End of the Year Part 2 {FREEBIES}

The end of the year countdown is no new thing, but I thought I would share with you some fun things we are doing and have included a few freebies along the way as well!

Free painting!! With the hustle and the bustle of school there is very little time to let the kids do creative projects.  I even had some asking "I can paint what ever I want?!"  It actually kind of made me sad that they are so over-directed.

Eat with the teacher day!!  This is one of the those days where you truly see how little it takes to please children.  They were ecstatic to eat together outside!

Ice cream day!!  I just told the kids there would have been a special treat....however....I think next year it would be fun to make up some clues to give throughout the day and have the kids make and revise predictions as we go along!

First Grade Fun Day!!  This is by far my most favorite day yet!  We made homemade play-dough...the ENTIRE FIRST GRADE!  We did some fun rotations where each class got to do an activity with each teacher.  Some tips I learned.....if you let the kids help add the ingredients you need at least 45 min. to an hour for this activity.  Without them doing the adding you can easily complete within 30 min.  Teach the kids to flatten their play-dough and then add a few drops of food coloring in a bowl-like fashion....this way most of the food coloring gets on the dough FIRST and not on their hands.  It will come off with multiple washes!

Click the pictures below for a FREE copy of our play-dough recipe!

 

Extra Recess!! I actually had a sub this day so I didn't snag any pictures but hey, we all know what recess looks like!

Bubble Day!!  After the play-dough, this is my second runner up for my most favorite day.  We did all things bubble!  

We had fun listening to POP by Meghan McCarthy and learned about how bubble gum was invented.  We then did a fact and opinion sort that was FREE from All Y'All Need!  Just click the pics below to take you to her TPT store and grab yourself a copy!

We also did some fun bubble art using black construction paper and pastels.  To top it all of we did bubble math using bingo daubers!  This is also a FREE download from Jessica Michele through her TPT store!  Click the picture to grab a copy!

Come back next week to see what else we are doing for our final week!

I leave you with another FREEBIE!  I made these quick gifts for my daughter's preschool teachers...she has five, so it is great on a tight budget!  Clicking the pictures will get you the link for the download!

The Worst Thing About Being a Teacher: End of the Year Part 1

I love my job.  I remind myself all the time how lucky I am.  How much I love the kids.  The true passion I have for creating lessons that include deep thinking and engagement. But, do you want to know the ABSOLUTE worst thing about  being a teacher.........

I spent my first year doing a long-term subbing position for a maternity leave and I always described the day like a roller coaster.  As soon as the bell rang it was like we were running around crazy.  Some moments were full of joy, some were full of stress, and others were just plain queezy.  Even when you remember the stressful days, it is the joyful ones that keep you coming back for more.  You can't be naive though.  If you get back on there WILL be more queezy days and truthfully, you never know when they will happen.

But what everyday has in common is time.  It goes by so incredibly fast!  Sometimes I am ok with that and other times I am not.  The life of a teacher goes by way to fast.  I wish everyday there was more time to slow down and not have that constant gotta go, gotta go, gotta go pressure.

  

SIDENOTE: I am a complete type A person and often have to provide myself with some self talk, affirmation, and positivity so I don't overload.  

You can read about me here: 11 Things Every Type A Person Wants You to Know :) 

Here are some of my favorite quotes that help me cherish each day; at school, at home, and in my personal life. 

You may have another year to re-do that lesson, try that great new technique, or fix your behavior plan but for the kids there isn't another kindergarten, another first grade, another second grade.  They get one year.  One shot and I am determined to make it worth it.  I push myself to make each day enjoyable, memorable, authentic, and above all meaningful.

This one in particular helps me get through the hard days.  Nothing lasts forever.  Everyday has the same amount of hours, minutes, seconds.  In the same respect, it is good to remember on the good days.  The ones where you really get to enjoy the kids' company.  Laugh at their adorable personalities.  Share their toothless grins. 

The plate of a teacher is always full.  Especially if you lead several roles in your life.  We are always striving for balance...how do you balance it all...how do you stay on top of it all.....the secret is.....YOU DON'T!  There is no balance...except for off balance.  You have to do what works best for now, this moment, and your students, or sometimes your own children.  The hardest part...willing to accept that if your heart is in the right place, no matter what else, then you made the right choice.  Take those teachable moments at all costs.  Foster relationships and encourage creativity.

With the end of the year approaching I hope we share some of these same thoughts, and if not, hopefully now we do.  

DISCLAIMER:  If you're wondering about the adorable models....my daughter and my niece :)

Letter Writing Unit

We completed our letter writing unit awhile ago and I am just now getting everything organized to share with you!  We usually focus on friendly letters and thank-you letters.  We started the unit writing a letter whole group on the whiteboard and talked about the different parts of a letter.  We have morning message everyday in the form of a letter so they are pretty familiar.  
The next day I wrote six letters that were all similar, but also different.  I cut apart the different parts of the letters; date, greeting, body, closing, and signature, to where I had one piece for each kid.  Then they had to find people who would complete their letter.  The good part is there really is no wrong answer, except having two dates, two closings, etc.  The kids got together and glued the letters back together and labeled the parts.

Because this happened just after spring break, my letters to them were mostly about what I did over the break.  So for their first friendly letter I had them write me back.  They were mostly excited to be able to use my first name!

After they wrote letters to me we talked about thank-you letters and things that we are thankful for.  We wrote a thank-you letter together and then we listed all the support staff in our school.  The kids each chose someone to write a thank-you letter to.  I didn't grab any pictures of them - - sorry!

To culminate we wrote a thank-you letter to our parents and mailed it from the school to their house.  Seeing the kids adorable, first grade handwriting on the envelopes was sooo cute!!  They loved sending mail from school.

We also wrote a friendly letter to another first grade class in Florida and was hoping they would send one back, but have yet to here from them.  One more week till school is out...maybe we will still get one.

Here is an INCREDIBLE resource where all my FREE letter writing printables came from!  

Thank you Jillian Starr at The Starr Spangled Planner!

We learned about Weather {Freebies too, of course!}

The past few weeks our class has spent studying weather!  I have been really into inquiry based unit launches, so this was no exception.  I gathered the kids around the carpet with a pan, a hot plate, and 1 cup of water.  We went through the steps in the scientific process and I had them a very simple response sheet to keep their focus.  You can grab a FREE copy below!  I set the water to medium/high heat and just let nature takes its course.  Of course each kid got to feel the vapor and we discussed what we thought was happening as we continued with our graphic organizer.

The best part was at the end of the experiment when I showed them what had happened to the water! The answers were wrong.....but in that YES YOU ARE WRONG! Teacher kind of way!  I had answers like "the water went down into the stove."  "The water stuck to the pan!"  We then went into water, evaporation, and water vapor.

The next day we read out of our science text about the water cycle and connected it to the previous day's experiment.  I found these questions off of ReadWork.org, an amazing website that has tons of passages for free!

Our next step was practicing the water cycle!  I found this great cut and paste activity on, of course, TPT from Kennedy's Korner. I think if I could go back I would eliminate a few of the steps in the water cycle to simplify it. Click on the pictures below to head to her store and grab a FREE copy.

This is my ALL TIME FAVORITE water cycle video and the kids LOVE it!!!

This was probably my second most favorite thing we did (the evaporation experiment was too perfect).  I will warn you this was one of those, this sucks so bad for the teacher, but is sooo good for the kids kind of thing.  Just keeping it real.  I put the class with a partner and each group had a cold water w/ ice, cold water, warm tap water, and hot water that I heated on the hotplate.  Ok it sounds sooo much more simple now, but multiple cups of water, all varying temperatures, and 19 kids with thermometers....you can see how it was a test of my patience.  

 The kids played experimented with the thermometers and the water.  They could has sat for an hour watching the alcohol go way up and way down.  I also used pretty fancy thermometers so they shot up quick and shot down quick.  It was fun for the kids and fun for me to see them so exciting about learning!

We then discussed the temperatures we observed and added some characteristics of that type of weather.

Click on the picture above or below to grab a FREE copy!

After our tiring fun thermometer experiment we discussed all the weather tools using my weather tools interactive book.  This is for sale for just $1.00 in my TPT store!

To wrap up our study I wanted the kids to review some of the topics they studied in depth from kindergarten.  We read about each season in our science text and completed this chart over the course of a week.  It was the perfect accumulation to our study. 

 I snagged this gem from An Adventure in Literacy.  It is FREE in her TPT store!

Well there you have it!  Weather study - - - check!  If you have any good weather ideas or comments please leave them below!

Saturday Stray: Across the Curriculum and a FREEBIE!

The year is coming to a close and this time of the year is busy, busy, busy!  Here are some stray things that we have done this past week or so.  This post has a little bit of seasonal ideas, grammar, reading, and writing all mixed into one.  

I am hoping for at least one more week of sanity and then we are on the home stretch!  I have AMAZING parents currently sending in supplies to make our last 10 days SUPER fun, so check back to see what we have planned!

Mother's Day this year has seriously crept up on me.  Not only for my school kids, but also for my own family.  I saw this picture on pinterest a while back and because I teach at a religious school, I thought it was perfect!  Although I couldn't afford to buy frames for all the kids, I did cut them to a standard size so they could be framed if the parents wanted to.

 This page is adorable and super easy for first graders to do by themselves but there was no credit on the pdf I have so I don't know who it belongs to.  If you know, please let me know.

Many of our comprehension skills we have taught, reviewed, assessed and so on.  However, context clues was a first this past week.  Unlike the other comprehension skills, I think the creators of our basal series purposely put this skill towards the end so the kids would be more capable of understanding its complexity.

First, I introduced the skill with this file that I made to display whole class.  You can grab it as a FREEBIE by clicking the picture below!

Later in the week we read some Amelia Bedelia books!  I forgot how completely adorable these books are and how much I miss reading TO my kids.  It seems as the year goes on I find less and less opportunities to read to them.  It is sad that our day is sooo jam-packed that there is not much time for read alouds.  I need to work harder at that!  We just read the books and jotted down some thoughts about Amelia and her confusion because she didn't consider her context clues.

The past two weeks we have also introduced subjects and predicates.  I started off with something familiar that my kids LOVE.  Silly sentences is a great resource that I keep at work on words or even work on writing.  After making the sentences we went back and traced the subjects with red. 

The next day we worked on this skill I included the predicates and we sorted them.  I then had the kids write down one real sentence and one silly sentence.  Then we underlined the subject with red and the predicate with blue.  For a little more enrichment we even circled the verbs to point out the starting point to the predicate.

 I used this next activity as my informal assessment.  Once again there is no name to give credit to so if you know who this belongs to, please let me know.  The sheet had all the subjects and predicates mixed up. They first had to color the subjects red and predicates blue.  Then they had to match them to make REAL sentences.

Do you play battleship with your kids?  I stumbled upon this game during my student teaching and have used it for sight words and spelling words!  It is so much fun.  Basically the two kids have the same board.  They each get four markers to put on four words.  Then the kids just take turns guessing where their partners markers are.  If they guess correct they get to take their partners marker, or sink their ship!

Something a bit more personal:  We are sooo thankful spring weather is warming up and we are spending more and more time outside.  One of our favorite things to do is hitting up yard sales!  Here is a pic of little M heading out to check out some sales.

And just cause I couldn't resist.  This is a drawing she made of our family!

If you would like to share some stray things from your week please link up below!