Pom-Pom Party!

Some of you might have been wondering why we were wearing Crazy Socks on Friday. It's because we were having our Pom-Pom Party!

Our full jar! We were very excited!

I have 3 levels of classroom management for the kiddos - individual, small-group, and whole-group. Individually, we use the color chart so that the students learn to responsible for their own behavior. Tables groups work together to earn points for small-group management. I give table points for being the first to sit with heads down, being the only table working quietly, etc. As a whole group, our entire class works to earn pom-poms for our pom-pom jar. We get pom-poms when everyone is doing what I ask of them or when we get compliments from other teachers. From the first day of school, I encourage the students to work as a team and help each other become responsible. Motivating students individually as well as in groups helps create very responsible citizens!

Stinky Feet is fun for everyone... even Ms. Stookey!

Each time we fill up our jar, I throw the students a small surprise party. It only takes 30 minutes, and I find that it really motivates them to make good choices as a team. I knew the weather was going to be bad this Friday, so I wanted to give them an indoor party. We had "Stinky Feet" for the whole 30 minutes, which is why Crazy Socks was a necessity! :) We had a dance party, listening to the KidzBop station on Pandora (I absolutely LOVE Pandora!). Then we watched The Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow to tie into the week's theme as well a give the kids some "movie time." We even had a little time at the end to play "Bubble Gum" with our toes. I had completely forgotten about this game, but the kids were adamant about playing it for a little bit. :)

One Direction was playing, and I couldn't help but get up and dance, too!

I can't wait to work on filling up our jar again for the next party. I've already got some fun ideas forming. :)

Rainbow Week

We decided to close out our colors unit out with a rainbow-themed week. I have really enjoyed spending all this time on fun projects. I just realized that we were incredibly busy this week, so be warned that this is a pretty long post! :)

Monday we read Kitten Red, Yellow, Blue and made plenty of connections. Everyone was very excited to create a page for our class book. We talked about things we liked to do and colors that might go with those verbs. Our creativity was in full-effect. I was SO excited to pull Guided Reading groups for the first time this year! Everyone was actively engaged in Daily Five, and I could not be more proud of all my firsties!

Tuesday we read A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni. I am such a huge fan of all his books - with gorgeous illustrations and heartfelt messages. After we read the story we made our first Story Map of the year! Last year I found a wonderful idea on The First Grade Parade for retelling. As a class, we talked about The Wizard of Oz, and I was glad to know that a lot of kids knew the story! We then talked about "following the yellow brick road" when we are retelling a story so that other people can know what happened without having to read the book. Using a Pinterest-inspired Story Map anchor chart, we retold the story as a whole class. The students were very motivated and seemed to have a wonderful time!

Wednesday we read Purple, Yellow, and Green by Robert Munsch. He is such a fun author! If you go to his website, you can actually listen to him read some of his stories. The kids LOVED being able to hear his voice while we looked at the pictures of the book. After the story, we followed the yellow brick road again then individually created a Tree Map for the story map as well. This was the first time we'd done Tree Maps for retelling this year, and I thought it went pretty well! These kiddos really seem to understand story maps!

For writing, we researched an octopus on PebbleGo this week. I was glad that most of us realized we were researching octopi because it was short o week! After we wrote our nonfiction stories, we illustrated and drew settings for our octopi. These came out wonderfully!

Thursday we read A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon. This is SUCH a great book! We made text-to-text connections with No, David!, and I think that really excited the kids because they LOVE those books. After we read this hilarious story, we went down the yellow brick road again as a whole group. Then we made connections to the book by thinking of what bad cases we might wake up with and what we'd have to eat to get rid of them. Some of the students' ideas really cracked me up! I was glad to hear that some of them suggested eating spinach and bananas to help clear up their symptoms. :)

Friday was a very fun day! I remembered a project we'd done in my Music Theory class in college, and I knew I had to do with the kiddos. We listened to a "Many Colors CD" that our professor had given us, and then we drew what those colors reminded us of. The students and I discussed what emotions we had when we thought of certain colors. Then, I played the CD for them and they drew what they were feeling. We talked about our drawings in our groups, then one of my friends had the wonderful idea of dancing our emotions, too! Of course I had to play the CD again so that we could responsibly move around the classroom and let our emotions out. I wish I could post those pictures for y'all, because it was quite a hoot!

We also read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss and created a class book based on our colors and emotions again.

We incorporated a lot of short o work into math this week. We have been studying different addition strategies, focusing on parts of numbers. I read 10 Apples Up on Top one day, and we made part-part-whole stories using parts of 10. This is always a big hit because the book I have used to be my dad's when he was in first grade. The kids are always impressed by how old it is. :) We also made part-part-wholes using dogs and frogs. I gave each student a domino, and they created their picture based on it. This was a good assessment tool for the end of the week.

We had a really fun science experiment on Friday. To close up the week, we did a Rainbow Milk experiment. The kids absolutely loved it! We added food coloring to milk, with drops of soap. The soap helps the food coloring mix together to create new colors. We talked about primary and secondary colors, then I mixed primary colors individually so the kids could see them mixing. We made sure to record our results in our Science Journals using the Scientific Method. This was a HUGE hit!

We had another great week full of learning and fun! I can't wait for next week. We're going to start doing October-themed activities, and it will be great!

Raz-Kids!

I am incredibly excited to announce that we finally have our Raz-Kids subscription! Below you'll find the directions for accesing the website and logging into your child's assignment.

Students will be expected to read AND take the quiz over 3 books each week to receive credit for homework.  Please note that they must pass the quiz in order to receive credit.

Please see the directions below:

1. Log in to the student account
Teacher Name: mstookeyb
Password: your child's 6-digit student ID number

2. Choose a book to read - When you log in it will show the level I have assigned to your child. Click on the green book with the eye to read the book.
Students are expected to READ the book by clicking on the green icon. They will not receive credit for simply listening to the story (the blue book with the ear).

3. After reading, select the "Take a quiz" icon.

4. Complete the quiz.
Students must pass the quiz in order to receive credit. If they get a message saying, "Good job" then they have passed. If it says to read the book again, they must re-read the story in order to take the quiz again. Remember, they must pass the quiz to receive credit. They can re-read the story as many times as is needed. 

5. Check to make sure the quiz is complete. 
Looking back at the home screen you can see a checkmark under the book AND the quiz when both have been completed. (A green checkmark under the quiz indicates a perfect score on a quiz. The gray checkmark indicates that your child has passed, which is fine with me.)

When your child has completed each book on the page, meaning they have read and passed the quiz for every book on that level, please let me know and I can go in and move them up to the next level. Students are welcome to read more than 3 books per week, but they must read at least 3.

Your child will be bringing home an orange or black reading folder. This folder should stay inside their backpack at all times when not in use. Inside you will find their first grade reading log. After your child has read a book and completed the quiz, he or she (or you) are to record it on the reading log. You must initial next to each book they read, showing that you have checked and know they have done the required work. We have done the first one together in class as an example. I will be checking reading logs each Monday to see their reading from the week before. Please note that I will also be logging on to the website to verify what has been read.

Remember, the more they practice reading, the better readers they will become! As always, if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

This is such an amazing resource for your children, combining reading skills with technology. I can't wait to see everyone using it!

More colors!

Our classroom was lucky enough to have a visit from the Desk Fairy this week. I hear she was making her way through the first grade pod, so I'm glad she stopped by our classroom! She left her card and a surprise on a few of the desks, and she was nice enough to leave a note for the whole class. We noticed that she has very pretty handwriting! :)

Here is a picture of a neat desk, just in case any parents are wondering. We've had a few conversations about staying organized and how that helps us learn, since we aren't having to spend 5 minutes finding our journals that we need. I also like the kids to keep their journals in a certain order, which happens to be in chronological order of our day (just a little of my OCD showing through). We have been working hard to keep our desks neat since we never know when our fairy might be coming back!

We had Open House on Tuesday, and I was very excited that I had someone show up for 10 out of my 18 kids! That's the best showing that I've ever had. I am blessed to have a great group of kids this year who have supportive, encouraging parents. Thank you to everyone who came to see us and for those who sent lovely emails after. :)

I was excited to continue with our color theme for another week. I've enjoyed reading these shorter books because they really allow for us to review book handling skills, and it has given us a lot of time for Daily 5 practice. I was able to finish all my DRAs, so I'm really excited to finally start Guided Reading next week!

We read The Farmer's Hat this week and made a connection to the story by turning a hat into something creative. I loved the creative ideas we had going - a sleeping bear, a trashcan, a T-rex, and countless others. I wish I could post them all!

We also read School Bus for our yellow day. The story actually worked very well, since we've been talking about communities and maps. We were able to make a lot of connections to social studies and the different places a school bus might be going. Some of our school buses went to the Museum of the Rockies, New York City, and the beach. Those would be very exciting field trips!

Our spelling pattern this week was short i, so of course we had to do something with pigs. :) I was very excited to do our first PebbleGo research project! I gave a lesson on main idea and supporting details, then we went through the research and discussed what the most important facts would be. We also talked about having an audience and pretending the audience knows nothing about pigs yet. I. Love. PebbleGo! We made a cute piggy to go along with our research paper. I can already tell we're going to be stars with our nonfiction writing!

As I mentioned earlier, we have been talking about maps this week in social studies. We started off learning about the different maps features, such as a title, compass rose, key, and symbols. We made a compass rose and then found each direction in our classroom. We located different places on a map and talked about the importance of knowing our directions. The boys really enjoyed their compass roses because they could pretend like they were pirates looking for buried treasure. We got a few "Hey my mom has that in her car!" comments, and I love it when we can connect our learning to real life! Ms. Stookey would get lost a lot more often if she didn't have her own compass in her truck, so I am glad we could all see the importance of learning cardinal directions. :) We made a map of our playground, then my creative friends noticed it looked like a girl wearing a hat. Of course we got a kick out of that. I was glad that we retained so much knowledge over the week!

We have also been working really hard to practice our math workstations. Since Daily 5 was so successful last year, I wanted to do a hybrid of Daily 5 with Debbie Diller's Workstations. So far, things have been going really well. I find that everyone is much more engaged in their learning, and they're all trying very hard to do the right thing. One of the choices for workstations is "Math by Myself" where the students can explore with dominoes, dice, and problem solving. The students can write number sentences with dominoes or work on number recognition. I have a couple sets of tangrams in "Math by Myself," too. We also have a "Math Games" workstation, and I introduced "Greater/Lesser War" to the kids. It basically works just like regular war, but they can also choose to play that whoever has the lesser number gets to keep the cards. I have been SO happy with the way math stations are going this year!

We had another wonderful week, and I'm looking forward to another great one. Feel free to leave any questions or comments so that I know y'all were here! :)

Colors!

Last week was all about colors! I have found that students really enjoy reading all these color-themed books because they are familiar with the texts, and it helps us focus in on retelling and rereading familiar stories. 

Monday was all about purple. We had lots of connections because I happened to be wearing all purple that day! :) I was surprised that very few of the kids had read Harold and the Purple Crayon. We discussed visualizing and how oftentimes we have to make movies and pictures inside our brains when we are listening to stories. Everyone seemed very excited when I told them that they would get to be illustrators and make their own pictures for the story. While I read the story aloud, everyone drew their pictures. When we finished, we pair-and-shared to compare everyone's pictures. It was interesting to see what each child thought was most important (like the boys' intricate dragon drawings vs. the girls' picnics). We discussed how it is ok for everyone to visualize different things. I always love these visualizing lessons! Then we watched the video for Harold on DiscoveryStreaming. The kids really enjoyed seeing the book in motion, and they were very excited to see that their drawings were similar to the real story. What fun! We did this project in my Art Theory class in college, and I remember loving it just as much then. :)

Tuesday was another day for purple. We started with reading Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. The students made connections to the text by thinking about what they would want inside their purple plastic purses. (The boys thought about things that their moms would want inside their own plastic purses.) I was happy that the kiddos even turned our discussion into a lesson on good and bad choices. We talked about how teachers want the best for us, even if we think they're just being mean at times. ;P Of course, I sent home all of my examples before I remembered to take photos, so here is a picture of mine. (One of my friends really thought that we should have turtles in our purse, so of course I had to add it! How fun!)

Wednesday we did green. We read Go Away, Big Green Monster! and created our own scary monsters out of construction paper. During writing time, we focused on adjectives and making our writing more detailed. We talked about how our writing should help our readers visualize. I always love how fun these monsters turn out!

On Thursday, we started orange. We read one of my all-time favorite stories The Big Orange Splot. As a class, we talked about accepting everyone's differences and how those make us special. I love how everyone made connections to bucket-filling and bucket-dipping. We are such good friends this year! The kiddos made their own houses and then added a big orange splot to connect to the story. It was hard to choose just a couple to share. Also, any day is not complete until someone mentions Ninjago, so I knew I had to add this house to the blog. :)

Friday was Carrot Day! You know how first grade teachers are suckers for theme days, so I was super-excited. Everyone brought in a full-sized carrot from home to participate in some Carrot Day awards. We gave out homeroom awards for Smallest, Longest, Biggest, and Silliest Carrots. Then we gathered as a first grade group in our pod, and we handed out grade-level awards. It was such a fun way to end the week! Our class read The Enormous Carrot then made our own carrot books. (I'm loving our use of new vocabulary from the day in this book!)

Science was extra-exciting, too, because Kindergarten let us borrow their hand lenses and microscopes! We have been learning about science tools, so this was a great way to integrate Carrot Day. I sliced off a bit of their carrots, and each kiddo got to look at their carrot under the microscope. Talk about exciting times! (Where were these nifty plastic microscopes when I was in school!?) This was a great way to talk about tools as well as practice using our Scientific Method.

All in all, my first Carrot Day was a huge success! I have to give a huge shout-out to my BFF, Ms. McCormack, for bringing out her Color Unit to share! :)