A Smorgasbord of Theme Work and Writing!

So proud! This is the last post before I am all caught up and ready for life after April vacation! Here's a look at how we spent the last 6 weeks in our classroom; finishing our United States unit and discovering our next theme: living and nonliving things and their habitats!!

To finish our unit on the United States, we filled our sand table with U.S. vocabulary for search and find, had an election using the book Duck for President and finished our "Where I Live" wall!

This was a good reminder for using and counting tally marks! Yay Duck!

We then started a very exciting unit on living and nonliving things and the habitats in which they live. We used each week to talk about living and nonliving things and discussed and explored one habitat per week.

Here is an anchor chart we did early on. I passed out each of the three item pictures to some of my students after I read the book What's Alive? We then discussed and discovered as a class which of these items was living. They had a HARD time believing plants breathe and eat so we, of course, had to do a set of experiments where we starved a plant of sunlight and water and suffocated it. YIKES! That taught them...

Here's one of our writing prompts about being a good citizen to our habitat and environment-"helping my baby brother"

Forest animal station. They bees used books to help them find their favorite forest animal and then they drew them within their habitat.

 "A squirrel"

We're working really hard on recognizing our shapes, so this pattern block center was a must!

I found a wonderful habitat book at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Biomes-Literacy-Activity-Desert-Rainforest-Forest-Grassland-Tundra-1270844 and used it as an assessment for the end of each habitat study. The children used their previous and learned knowledge and visual cards to pick an animal of choice for each habitat, write its name, trace the sentence, and then draw the animal in its habitat.

We loved this art project for the grasslands: marble painting zebras!

We sorted wants and needs of living things (we decided humans in particular). This activity sparked wonderful discussion about why we need some things and what it means to want. They are quite the intellectuals!

Here's a cute flip book we made for the desert that helps the kiddos practice reading a predictable sentence and learn some desert vocabulary.

This served as an end of unit assessment table where the students worked in small groups to place three animals in each habitat. There are picture cards and also a set of word cards for the readers.

This was a living and nonliving sort used as an assessment at the end of week 2.

Here's one of our vocabulary word walls for the habitat unit: The Rainforest!

we added vines to our classroom library, of course.

We also did a whole group sorting activity with the animals of the rainforest. The bees were so taken by the awe and structure of the rainforest that we decided to delve deeper to discover where each of the animals of the rainforest makes its home. Instead of using a paper cut, paste, and sort, we built a large three story tree and labeled the levels accordingly. We then read The Umbrella and The Great Kapok Tree and learned where each of these amazing creatures lives. I then took printed pictures of each of the animals and let the whole class sort and glue them onto the right layer. It was so much fun and was a great discussion starter for why each animal chooses the home it does. 

When the weather began to warm up, we took our study of living and nonliving things outdoors. We went on a nature walk around the school and drew and labeled things in our life that are living and nonliving. So much fun to apply our new knowledge to real-life things!

Here's a friend who is not very fond of drawing, but it excellent with reading and writing.

Here is a friend who is new to the English language, but is very capable of drawing what he knows.

 Heres another assessment I used after we finished discussing the rainforest and the desert. The bees cut and paste the animals according to where they live!

Here's a few of our habitat crafts!

Rainforest Monarchs; looks beautiful in the windows!

crafting a bear cave (which doubled as a lions den) for the sensory table

Here's our desert sunset collage (ideally, the entire paper would be covered with sunset colored paper strips before the shadow cut outs are added...)

making leopard faces- of COURSE! we painted a paper plate yellow then added thumbprint black spots, googley eyes, and some ears!

Making coral reef structures during our ocean study. We used pink packing peanuts and toothpicks with a little glue to hold them into the "ocean".

We also finished our first two chapter books as a class. I love to read aloud some advanced texts to the bees to keep them engaged, expose them to different text types, and push their understanding of complex texts. We read Snow Monsters Do Drink Hot Chocolate and Flat Stanley: His Original Adventure.  Here's a few activities we did surrounding these texts!

Writing prompt for the book Snow Monsters Do Drink Hot Chocolate. "My favorite part is that he was not a monster"- (at the end of the book the characters found out the snow monster was not real! Go figure! ) Great comprehension work from a very limited English speaker. 

A character web about the main character's little brother, Arthur. We used this as a interactive writing piece. We discussed the character and his traits and the evidence that shows that he is all of these adjectives. Great first grade work, bees!

We also made a sequence chart so that we could see all of the story parts from beginning to end. 

Late Winter and Early Spring Centers

I've been so busy with the 100th day, Dibels testing... sigh.. and Spring changes within the classroom that I haven't been able to share all the learning we have been doing! We have been working SO HARD and my class got a compliment on our Dibels scores! Way to go bees! And thank you to all the teachers who share their wonderful ideas with others!

During literacy centers, we have been focusing on improving our blending skills, reading fluency, medial vowel sounds, blends and digraph identification and usage, sentence reading, sneaky e word reading, and keeping our alphabetic principal and phonics strong. PHEW! They are working so hard!

We love to play MOOSE. I now have CVC and CVCE words in a small pail (from the dollar store) and the students take turns passing the pail, picking out a word, reading it, and writing it. The higher students write a sentence using the word. Easily differentiable and they love getting MOOSE! (they have to put all their words back in the pail) ... its the small things, right?

 One of my higher students (who needs to work on his handwriting) writing sentences using the CVC words.

Some of my higher students use center time once a week to read authentic texts (from the library area) this helps to keep their interest in reading high and purpose clear. I love using Dr. Suess texts; they are predictable, rhyme, and of course, engaging! When they are finished, they answer two comprehension questions- one inference question (not found in the text) and one that can be found right in the text. Throughout the week we also use Mac and Tab books to focus our reading on the sound-spellings that we are learning that week.

I LOVE this center from Lakeshore. It is called sight word sentences. Again, easily differentiable as the colored word cards have a picture on one side and the written word on the other. I love this center for the bees because their English vocabulary is low. (20/23 are English Language Learners). The kiddos are given (by me) a sentence strip with a blank and asked to choose a word/picture card from their pile to fill it in. Simple sentences help some of the bees feel successful at reading a sentence and completing one that makes sense and my higher kiddos are working on filling in the correct plural or vocabulary that makes the most sense within the context. A+ Lakeshore!

Here is a simple game I borrowed from my wonderful neighboring teacher. Write all of your sight words on the bottom half of a long side folded (hot-dog folded) piece of card stock. Laminate them. Then fold them and place as many or as few as you want on the rug. Students play in teams and a caller asks a student from each team to find the word in question on the rug. The first student to go to the word gets a point for his or her team. SO simple and engaging!

During our math centers, we are refining our writing 0-20, comparing number quantity, practicing and extending our addition skills, sequencing numbers, understanding and using subtraction, and learning (Yes, learning) our shapes. My bees came in with very little shape knowledge and our city curriculum hasn't covered it much yet :(.

Love this center. We work for most of the year on decomposing numbers to increase our fluency with addition and subtraction and especially to advance our understanding of number concepts. I laminated these ladybug sheets (so that I could reuse them and not make a million copies) and gave the kids erasable markers to use. each of those small white cups is labeled with a number 4-10 on the outside. The students find the cup that matches the sum they are looking to create on their sheet and shake the two colored counters inside. They then CAREFULLY spill out the counters and write how many yellow and red they have in the equation. Here, my bee is working on 8. He has 8= 6+2. So visual and independent! 

Roll and cover games are our favorite. Here is a two payer game called Cocoa Cover up. I gave each pair two dice and they rolled and added the numbers together to make a sum. Then they covered the sum on their side of the board with a counter. I had the bees also write their equation out on paper too for assessment purposes. 

Here's another game similar to Coca Cover up, just St. Patrick's Day themed. This time, I had the bees write their equations on wipe off boards.

Sorry for the blurry picture! This game is called Nutty about Numbers and includes many picture cards containing 1-20 acorns. The students count the acorns (awesome practice for my kiddos needing one to one correspondence help AND for my advanced ones who are working on recognizing  numbers quickly without counting (subitizing) ) and I have them practice writing the number on their white board. Then they can move one space. There are also go back and go forward spaces to make the game super fun!

This subtraction game proved a little difficult for the bees so I had to make a task card to go along with it. I also included number lines and counters to help the bees subtract. Subtraction proves very difficult for the students to wrap their little minds around- a lot of them are still adding instead. The game has you roll one die and take that number away from 8.Then you use your color counter and cover that number on the board. When you and your partner cover the whole board, you've finished. The task card reads 8- ___ = ___. The bees use their erasable markers and die to fill in the blanks. These helped so much to scaffold their work!

This is another subtraction game but this time the kiddos use two die and subtract the larger from the smaller number and cover their answer. They can bump another friend off the board if they get the same number. How fun! I made task cards for this game as well.

Another Lakeshore product, comparing numbers center.Very independent and well structured to enforce the use of the >< symbols. The kiddos loved using the little colored ducks! I made a recording sheet to go along with the game so that they could transfer their work onto paper and practice using the sign in a number sentence. 

Found this gem at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pirate-Addition-Math-Work-Station-176683

I LOVE this game. Very differentiable as the students can use the task cards to add numbers together (of various degrees of difficulty, and or then place them in categories depending on the sum they represent). Here, the higher bees are placing the equation cards under the correct column and recording their work on paper. 

Another subtraction game where the bees solve each equation in the box and cover it with the matching difference. We used our number lines and counters heavily to complete this game.

This can be found in my freebies !

Here's some of our shape work! This activity is helping the bees to recognize, categorize, and become familiar with each of the shapes we need to know well for first grade. We are simply taking turns grabbing a shape from a jar and recording it on our graphs. See which shape wins!

A BRILLIANT veteran teacher made this wonderful game and so kindly passed it on to our classroom. In this addition and subtraction game, the bees are catching butterflies with number food. They choose a number to place at the top of their magnetic nets, then find the three butterflies that have equations with a sum and difference of the same amount. 

We love these magnetic ten frame boards from Learning Resources. I am working heavily on subitizing and teen number decomposition with the bees and these were an amazing way to keep them all so engaged. I called out a teen number and the kiddos made them on their boards. We then recorded the number and its ten frames on the recording sheet and I asked them the two parts of the teen number. (Ex. 19 = 10 +9) Hopefully this helps with our fluency!