Spring Break

I hope you all have a wonderful Spring Break, and come back relaxed and ready to conquer the remaining 9 weeks. 

Be sure to continue practicing your math addition facts and reading each day!

I can't wait to hear about your Spring Break adventures!

Indoor Recess

Sometimes it's just too cold to go outside. We have become competitive and encouraging of others while playing board games.

Pawsitive Behavior Day

The first grade teachers are pretty excited about our Dr. Seuss themed Pawsitive Behavior Day!  We really enjoyed the opportunity to dress up and represent some of our favorite stories from the Dr. Seuss collection.  Can you identify the following characters: Cat in the Hat, Thing 1, Thing 2, Grinch, Lorax, bar-ba-loot, and Fox in Socks?

Our classroom had The Lorax theme because it is my favorite book in the collection.  I have a lot of fun sharing this story with students.  They especially like when I read quickly (I think they are hoping my tongue will get twisted!).

Here are the classroom decorations we enjoyed creating and sharing.

The Lorax had to be present on his truffla tree stump.

We also had plenty of truffla trees.

Posters were created to illustrate characters and memorable quotes from the book.

Students enjoyed a little photo booth fun.  Ms. Pace had made them Lorax mustaches (you know how we like mustaches in our class) for us to wear. 

Teachers jumped in on the fun too! Did you know bar-ba-loots admire the Lorax's mustache?

As we listened to the story being read aloud by a brown bar-ba-loot we enjoyed Truffla Trail Mix.  Each item in the trail mix represented something different from the story.  We had to listen carefully to the story and identify the representations before we could enjoy the tasty treats.  Many students were quickly able to identify pretzel sticks as representations for truffla trunks, a chocolate chip as a truffla seed, a marshmallow as a truffla fruit, teddy grahams as bar-ba-loots, and goldfish crackers as humming fish.

Our classroom was overflowing with Loraxes!  Aren't we cute in our mustaches?

Students agreed to one more picture with a bar-ba-loot.  We're all friends here.

We really did enjoy dressing up for our first graders today!!

Students were able to choose a movie ticket.  We were showing Horton Hears a Who and The Lorax this afternoon.  Of course, Hop on Pop popcorn was involved.  No one goes to the movies and doesn't get popcorn, right?

Math Stars for Mustaches

We are working really hard lately in math as we review our addition facts.  We are so good at combinations of numbers we initiated a contest: first one finished get a math mustache!  Makenzie was our math star today and suddenly grew some fancy facial hair.  {grin}

Habit 3: Reading New Classroom Books

I found a great deal on books at the local Mighty Dollar (yes, a dollar!).  Students have been enjoying them as they complete their work early.  The favorites have included the 3-demensional non-fiction books, of course.

Wildcat Spirit

We've got spirit, how 'bout you?

Sometimes we show our Wildcat spirit wearing purple head to toe on Wildcat Wednesday. 

Scholastic Book Orders

Reminder!

Scholastic book orders are due this Thursday, March 14.  I am eager to place the order early this month so we can get our books back in time for Spring Break.  Don't forget to order online, if you can, because you can win free books for our classroom and yourself!  Win-win, am I right?  Our classroom code is: GYTGY. 

Braille

During guided reading this week we focused on figuring out what was important in non-fiction texts using a article describing Helen Keller.  We dove deep later in the week and created our names in Braille using miniature chocolate chips.  We had a great time learning how people  can be different, but still make a difference.  Louise Braille became blind and at the age of 13 created Braille so blind people, including Helen Keller, could read like everyone else.  We had discussions about compassion for others that are different than us, and really grew an appreciation for others.

We had to study the Braille alphabet to correctly represent our names in Braille.  We even had to include an extra character in our names to show that they are capitalized.