Gingerbread and some other random thoughts...

I know, I know...I promised to tell you what we were doing with gingerbread, but seriously, it just slipped my mind.   I'm not trying to lead you on - really!  So, let's see, in reading we began by reading the classic The Gingerbread Man  and practiced visualizing the story in our heads.  It was really funny to watch the kids close their eyes and "watch the movie in their minds".  Some of them would laugh and point at the scenes they were playing in their heads (at times, I wondered what movie they were watching...).  We also worked on retelling and sequencing the story.  Throughout the week, we also read these favorites:


            


The kids really love the different versions and comparing each one.  I had planned on making gingerbread men for our gingerbread exchange last week, but...well - you know how that goes.  So, we will be making Florida gingerbread men this week. They'll have shorts, sunglasses and surfboards. These are so fun to make and the kids love getting gingerbread men from all over the country.  When they start coming in, we make a huge U.S. map and put each gingerbread man on the state it is from.  If you've never done a gingerbread man exchange, you need to try it.  It's a great way for the kids to learn about the different states/regions of our country.  I'll post pics once they all come in!
One of the activities we did at our word work center during gingerbread week was one that I adapted from a mailbox magazine activity.  Basically, I took these:
(gingerbread men cutouts from Carson Dellosa)

and on each one wrote a word with a missing vowel (for example: cl__b).  Then, on paper peppermint candies like this: 
I wrote the vowels (one on each candy).  The students had to choose which vowel fit in the blank to make a word.  I let them know that sometimes, there could be more than one right answer and challenged them to see if they could find the ones that had multiple answers.  I asked them just to write the extra words on the back of their recording sheet.  I did make a sheet for the words that I made, although it would be super easy to make your own if you want to use different words.  Also, I tried to focus on words with blends since that was the phonics skill we were working on at the time.  Feel free to grab a copy here (if you do, please leave me some feedback and let me know what you think):
My Sweet Words
I included a page with some gingerbread men in case you didn't have any. I would just print them out and laminate. Then, you can change the words as you wish. If you want a word version of this sheet, just send me your email address and I'll send it to you.


Now onto the random...
  This week, we are learning about Christmas Around the World.  We study Mexico, Sweden, Holland, and Italy.  One of the art activities we do is to make paper poinsettias for Mexico.  These turn out sooo pretty.  I wish I had a picture, but I forgot to take one today.  I'll take one tomorrow and post a picture and the templates so you can make your own.  For Sweden, we take die cut leaves, a sentence strip and some die cut candles to make a St. Lucia headband.  Just glue the leaves and candles onto the sentence strip and staple to make a headband.  The kids love wearing these around at our Christmas party.  When we do Italy, we make a paper witch, La Befana, and when we do Holland, the kids glue wooden shoe clip art to paper and you can either have them glue hay and carrots in the shoe (paper, of course.  Although real hay might be neat...) or you can have them cut out pictures of presents they would like to get and glue them in the shoes. 

On another note, every year I make an advent calendar for my kids.  They love opening the boxes each day and finding the surprise inside.  I've used lots of different ones over the years, but I wanted to share the one we're using this year.  I wanted to take the emphasis off of "things" this year and focus more on quality family time.  I found this idea on Pinterest:

 

Source: kimberlypetersen.typepad.com via Kristy on Pinterest

What's cool about it is that in each pocket is a family activity that we can do together.  So far this month, the tags in my kids' pocket have read:
Decorate the tree
Lunch at McDonald's
Family game of baseball
Make Christmas treats
Christmas party at Girl Scouts

I love this idea not only because it gives us the chance at a normally crazy time to spend some quality time together, but also because I don't have to spend time and money searching for little toys/candy that they really didn't need anyway!  If you go to my Christmas board on Pinterest, you can find the original link for more ideas.

Finally, my kids and I were making Christmas treats tonight for our first grade bake sale tomorrow (and "make Christmas treats" was our advent calendar tag today - kill 2 birds with one stone...).  We decided to make another Pinterest inspired idea (yes, I am a Pinterest addict):

They were soooo easy.  Just powdered donuts, orange M&M's and mini chocolate chips.  I think we might make these at our Christmas party too!

12 Days of Christmas Giveaway

Ok, so I was gonna blog about the gingerbread activities we did this week, but then I saw that Farley over at Oh Boy Fourth Grade is hosting a HUGE 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway. The cool thing about this one is that each day you have the chance to win a prize from a different guest blogger (and if the giveaways are anything like the first day, look out!)  I didn't want you to miss out on the chance of winning any of these awesome prizes, so head over there right now to check it out (just click on her blog name above). 


Isn't Christmas the greatest!!!  Don't worry, I'll blog about the gingerbread stuff tomorrow!

Wow! Really???

When I logged on today to try to think of what I was going to blog about, I was greeted with a great surprise!!! Christine over at Hopping Into First Grade awarded me the Sunshine Award!

 I am still completely amazed that anyone would even want to hear what I'm doing in my classroom, let alone give me an award.  Thank you so much, Christine for your thoughtfulness. Click on the link above to run over to her blog now to check it out!

Now, onto the rules:

1.  Thank the person who awarded you (yep, did that)
2. Blog about it(check)
3. Answer the questions (will do)
4. Pass the award on to 10-12 bloggers, letting them know you awarded them the Sunshine Award (this is the hard part - there are so many good ones...)

Questions:
The Questions

• Favorite color:  yellow
• Favorite animal: Cardinals - they were my grandmother's favorite bird and when I see one, it makes me think of her.
• Favorite number:  4 (wanna know why? It's the only number that has the same number of letters in its name!)
• Favorite drink: Cherry Coke Zero
• Facebook or Twitter: Facebook
• Passions: Pinterest (oops!  I guess that would be more of an addiction).  Truthfully, the only thing I would really classify myself as passionate about would be the Lord.  He has done so much for me, I want to do everything I can to draw closer to Him.
• Giving or getting presents:  Can I pick both?
• Favorite day: Sunday
• Favorite flowers:  tulips

Now to pass it on:
First Grade Learning Stars
A Teacher's Touch
Fabulous in First
First Grade a la Carte

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nikon Coolpix s6100This Thanksgiving has just begun and already it's turning out to be great! My Mama is visiting from Kentucky, we have our Black Friday strategy all mapped out, the gift I'm making for my secret blogging buddy is turning out great, and I got some great Christmas presents! No, I'm not confused, I know I'm a holiday early, but my mom and my husband are both really bad at keeping secrets (which is why my husband usually shops on Christmas Eve). I collect cookie jars and my mom gave me a cute tiki hut cookie jar that plays the theme to Gilligan's Island when you open it. Now I'll know whenever the kids try to sneak a cookie, lol! My mom gives her gifts now because she wants to see us open them (and since she's in nursing school - yep, went back to college at 61), she won't be here at Christmas.
My husband, on the other hand is just bad at keeping gifts. He asked if I wanted my Christmas present now. I told him that I only wanted it if it was a new camera. His response, "It's in the bottom of my toolbox!" This is the awesome new camera I got:
Check it out here:

Nikon Coolpix S6100


So now I can take awesome pictures of all of our fun Christmas activities (and things I make from Pinterest, of course). 
I hope your Thanksgiving is as great!  Happy Thanksgiving!

The Christmas Plans Begin...

Since we're off this week, I'm hoping to get all of my plans for the month of December done. We only have about 3 weeks, and I'd like to have it all done by the time we get back. As I go through my files, I'll be making some gaes to use in our math and literacy centers. One of the things I want to work on this month in math is patterns. I really thought my kids were doing well with patterns, until I gave them some M&M's to make patterns with. I don't know if they just rushed through it or (because it was the week before Thanksgiving) they just didn't care, but apparently, we need some review. I found these Christmas clipart pictures on an old Mailbox sheet.
Christmas Patterns


I'm going to print out a set to color and laminate to use with my small groups. After we work on making the patterns together, I will put the pictures in a center and allow the students to make their own patterns.  I'm planning on copying the recording sheet front to back and giving the kids a sheet of pictures they can color, cut apart, and glue on the recording sheet to show their patterns.  I hope this is something you can use.  Check back for some more Christmas ideas/activities coming soon!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ahhhh!  Thanksgiving vacation...sleeping 'til 8, catching up on blog stalking, and planning.  Oh, yeah, I can't forget spending time with my Mama (who is visiting from Kentucky), Thanksgiving dinner, and SHOPPING!  For those of you who still have to work this week, I'm sorry. 

I thought I would share what we've been doing the last couple of weeks.  We've been learning about Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  Scholastic has awesome resources for teaching about this topic.  Visit The First Thanksgiving on Scholastic and check it out!  We also read these books:

These books are great for teaching about the daily life of pilgrim boys and girls.  I haven't seen this one, but I've heard it's good, so I may have to check it out:

After reading the books about the pilgrim boys and girls, we venn life then and now.  Finally, we write about whether we would or would not like to be a pilgrim.  My plan was to take really cute pictures and post them here, but this has been the year of camera issues.  This summer I ran over my camera (yeah, you heard me right) and although the camera is still functional, I can't see what I'm taking a picture of.  So, I have to take the picture and then download and if it's not right, then take another one and download and...you get the picture (no pun intended).  Now, however, I cannot find the cord which I need to download the pictures.  So, no cute pictures for you!  I have been lucky enough this year to have a great mom with a great camera who lets me use it whenever I need it.  I just didn't think to take the pictures before we left for Thanksgiving vacation.  Oops!  So you'll just have to picture the cute Pilgrim writings hanging on the wall.  I promise to do better in December (hopefully Santa will bring me a camera for Christmas!).

Happy Thanksgiving All!

Catching Up

    I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post, but life has been cuh-ra-zy, if you know what I mean. Between school leadership meetngs, RtI paperwork, lesson studies, church meetings, etc. I haven't had time to breathe, let alone blog! Thanks to my sweet blogging buddy Rebecca from Teaching First for checking in on me!  If you haven't seen her blog, jump over there - she's got some great ideas and an awesome TpT store.
    Anyway, I thought I would catch up on some of the things we've been doing in our class.  In my last post, I mentioned that we were doing some fun bat activities.  We used some of the ideas from Fun in First Grade.  We grouped and counted mosquitoes and even made life sized bats.  Jodi at Fun in First Grade was kind enough to share cute signs that gave the wingspan of the flying fox and bumblebee bats.  The kids really enjoyed seeing the true size of the bats and these activities really made the learning stick! Here are some photos of our bats:

(Please excuse my drawing.  I teach first grade because they are the only ones that think I can draw!)

We then made a think map to show our learning:

Which I had to hang upside down from our cabinets (of course)!

We finished out our owl unit and (with a little help from the teacher across the hall), we created a think map showing our learning about owls:

To finish off October, we had a wonderful Halloween party.  We made Spooky Stew:

YUM!

We also made nutter butter ghosts and jack-o-lanterns:

We then moved into November with lots of turkey activities!  Our Red Ribbon week kicked off on Halloween with a western theme.  Don't worry, I won't post the pics (or the video) of me line dancing at our school assembly (Yes, I heard your sigh of relief), but know that I had enough school spirit to do it...in front of everyone...including the superintendent, asst. superintendent, and school board chairman. 

Anyhoo, we had a door decorating contest and it had to be something with a western theme.  Western theme? Wait a minute...this is November and I wanna do turkeys and pilgrims and all things Thanksgiving.  So, I had to be creative.  And, since learning time is so valuable and never to be wasted, we turned a math lesson into a math/art lesson so we could make door decorations.  I took a turkey I got from the Mailbox magazine and made 4 turkey feathers for each turkey.  Each child got a turkey and a flash card.  They had to use the numbers on the flash card to write the fact family numbers on the belly of the turkey and the number sentences for that family on the tail feathers.  It was fun and the kids enjoyed making them.  Check out our western turkey door:

A couple of kids made cowboys an we used some yellow rope from one cowboy looped around a turkey.  We didn't win, but hey, the kids had fun and got some good math practice, so I'm good with that.
Finally, I saw that some people had done a turkey disguise project, so I decided to try it this year.  Here's how they turned out:

Turkeys disguised as: a rainbow, a surfer, and a flower.

Turkeys disguised as: a peacock, a karate student, and a spice cabinet

 Turkeys disguised as: an army man, Batman, and an M&M (the M&M was soo yummy, someone ate off it's foot, lol)

Turkeys disguised as: a bush, a police officer, and a girl eating turkey (if you lift up the clothes, there is turkey on the table).  The kids had lots of fun with this project.  I'm so glad that I have such involved parents that will take the time to sit down and work on projects like this with their child.
    So, there you go!  You are now officially caught up with all that has been going on in our room.  This week, we'll be working on pilgrims and Indians.  I try not to do the same projects every year, but these cuties I found at The Virtual Vine are a must do each year:

These take a couple of days to do, and I use peach colored glass gems that I found at Wal-Mart for the noses.  They worked out great, because they are flat on the bottom, which makes them easier to glue.  Only one more week until Thanksgiving vacation!  The best part - my mama is coming for the week!!!!!  Have a great week and a Happy Thanksgiving!