeycrisp. We compared and contrasted their colors, sizes, shapes, textures, and tastes. At the end of the lesson we voted on which apple we thought tasted better. Honeycrisp won by a large majority!

Here's a photo of our PK-4th grade choir singing at the church during Education Sabbath. They did a fabulous job!

Reading & Writing

Here's a look at some of the mini-lessons we have had so far in reading and writing. Pinterest has been such a wonderful resource. I end up finding excellent resources as well as blogs from fellow lower elementary school teachers who are incredibly inspiring.

The class brainstormed this list of what readers read. This anchor chart was borrowed from The First Grade Parade blog.



Here's another list the class created. This chart inspired by The Teacher Wife blog.

We started Daily 5, the structure we use for our reading workshop. The students have learned how to shop for books from our classroom library. They have also learned how to care for our books and how to keep their individual book bins neat and orderly. Currently we are working on building our reading stamina and completing reading responses that require students to write about a book's beginning, middle, and end.

Here's a quick look at how we remembered and honored the heroes of 9/11. Thank you, parents for completing the at-home activity with your children.

One month of school!

I can't believe that school has been in session for one month now! We have learned so much already, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. We have so much more to learn and only 161 days of school left to squeeze it all in (not that I'm counting *wink*). It seems that each school year goes by faster than the last. Wish there was a way I could slow things down!

Here are some of the fun things we have been doing over the past month.

These are several self-portraits that we displayed during Back-to-School Open House. The kids really enjoyed doing these. For any teachers out there wanting to do this in their own classrooms CLICK HERE to get free printables for this project.

In Bible class we are currently studying about the first family God created on Earth. The kids made drawings of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden. This one made me smile. Clearly, Adam and Eve's belly buttons are the best part, but then it made me wonder whether or not they even had any!

During the first full week of school, the class had a great time creating their first glyphs during Math class. Some of you are probably scratching your heads wondering what a glyph is. (My husband did!) A glyph is a pictoral form of data collection. In these glyphs, a pair of pants or a dress represents the gender of a child. The number of buttons represents a child's age. The color of shoes tells whether or not a child likes school. Fortunately for me, a resounding majority of my class enjoys school. Phew! For a free copy of this activity CLICK HERE.

Right now we are in the middle of our "Getting Fit & Eating Healthy" science unit. This week the class has been learning about healthy vs. unhealthy foods. We did a food sort today. Disclaimer: for the vegetarian/vegan families in our classroom, please know that we did discuss non-meat options and substitutes for the Protein and Dairy groups. :o) Next week will be the "getting fit" part of our unit. Parents, your children will probably be sleeping very well next week! Resources for the food sort are from this wonderful unit that's available for purchase CLICK HERE.

And finally, a super cute photo of Coco our class mascot at church this past Sabbath beside one of our classroom friends that he was spending the weekend with. Coco has already spent three weekends with three different families, and the class has really loves hearing about his adventures.

What's in a name?

I wanted to share a writing activity that the kids and I really enjoyed last week. I got this idea from one of my favorite teaching blogs, The Inspired Apple. This teacher makes the most creative anchor charts. I bought myself a whole new set of Mr. Sketch markers, I was so inspired!

For this activity, I wrote my name quite fancily and then made a graphic organizer of all the things that I love and make me, well, me! The kids did such a wonderful job writing and illustrating their own names and the things that they love and enjoy. I was really proud of them for working so hard. Their finished pieces will go into their writing binders. All the things that they drew and wrote about themselves will be  topics for them to write about during writers workshop.

On another note, our classroom has been coming together slowly but surely. This part of our room makes me happy . . . all our classroom supplies organized and labeled in these wonderful Iris drawers that I purchased during Office Max's back to school Buy One, Get One sale last month!

This part of the room is our math corner. For a number of students, this is a favorite spot because they LOVE doing Calendar time. We do quite a bit of learning during Calendar time. Basic numeracy, skip counting, money, time, place value, weather, patterns, tallies, bar graphs, and math vocabulary. We'll be adding temperature, estimation, and more. This is where we also work on our 100 Books in which we do an in-depth study of the number of the day. We also sing our math songs "Days of the Week", "Months of the Year", and "The Money Song" in this corner.

Have a great week!

Finally!

I am still here! We've been in Florida for five weeks and counting. I haven't had much time to do anything except unpack our house, set up my classroom, and get ready for the start of a school year.

Here are a few pictures of my classroom before I started setting up. My room is quite spacious as you can see.























 One of the first things I set up was our classroom library.

Our first day of school was one week ago today. I've been having a wonderful time getting to know my students. One thing to get used to are all the bugs and spiders. I'm not a bug person. Don't get me wrong. I'm fascinated by them (that's the science loving person in me talking), but there are tons of them and many are BIG. For example, I had to rescue one of my little firsties from this spider the other day during recess time:

A spider person I am not. But as the teacher, I had to put on my brave face even though all I wanted to do was scream and run the other direction!

One fun thing that the kids have been doing at recess is finding little frogs. This is definitely not something we ever did during recess back in Illinois.

Unforuntely, one of my own children fell and spent some time in the ER last night. We're hoping and praying that once the doctors are able to get a clear picture of his elbow, they'll be able to rule out a fracture. We shall see . . .



Happy Wednesday!