Monday Madness Sale! and Freebie!

Hello,
   I am throwing a sale on my Theatrical Thanksgiving Experience product from tonight until Thursday. 20% off! I also want to spread the love to my readers, so here is the deal:
    This product is really geared more toward third grade, but it works AMAZINGLY with collaboration. So, if you can collaborate into getting a third (or up) teacher to comment and mention YOU in the comment, I'll give you BOTH the product for FREE!! So get collaboratin'! First 2 to comment win. Remember, the comment has to be written by a third or older teacher, but make sure they mention you, too!
   Have fun!!
Here's the link so you can check it out! Theatrical Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Experience

Hello,

    I feel like this year is flying by! Two weeks until Thanksgiving… What?!?!?I will need to do a mass update soon! This year has been so amazing. My kids are just the sweetest, and they are catching on so well to everything we do. Is the fourth year the year you hit your stride? I just feel really good about it.

I’m loving Common Core, and especially the Curriculum Maps made by our county. Everything is focused on what they students should be able to know, understand, and do at the end of a unit.

Writer’s Workshop is going well, too. I have some great writers! We are studying Day of the Week books to move them away from simple sentences to stories. So far our mentor texts have been The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Mrs. Sato’s Hens, Cookie’s Week, Seven Blind Mice, Lola Loves Stories, and Today is Monday. The kids are noticing what they author does, and emulating their own stories. Next week we’ll start publishing them!!

I have been working on something for a few weeks that I wanted to share. I had the idea a long time ago in college when I took a children’s theatre class. We wrote diary entries and acted out the Oregon Trail. This summer at the ISI, we looked at using diaries to integrate writing into Social Studies. That sparked the idea to make an interactive Thanksgiving Experience. For the past two years I’ve done a “crossing over on the Mayflower” experience that includes cramped spaces, loud storm noises, and squirting children with water!! So I took that lesson and expanded it. Now it’s a whole week’s worth of videos, drama, and writing. I am very proud of it, and I can’t wait to collaborate with another class and share it with my students! It works better for the firsties if we collaborate with an upper grade.

Each child gets a historical character who was really on the Mayflower (I learned so much doing research for this project!) and they follow them from the journey over to the first Thanksgiving. There are also videos to watch each day to inspire and inform. Hopefully, the kids will get really into their characters and absorb tons of facts along the way, too. If they can imagine it, they can learn it!!

Here’s the link to my Teacher’s Pay Teacher’s store where you can purchase the Experience. Pass it on to your upper level social studies teachers!!

Now I think it’s time to break out the peppermint ice cream… Hooray!!

And here is a freebie I made a while ago about apples. Late, I know, but never to late to save for next year!

New Blog and Fall Apples

Happy Fall! Hope you are all enjoying the beautiful weather. And some of you lucky folks are enjoying your fall break! 

We have been busy in first grade, our first quarter is almost over already! We have studied fiction, story elements, fantasy vs realism, beg/mid/end sounds, word families, numbers to 20, number bonds, and we're working on addition and subtraction to 10! Whew! We also have 4 of the 5 Daily 5 rotations going. They already earned 50 minutes of stamina, had a dance party, and set the new goal of 100 minutes. It's been a busy, and exciting time. 

We have also started our class blog! We try to write once a week, and I think they enjoy seeing their writing and pictures online. If you'd like to visit us, click here! We like seeing positive comments :) 

I attended the Fall Writing Conference at MTSU and heard some great information about the kinds of writing common core will require. Narrative, informative, and persuasive writing are included in common core, beginning in Kindergarten. So to keep up, I made a little apple book for our celebration of Johnny Appleseed day. Grab it here, by clicking the picture below.

 

Activities are graphing apple colors, making applesauce and writing about the process and using the senses to describe and persuade, reality and fantasy about Johnny Appleseed, and labeling parts of an apple. It was a fun day, and as always, we couldn't even finish all we had planned!

We made an apple tree mural, depicting the four seasons. This is my second year to do this project and once again, it is too cute! I love the way the kids interpret the direction “Paint a tree trunk”…

Winter “In winter the tree don’t have leaves.”  

Spring “In spring pink flowers grow.”

Summer “In summer little green apples grow.”

Fall “In fall apples grow.”

We also made a hall display called Story Street. We will be blogging about it on The Penguin Pen next week. Check us out to read all about it!!

Hoorah for Horses!

I am able to blog in the middle of a week day because my county is having (drum roll please….) HORSE SHOW BREAK!!! Yes. The Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration is held in Shelbyville where I teach, and so many people go and are involved that we shut down school for a whole week! At first I thought it would be a bummer to finally get the kids into a routine after 3 weeks, only to have them leave and come back remembering nothing. However, each year so far the kiddos come back and things are completely normal. It’s a great opportunity to reinforce procedures, though, and I always do. We also usually get a few students moving around when we come back, so I may have a new kiddo to explain our procedures to.

During my Horse Show Break I have been to Dallas to visit some dear friends and their 14 month old daughter. We had a great time! Now I am reading, sunning, hanging out with my mom, cleaning, cooking, and sleeping in for the remainder of the break. Oh, and blogging!  

The first 3 weeks of school have gone very well considering (considering the crazy political drama going on right now regarding our budget and high numbers of students). My class is doing a great job learning how to be first graders! We have gone over a lot of procedures and they are picking them up quickly. I always block out the first few weeks of school because they are so hard, but this year I am feeling really good and relaxed! Maybe it’s just a great mix of kids, or maybe its that I am becoming more comfortable with starting a class. Probably both!

Quick room tour!! I do apologize that I took these pictures with the lights of when the room was messy . :/

A new addition to the room this year: my mom’s easel! She made this for us when we were little and I added some chalkboard paint to it. It will be great for word work!

I moved the small group table. The salmon colored shelves hold basal leveled readers, trade books organized by theme, my files, and mentor texts. The yellow shelf holds our math workstations, other math materials, and our “Penguin Pals”. And one broken ukulele .

Our carpet area got shifted around, too. You can see our heart that we crumpled during Chrysanthemum.

My door! I found this amazing Penguin Crossing sign at the St. Louis Zoo this summer and HAD TO HAVE IT!! We rezoned this year and our class lists were changing every minute it seemed, so I skipped out on putting names on the door this year. But I feel like this door is just as cute and inviting!

Know, Understand, Do (yes I know Understand is missing!) board. This is new following our curriculum maps. We will put what we need to Know, Understand, and Do on it as we move through our units.

Word Wall (post-it style!) and FACE board for reading. FACE goes with the CAFÉ book, but I saw someone had rearranged it to say face, so I changed it last year. I am having some pictures of the kids reading printed during break, so soon this board will be covered with cute kids and strategies!

Desks in rows this time. I usually do 2 long rows facing each other, but we re-read First Days of School by Harry Wong this summer and he suggested forward facing rows, so I’m trying it out. Only problem is that the rows end up like zigzags by the end of the day…

My desk! Got a new table cloth this year and moved the classroom library on that side of the room.

Classroom library! Blue bins for the kids (levels and genres) and red boxes for me! This is also where we keep other reading manipulatives. Notice our love of Helen Lester, Mo Willems, and Kevin Henkes .

Last Thursday we were able to take the kids on a field trip to the Horse Show! They really enjoyed it. We saw lots of horses, the stadium, ate “horse show donuts”, and even got to see some of the classes being judged!

 

The kids were cheering for all the “cowboys and cowgirls”, even though we didn’t have a clue what was really going on! I don’t follow the horse show, and it was my first time to go, too. So we just enjoyed looking at everything and eating our fried donuts. We got back to school and made a bubble map about the horse show, then drew and wrote about it.

This summer I got the idea to have my students write about things we learn as a class blog! They will decide what to write about, then write and draw or take pictures and I will put it up on the blog for them. I need to get permissions to have their work and photographs shown when we go back to school. I am really excited about this endeavor, and I can’t wait to share what we do with it!

First Day of School!!

Tomorrow is our first day of the new school year! I am, as always, very excited and very nervous. These two videos pretty much capture my emotions.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!

 

This one made me laugh cause the teacher is not even in the room when the kids are… Where are the procedures???

 

I should feel ready. My classroom is looking very lovely (pictures to come!). I have my plans ready for the first day. We’re going to spend time getting to know each other, and practicing a few procedures. I have my back to school outfit!

 

This dress from Old Navy and a black cardigan!

We had Open House on Friday and I got to meet a lot of my students. I have 19 on my roll now and I met 11. Mostly girls! Everyone seemed sweet and excited. They all looked happy when they were exploring our classroom, looking at the books and checking out our penguins.

But those unknowns keep creeping up and making me worry. What if some of them refuse to listen? What if there is chaos?!?!?! I think part of this worry is that I usually block out the first days of school after they happen because they ARE the most stressful.

All my worries can be put aside, because I know that I can handle anything thrown at me. I just have to remember that, and breathe, and enjoy the first day of school! All those sweet, little people who are going to grow so much and become so dear to me will be waiting for our new year to begin! Now I’m feeling like Nemo. FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!

Sale Day 2

Yesterday I started a sale on my TpT store in honor of Harry Potter’s birthday. HOWEVER- it was also the birthday of J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. So, today I wanted to write a little bit about her.

She is a woman I truly admire; a hardworking dreamer I can identify with. She not only dealt with poverty and depression, but has been quite open in admitting they were hard won battles. Personifying depression in a dementor was a genius idea, because it helped people empathize with what she and so many others feel during depression. Empathy can lead to understanding. Understanding can lead to help.

She also values imagination more than any one else I can think of, maybe Walt Disney or Jim Henson, but she believes imagination is for more than making art. In her speech at a Harvard commencement, she told them this: “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

During that speech, I learned what a humanitarian she is, and that she had worked with displaced people who were still reeling from the oppression they had suffered. She had personally encountered the victims of real-life Voldermorts, and the horror they had lived through inspired her to write. She shared a part of their stories with her readers, and her readers (using their powerful imaginations) empathized with people who, like Cedric Diggory, died because he was in the way of someone whose power corrupted them.

And I can’t even begin to talk about how clever and witty I think she is. I am eagerly awaiting her first adult novel in September. So happy birthday, Jo! I hope you will keep inspiring us and taking us on adventures for many years to come! 

This is her speech. It’s long, but definitely worth a listen!

Click on the picture below to shop my TpT store. 10% off everything until Friday!!

Sale for Harry!

Happy Birthday, Harry! Harry Potter, that is. Yes, I love the Harry Potter books, so much so that I want to celebrate! Today is the first day of my happy birthday/back to school sale! 10% off everything in my TpT store!

Be sure to check out my back to school product “Ready for First (or Kindergarten or Second)”. The activity I am most excited to use is the “To Tell or Not to Tell”. I feel like sometimes kids don’t know what is serious enough to tell about and what isn’t. So, let’s talk about it! During morning meetings, we’ll go through the cards, act them out (who doesn’t love a little early morning improv?), and discuss. Click below to check out the product!

And… click on this fabulous Harry Potter cake to go to my TpT store. Happy shopping!

 

PS- on the topic of amazing Brits- CONGRATS to the GB men’s gymnastic team for totally rocking it last night! Amazing!!