End of the year.....

Wow!  Only 4 days left of school.  Getting out this early in the year is new for me, which must be why I signed up to teach summer school.  I think I must have been crazy afraid that I would be bored for way too long.  I am really going to miss my kids.  I don't know why, but for some reason this group has really attached themselves to my heart.

Every year I find myself wondering how to send home all of the little reminders of my students that I have around the classroom.  This is what I did this year:

The header with their name is from our wall of work.  Every year the first day of school each child colors and cuts out their name.  I take a picture of them to put beside it, (this goes in the empty first day box).  Throughout the year as students loose their teeth, we put their tooth in the tooth chart.  I hate to throw anything away that was theirs so I decided to add it to the page.  The ice cream scoop is from our birthday graph and finally, their foot pattern from How big is a foot? lesson we did about a month ago (from Rowdy in First Grade.)  Then the other misc. empty boxes are from pictures I took during the year and put up in the room, so now they get to have it back.  

If you would like the copy of the 1st grade, feel free to grab it here.  I also made a second page that has a class picture in the middle of it.  This will be for all the children to sign for each other.  (I hadn't actually intended to do this but when I was printing up the 1st grade page my printer lost its mind and kept printing until I was out of paper!)  Anyway, I don't like to let things go to waste so that is what I am doing with it.

How to keep students busy without using copy paper the last week of school?  Here is my favorite activity from last week:

We tore out the letter page from the back of our practice book and then we started making words.  They loved this!  I loved the fact that some of them even started making sentences.  They were still using them the next day.

my favorite word!!

Happy Sunday.  

Until next time........

Deanna

Keeping Track and a freebie.......

Have you ever gone home at the end of a day and wondered to yourself, "Did I actually talk to little Johnny today, one on one, even for just a few seconds.?"  I am human, so obviously my answer is yes. Although I do think I have solved that problem for myself.

I am a control freak and I like to be able to tell parents that, "Yes, I gave little Johnny his homework today.  I put it in his backpack myself." While many of you may think this is time consuming, (I think) I finally have it down to a fine art and at the same time I get to make sure I talk to every student, eye to eye, every day.

The blue folder on the table is where they put their homework folder when they come in in the morning.  I then check them all and place them in the rolling file that (conveniently) rolls under the table when I am done.  At the end of the day, I call the kids to me by groups or rows or one at a time depending on what I need to talk to them about.  They come to me with back-packs open and ready and I zip and chat.  

Of course I'm sure you wonder what everyone else is doing while they wait their turn.  

Well here is what they do:

Sight word practice time.  Each student has their own "Green Words" in their desk.  This is their time to work with a neighbor to master their sight words.  Now that we are at the end of the year they are practicing spelling them to their neighbor.  It warms my heart and makes me laugh to hear them practicing with one another.  I love it!  This year I had the most students I have ever had with 100%  not to mention those that scored 80% or above on their "word wall" reading tests! (Of course I left my score sheet at school so I can't tell you the actual break down, but lets just say, I will continue to do this until I think of another way to build community in my classroom.)

If you are interested in grabbing the sight words  that I use you can get them here.

Happy last few days of school...........

Deanna

Happy Mother's Day

I hope all the mother's out there had as a great a mother's day as I did.  My awesome daughter took me to Starbucks and then for a pedicure.  What a great morning.  We then met my husband and mother-in-law at Roadhouse for lunch.  Now they are working on napping and I am in here working on this post before its time to go to church.

My kids worked all week on their books for their mother's.  I have to say, they really put their hearts into their work and they turned out super cute.  Thank you Gayle for creating Thinking-about-Mom.  These maps really helped my kiddos think about their moms and how much they love them.

I can already hear my kids tomorrow morning as they come in telling me (all at once) how much their mom's loved their books!

Until next time.............
Deanna

What I learned this year.....

I am soo excited!!  I have my first two followers. (Okay, technically one doesn't count because she is my sister, but the other one does!)  Thank you Jill for becoming my first official follower.

What a year it has been and I feel as though I have barely begun!  I stumbled into blogland via pinterest and my classroom hasn't been the same since.  I have been stalking and collecting great ideas from many people, and as I mentioned in my first post I am trying to show some of the ideas I have used.

 I decided to make a class book this year using  Book Creator for iPad ($4.99.)  It allows you to put your own pictures in and also allows you to record the book.  You can then open and read the book in iBooks.  i asked my students to write and tell me something they learned this year. I then scanned their pictures and added the text and let them record their own voice for their page.  They loved listening to the book being read back to them.

My favorite student page is below:

 As you can see, the stuff he is referring to is the projects we did; Abraham Lincoln from  step into second grade, Martin Luther King directed drawing, and (what a coincidence) mrs. t's first grade class ladybug fact families!  (kids have the best timing)

I think sometimes we forget how important some of our projects are.  They may seem "fun" to us, but obviously to my little guy, they leave an impression.


More next time.........
Deanna

Here we go........

So instead of thinking about it all night, again, I have decided to go for it.  I have enjoyed my adventures in blogland the last several months.  All of you have such great ideas and are so generous to share that I figured it was time I started showing what I have been doing with all your great ideas.  If you see anything on my page that I have not given the proper credit to, please let me know.  Also, please give me a little learning curve, I have never done anything like this before and I have no idea how to create let alone add and attach etc. etc.

Who am I?  I am a first grade teacher in So. California.  I have been teaching first grade for 6 years and absolutely love it!  I love to play with any technology that "they" will give me.  I currently have 6 iPods to use along with an iPad.

Thanks to great ideas from iPaddingalong, I made some QR codes (qurify.com) using clues for our vocabulary words.  I then printed them out and divided my class into teams.  They then needed to break the code and decide which vocabulary word matched the clue.  I had so much fun listening to them read and discuss what words matched the clues.  No one was fighting and everyone was involved!  It was an awesome moment!

Well I am signing off for tonight.  Hope to be back soon.
Deanna