Sunday, November 30, 2014

December continue...

We only have three weeks until Christmas break. There is so much I like to do with my kiddos but I always seem to run out of time. Our grade level is doing the Christmas play this year. It's the story about the Gingerbread Man. That takes so much time between practices and the day of performance. We do two shows during the day and one in the evening. Luckily we are doing the play earlier than normal so we have time to relax and do our Christmas unit.
Yesterday I posted my nonfiction close books and said that I would post my writing today. So here we go.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Gingerbread-Man-Cookies-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1587286
 Here are some examples from the opinion writing for Gingerbread Man. I always do lots of prewriting so the kids understand their writing. I see my own children who are given a writing prompt and told to write 2 paragraphs with absolutely no prewriting and it's awful. But if I sit them down, create a makeshift graphic organizer, their writing is more exciting!
To go along with opinion writing there is also informative writing which includes facts about the Gingerbread Man and narrative writing to create a story about how to catch the crazy cookie.

Next....Christmas!



 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Christmas-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1587313
 These are samples of the narrative prewriting, final writing and rubric. I have maybe four kiddos who are getting good at using their imagination to give me ideas on our stories, but the rest are mostly following along. So we do all the prewriting together. Then they write the final writing independently. We are working on drawing pictures to match our stories because I am still getting pictures of a house, tree, sun and bird even though the story is about Thanksgiving dinner. It's like they were trained to draw those exact things in kinder and don't know how to move away. The last 2 weeks, I've given them extra time just to draw their pictures so we can draw details. It's a process.  Here's to the Winter break countdown!!





Saturday, November 29, 2014

December begins....

This is going to be a super quick entry. My niece is with me and wants me to read the Berenstain Bears Save Christmas. Priorities people! So here are a few nonfiction books for this month. The first one is a Christmas Around the World book and the other is about how to make gingerbread man cookies.

 











 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Christmas-Around-the-World-Nonfiction-Book-Close-Activity-1564847
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/How-to-Make-A-Gingerbread-Cookie-Nonfiction-Close-Book-1584928
 Check out these books! Tomorrow I'll add Gingerbread Writing. Don't forget Teachers Pay Teachers sale Dec 1 and 2! Now to go read a story!!

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Thanksgiving

Can you believe Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away?? I haven't even begun to think about what our plans are going to be! I have been focusing on my nonfiction readers to read during our Thanksgiving unit. I want to spend more than the 2 days before Thanksgiving working on it. So I need at least 7 days worth of Thanksgiving work. So check out some of my books


My Now and Then book helps kiddos understand there were some big differences between the children from Pilgrim days compared to them today. They sometimes have a hard time understanding the time differences and I'm hoping this helps.
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Mayflower-Nonfiction-Close-Reading-Book-1537699

This book give the kiddos facts about the ship. Most of the books I read have quick glimpses of the Mayflower but not a lot of details. So now I've created a book to give the details!



 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Thanksgiving-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1537899

And of course we have writing! We cannot forget to work on our opinions, informative and narrative writings. Bring on Thanksgiving!




 


Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Veterans Day

Veterans Day is next week and it is a holiday is dear to my heart. I have my own personal veteran that I think is awesome! He's the best! So it is my mission to share appreciation to veterans to all. One of my goals is to teach those who listen not all veterans are soldiers! This is very important and shows the upmost respect for veterans if you know what kind of veteran they are. So here we go:
U.S. Marine Corps = Marines
U.S. Navy = Seamen
U.S. Army = Soldiers
U.S. Airforce = Airmen
U.S. Coast Guard = Coast Guardsmen
Army National Guard = Soldiers
To honor our veterans I have made a nonfiction book with close activities for my kiddos to read.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Veterans-Day-Nonfiction-CLOSE-Reading-Book-1537105
Check  out my book and remember to thank a veteran for the sacrifice they made to keep our country safe and free!

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Writing and Booklets

This is a quick post...life has been super busy (Red Ribbon Week, Halloween, etc) and it seems my husband and I are in a constant battle over the laptop since he is doing online school. I wanted to update everyone with the few new writing and books that I have created. The first ones are for fall.
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fall-Nonfiction-Close-Reading-Book-1523921
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fiction-CLOSE-Reading-Book-Fall-1510594
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fall-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1510634

This is actually are plans for next week. It feels like the right time now since the weather is finally cooling off. When fall actually begins it is usually in the mid 90s here so it is hard to relate to falling leaves and cool temperatures when we are still sweating and wearing shorts.
I wanted to get a little ahead of the schedule and get started on our owl unit. I did create a nonfiction reader but am unable to sell it for "copyright" issues. I don't understand them so I'm not messing with it. BUT, I am able to hook you up with the writing unit on owls.

 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Owls-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1524081
 Check them out and let me know what you think!

Monday, October 20, 2014

New Fiction Readers

I got brave tonight and uploaded two of my fiction readers with CLOSE activities to my TeachersPayTeachers account! I'm kinda freaked out! I really hate doing new things. It makes me super nervous until my "I don't care what others think" instinct kicks in. I like that attitude much better. I'm less jumpy.
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pumpkin-Patch-CLOSE-Fiction-Reader-1510605
The first one is a story about a little girl looking for the perfect pumpkin at the pumpkin patch. I tried to use many of the sounds we've learned in our phonics program but many things are thematic based.
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fiction-CLOSE-Reading-Book-Fall-1510594
The other story is about two little boys playing during the fall. It's my first few attempts at fiction. If you remember from yesterday (I think it was yesterday...day before...oh I don't remember) I want to extend my books to include fiction so that I can ask that simple question. What is the author's purpose?? That is a really easy question to ask with nonfiction books that are filled with facts, but not as easy with fiction. So wish us luck as we begin this adventure in first grade!

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Pumpkins

We have been working on pumpkins for a many, many days. It is such an easy theme to do so many activities on! Of course I am going to talk about our nonfiction reader and our writing. My kiddos are getting really good at the writing. I am so proud of them! Here is some of the writing examples.


 The end of our trimester is in a few weeks and I will have to add to our rubric to help my kiddos grow in their abilities. For opinions I will add another sentence supporting their opinion. Informative is just adding another fact and narrative...I think I will leave alone just because we are still doing a lot of that writing as a group. Maybe third trimester I will add another sentence to the story but for now we will just work on our imagination.

 Our reading is going along well. When doing the CLOSE activities at the end is becoming relatively easy for most of my kiddos. I realized with this book that when I ask the question about author purpose they all repeat what we wrote the week before. So I realized I am asking that question a lot in informative readings but not in narrative or fictional reading. So my goal the next couple of weeks is to begin creating fiction books that go along with my themes....stay tuned for them!



Saturday, October 11, 2014

Bats are a little freaky!

This first grade class has been SUPER busy! We've been learning how to sign onto the computer by ourselves, we have been allowed to go to the computer lab another 45 minutes, and we are learning how to use Lexia all while doing our everyday needs of reading, writing, phonics, comprehension, math, ELD, social studies and science! The kiddos are doing great with all these challenges. Their teacher...is exhausted!
Our Prewrite for Opinion

This week our theme has been bats. There is a definite divide in our class about whether or not we like bats. We wrote our opinion writing about whether we think bats are scary or not. So many of them are truly scared of bats. So I looked up some Youtube videos on bats just for kids. I've never had absolutely zero noise while watching a video. These kiddos were amazed at what they saw.I love using Youtube to show them real life videos of the science info we are learning. I even found a video about vampire bats and thought that if they saw how they just licked the blood of animals, they would be less fearful of bats. Nope...it even freaked me out a little. Those bats are not as little as I thought!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLp-ls8AoaU
Check out the video and see what you think!!
We also managed to write our informative writing and do our CLOSE reader about bats this week.
 
Bats will leak into next week. There is so much to learn about! The kids are loving it though so it's ok to get a little behind schedule. 
 


Tuesday, September 30, 2014

End of Apples and Beginnign of Spiders

Last week we ended apples and now this week we have begun spiders. So let's back track a little and look at the end of apples. On pinterest I found a cute apple activity where you made a book with an apple cut out and it inspired me! I used the ELA and math activities we had for apples to use with it and viola! Here is it...
 

  
I know some are messier than others but my philosophy is that it's the kids' art not mine so it needs to be finished completely by them. My first year teaching I took over in January for a class that the teacher retired from. She did not like "ugly" art so she did most of the cutting and gluing herself. So when I began the kids didn't know how to cut and glue! They sat there staring at me waiting for me to do it for them! UGH!

So now onto spiders. Monday's writing began with a story. A few weeks early when we were lining up to go home and right by our backpacks was a HUGE spider. I quickly shooed the kids away and we walked up to the front of the school and told my teacher friends about it. They then became curious so they went to see this spider with my own children but after a few minutes of hunting decided it was gone. Wellll.....it wasn't! It traveled across the concrete to the building beside me and introduced itself to the curious teacher. Our computer guy came to her rescue and stepped on it. Guess what...it was so big because it had babies all over its back!! Babies went EVERYWHERE! They ended up having to fumigate her room. So that's how we got started with spiders.
Now we made our opinions on whether or not we are scared of spiders.
  
We brainstormed why we would and wouldn't be scared and then everyone picked their opinions. Tuesday we did our final writing. I don't know if you can see the picture on the right...the little girl's mouth is screaming because she is so scared. The one on the right is a shoe getting ready to step on the spider! LOVE IT!

Now onto our CLOSE book. We read the book without any pre-vocabulary feeding. Then we went back and the kids told me what words they didn't know. We talked about the meanings and I even pulled up some YouTube videos to actually show the kiddos a close-up of spinnerets. That freaked them out because they realized it was on the spider's butt! 1st graders and the word butt equals laughing for at least 5 full minutes. 
 
 
Then we did our reading comprehension and got to COLOR! Who doesn't love to color!
On a side note...I don't know why I am sharing this...buuuuutttt....one of Youtube videos of a spider had instrumental music in the background and it took a few minutes for me to realize it was Metallica's One! I love that song! LOL