My Favorite Season

I am soooo ready for fall.  It is absolutely my favorite season.  I love the cooler weather, the beautiful fall colors, and the holidays.  Now that I live in Florida, I don't get to see all of the beautiful fall colors (well, actually I do get to see some, but not usually until November or so), and as for the cooler weather, we've still got a while until that comes.  So, we have to create our own "fall" atmosphere by cranking down the a/c and we have to make our own fall colors.  We are getting ready to write to our wonderful penpals in Kansas so we decided to send them a beautiful fall picture.  I got the idea from Pinterest (where else?).

It was super easy.  The kids draw and color a tree trunk and branches, then I had them LIGHTLY draw a circle (which helps them see where to put their "leaves").  We then used Q-tips to dot fall leaves onto our trees.  Once the top of their trees were all filled in, I let them make a pile of leaves on the ground by their trees.  They ended up looking great and now we have some fall color in our room (until we mail them off to our penpals, lol)! 
How do you get your classroom ready for fall?

Sparkling Vocabulary

I wanted to share an idea I heard about this summer (from where, I'm not sure.  If you know, let me know so I can give credit).  I've always had a WOW board where we would post special higher level vocabulary words.  WOW stood for Wonderful Outstanding Words.  I would post the words as we heard them in our stories and then if the kids could use them correctly in conversation, they would get to put a sticker on the word.  The challenge was to see how many words we could get stickers on.

Well, this summer, I saw the idea for a Sparkling Vocabulary board.  Rather than calling them WOW words, we now call them Sparkling Words.  Then, I thought it would be cool to make a title for our board with some sparkle on it (I mean, who doesn't love glitter?).  So, I tried to make my own:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but I put a border of glitter around the letters.  Ok, but not great.

So I went on the hunt for something better and found these at Dollar General:

Oh yeah - these will be much better!  So I put these sheets through the Ellison machine and got this:

Much better (and very sparkly)!

 

So, the plan is to still put the sparkling words on cards and allow the kids to put a sticker on the card when they are able to use it in conversation.  The new idea I found this summer was when they were able to use the word correctly in their writing, they would get one of these on their paper:

(sorry for the blurry pic - had to take it with my phone)

These are sticky back gems.  Unfortunately, I was only able to find pink and white, so the boys will have to deal with those right now.  I'll try to go this weekend and find different colors.  I'm hoping that this will inspire the kids to try to use some enriched vocabulary in their speaking and writing. 

I hope this is an idea you might be able to use in your room.  If you do, let me know how it goes!

 

Sweet Giveaway

Tessa is having a super 700 follower celebration.  She is giving away freebies every day for the next week!  She is not only giving her stuff away, but she has arranged for some other great bloggers to give away some of their goodies too!  Don't wait - the freebies will only be up for one day - she'll change them each morning.  Go and check it out!



Tales From Outside the Classroom

 

Have a safe and restful Labor Day weekend!

Mad Scientist Monday (on Friday)

I finally remembered to bring my camera home!  Here are some pics of the experiment we did on our first Mad Scientist Monday:

We started by making an hypothesis about what would happen to the food coloring/milk if we dipped a dry q-tip, a wet q-tip, and a q-tip soaked with dish soap into it. 



First, the dry q-tip - this one made no difference.

 Then a wet one (a little color mixing).

Then we dipped the one with the dish soap and the colors went crazy!

The kids thought this was beyond cool!!!

I also made the kids a science journal where they could record their learning.  There were some things I need to tweak, so hopefully I'll be able to post the science journal stuff here.  Have a great long weekend!

Wacky Wednesday

Apparently, I was REALLY tired (or completely asleep) on Monday when I wrote the blog post.  Ya know how I said I was gonna go get on the treadmill?  Ummm, yeah...we don't even own a treadmill!!  Seriously, I mean it.  Now, we do have an elliptical machine, which was my most romantic 14th anniversary present (can you sense my sarcasm?), but the only person I know with a treadmill is my Mama who lives about 900 miles away in Kentucky (and that's a little to far to go for a workout on a Monday night).

So I know you've been waiting on the edge of your seat for the pictures from Mad Scientist Monday, and I was all ready to post some, but when I went to get in my bag to get it, I realized that I left my camera at school.  Yep, seems to be par for the course this week!  So I'm gonna go to bed now and hope that the last couple of days ends up better than the first half of the week!  Just remember - it's a LONG WEEKEND!!!!

Ugh! Monday!

I was going to blog about our Mad Scientist Monday today (which went great by the way), but it's just been one of THOSE days.  You know the ones - the ones that start with your daughter yelling from the other room, "Mom!!! Logan has blood everywhere!"  Yep, one of those!  Don't worry, he's fine (just fell out of his chair and busted his nose on the floor), but I'm exhausted, so Mad Scientist Monday pictures will have to wait until tomorrow!  I'm gonna eat my homemade french bread pizza (piled up with fresh tomatoes, onions, and basil), try to get on the treadmill later (as long as I'm still awake), and then go to bed.  See you tomorrow!

Pete the Cat and Some Zoo Plates

I have to say that I originally was less than impressed with Pete the Cat.  I bought I Love My White Shoes at the Scholastic book fair at the end of last year and when I looked through it, I thought, "Really?  What is all the hype about?"  Now wait a minute, all of you Pete the Cat lovers, let me finish...
but before school started this year, I went online and listened to it.  THAT made ALL the difference!  I am now officially a Pete the Cat lover.  And, the best thing about it is that I have also recruited the rest of my first grade team to be on the Pete the Cat bandwagon too.  The music really does it.  If you aren't sure about Pete and haven't listened to the music, you've gotta go listen now (click here).  My kids had such a good time reading a listening to Pete that we decided to make Pete.  This was sort of a spur of the moment thing.  I just passed out some blue paper and gave the kids simple directions ("draw an oval and cut it out - this is Pete's body.")  I think they turned out pretty good (considering it was a last minute thing and I am SOOOO not an artist.  This is why I let the kids make their own!):

This turned out to be a very cool activity because it served as a shape review, a fine motor activity, and when I asked them to write the sentence underneath, a writing lesson.  Look at all that learnin' goin' on!

We also had some fun with zoo plates and math last week.  We were introducing part-part-whole models.  I had seen somewhere this summer (probably on Pinterest) where  a teacher used zoo plates to show the two parts in the small section and then how to put them together as a whole in the large section.  It just so happened that the day before we did this lesson, I found these cute printables from Wild About Teaching:



just click on her blog name to go directly to the link. 
These are free in her TpT store!

Anyhoo, the kids had a blast using the plates (or it might have been the M&M's we were using...):

You may notice that some of their plates were upside down.  That's because our math series puts the parts on the bottom and the whole on top.  I wanted to keep the activity as similar to our math pages as possible so they wouldn't have trouble when we transitioned to doing it on paper. 

 

We're having a blast this year!  Monday is our first "Mad Scientist Monday" experiment!  The kids are super excited and I can't wait.  Check back to see our little scientists at work!