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! :)