Saturday Stray, Sale, and a Freebie!

Ok so I really never understood the time blogging takes!!  Is it just me or did I underestimate?!  Maybe I don't know something I should.  Sorry I wasn't better about keeping with my weekly linky...I promise I will get better!

This week was a short week because we had a teacher in-service Friday plus Valentine's Day festivities on Thursday; we really had to squeeze in a lot of work!

Working at a Catholic school I am always trying to integrate faith into other areas!  This year I have also been trying to incorporate more virtues in our religion.  Our topic for January was love and kindness, so to accumulate all of our studies we did a writing on how we could live the greatest commandment.  We read the book Do Unto Otters by Laurie Keller.  This is a wonderful read aloud - - like the kids clapping saying "AGAIN, AGAIN!" kind of wonderful.  We then did a quick graphic organizer to get started.  The next day we put our writing into a paragraph in our speech bubbles.  On the final day, I taught the kids how to make an otter with a directed drawing and then we decorated.  The kids did such a great job making the otters unique and one of a kind.  This may be an all time favorite activity for me! 

This pack will be 50% for the long weekend!!  Check it out at my TPT store!

                 

Teachers are clever thinkers!  Especially as a newbie teacher I am learning each and every day and of course my colleagues help me along the way, so I thought to share something that you may not know.  Every once in a while we work with partners on assignments.....sometimes I just pull sticks and let the kids pick their partners but other times I need a clever way to mix them up.  I use contractions, compound words, place value, and really any possible skill that can be matched to quickly and easily review skills and pair the kids - two birds:one stone.

We touched briefly on homographs in our reading this week so I whipped up this super quick activity: each student got a sentence and they had to find their partner that had the same homograph.  There are two versions - one with the word underlined and one without.  Grab it below for FREE by clicking on one of the pictures!

   

We had our Valentine's Day party on Thursday and it was blast!  My parent volunteer made this adorable pin the kiss on Mrs. Valentine!!! A-DORABLE!  Then all the super sweet valentine cards that my kids made were awesome!                                      

Of course we couldn't have just a normal day so we did some fun Valentine's themed activities.
Our morning work was a fun freebie word search from Kathy Ryan I found on TPT.

In Math we discussed comparing numbers with equal to, less than, and greater than with this fun math freebie from Love of First!  This concept is really lacking in our math series!  I introduced it with the kids picking numbers from a bag and then talking about which one is greater or less than the other.  Of course the kids were good at telling which one was greater but they had A LOT of trouble verbalizing WHY!  It was an amazing lesson - - I let the kids pick two numbers from a bag and we wrote them on the board.  The kids started saying things like one number is bigger or higher - so then of course I would write the other number BIGGER (literally) or HIGHER (literally)!  The giggles were priceless!  After about five times they changed their reasoning to the greater number having more digits, or more tens etc.  It was very successful!

Thankful I get to call this crazy girl my own!  We were happy to get a few warm days last weekend and made sure we spent as much of it outside as possible!  Here are a few pics from the small walk through petting zoo we visited.

 

Thanks for visiting and if you would like to share some randomness from your week just grab the images and link up!

Morning Meeting and a Tally Freebie!

One thing I don't think I could teach without is morning meeting!  I have used it when I taught in K and now in First and believe it really starts off the day in a positive way.  One thing I have been more focused on this year is character education and virtues!  I teach at a Catholic school so it is easily tied to our religion as well! WIN-WIN!  Each month we have a chapter from our sticky situations book that focuses on one specific virtue; kindness, compassion, friendliness, responsibility, contentment etc!  To go along with each chapter there are daily stories with situations about children that my students can relate to.  We not only read the daily story but review the month's topic as well.  Each story ties into scripture from the Bible as well, but this can be skipped over if you teach at a non-parochial school.  It is truly an amazing book!

MORNING MEETING

Another essential piece to our mornings is our message!  Again, something I have used in both K and 1st and love for both grades.  It is so easy to introduce, review, and incorporate almost any skill and topic.  I always include the date and what our special is for the day as well as a question.  I increase the message in difficulty by moving from easier and more obvious errors to harder ones.  I also begin the year writing each sentence a different color and then go to all one color.  I include a variety of fill-ins and mistakes to go along with the skills we are working on.  I have students volunteer to edit the message and then our student of the day or teacher's helper will read the message and the class repeats the message!  You can see some examples of the recent messages we have had.

Working on identifying the sounds of y at the end of words and verbs!

Working on vowel digraph ee, r-controlled combination er, and reviewing those ending y sounds!

Working on linking verbs, and reviewing tricky y sounds, and ck!

Working on writing months and r-controlled combinations!

Working on sight words, digraphs, and endings!

Just for sticking around here is another fun activity we did this week to introduce tally marks! Just click on the picture to get a FREE EDITABLE VERSION!

Saturday Stray {Linky Party}

My First Link Up!!!  I will seriously be so ecstatic if I have one fellow teacher blogger link up with me!  Will it be you?  I am learning so much through this blogging journey and it is truly feeds that techy inside of me.  I wanted to start a weekly linky where I could add my random thoughts and happenings of my week.  So here it is............

Saturday Stray is a weekly teacher linky where you can share five stray things from your week!  Please grab the button above and add it to your post.  Once your post is complete, please come back here and link up with the linky tool at the bottom of this post.

Every teacher loves - - L.O.V.E.S - - loves the dollar tree.  I mean come on it is only a dollar right...hmm I think I will grab all three left on the shelf.  Do I have a plan for them.  No not just yet...but what if I need all 150 some day and then Dollar Tree doesn't carry them any more?!  Oh the misery!!  So as I ventured into Dollar Tree this week I found some goodies.  I did have a tad bit of self-control.  They had some amazing non-fiction readers.  I had to grab a couple 100 piece puzzles for our 100th day of school celebration coming up Thursday.  The best find, and I resisted buying enough for an entire class, was the dry erase page protectors!  Oh yeah and of course all 150 of those cubes............

The Next Step in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson came in this week and I am excited to begin reading it and am also participating in a book club to help push me along.  I will admit it has been on the to do list for ummm.....ok an unmentionable amount of days.  But it will happen!

This week, and actually a bit of last, we worked on understanding Martin Luther King Jr, all that he taught us, and what he stands for.  Of course MLK is a tricky subject for our firsties, but one of my FAVORITE books is Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport.  We used Amber Kotzin's Literature Unit to help us!  The questions were a bit beyond first grade so I cut them up and gave one to each kid, or group, and they listened for the answer.  Then we went over everyone's question.

I love to talk about what 'BIG' words mean in context to the story and come up with more 'BIG' words.  We sometimes do a directed drawing and decorate it with our big words.  Didn't snag a pic, but you get the idea!  This year our plans consisted of our scholastic reader, a making words activity, and some fun activities from my peacemaker unit!  You can click any of the pictures to check out my Peacemaker Mini-Unit!

     

  

   

My 100th day shirt came in!  Kreative Kinder did a great job!  My kids are going to love it!

My daughter painted 'polish' as she says, for the first time this week and wrote an M for the first time all alone!  Can you tell she is our first - - everything she does is magnificent! 

If you have stray happenings to share from this week - please link up with me!  Have a great weekend!

An InLinkz Link-up