Five for Friday: 2/13/15

I haven't linked up with anything in a long time and I thought this was the perfect week to get back into the swing of things! 

My favorite holiday to celebrate at school is Valentine's Day.  There's not an official party.  We just pass out our Valentine's and eat a special snack.  

All the girls flocked to this little boy's Valentine box.  The shiny, fake diamond lured them in! Haha.  It starts young!

The added benefit is sometimes you end up with really neat gifts!

Backing up to earlier in the week, we studied ending digraphs.  

This year, my students love the "I Have, Who Has?" game. I had to whip up one for middle/ending digraphs.

Go to my TPT store to download it for free!

Do you have a subscription to Brainpop, Jr?  They have the best videos to introduce a topic!  They are short and engaging.

We watched two videos for George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman before making our crafts.

I let the students complete their Venn Diagrams on their own.  I read through them to make sure they understood the concept.

Um, he compared Harriet's head injury to his busted lip. Way to make Social Studies more entertaining!

It's that time of year when the students are comfortable and love to talk to their friends about anything and everything.  Rainbows, unicorns, marshmallows....anything except work related tasks.

It was getting a little out of hand, so I had to use one of my favorite tricks in the book.

The Blurt Chart.

Each student gets 3 blurts a day.  If they lose all of their blurts, they get a number written in their binder (which correspond to "I was talking too much.")

Student 2 has permanently lost her blurts because she moved.  I didn't want a chart that said 1, 3, 4, etc. 

If they keep all of their blurts, they earn a Star Dollar (part of my class reward).  They will do anything for a Star Dollar!

Well, most of them....Here's how my chart looked after Monday.  This wasn't the best day, but we had much better days the rest of the week.

It's a great visual reminder.  Once they lose all of their blurts, they have to move their clip down on the clip chart.  It also helps me track how many time they talk during the day.

{This is not my original idea.  I found it on Pinterest way back when in 2011.}

I've started posting a little more on Instagram and I'm looking to follow new people!  Leave me your Instagram name!

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Be sure to checkout Doodlebug's linky party for more great ideas!

Hello 3 Day Weekend!

One of my favorite weeks of the year is over! I just love celebrating Valentine's Day with my students. There's still so much love to go around in first grade and it's so innocent.

You know what made be laugh even more? I was scrolling through Pinterest last night and so many of the people I follow were already pinning St. Patrick's Day ideas.  We can't even wait for one holiday to be over with! I know I'll be pinning some St. Patrick's Day ideas this weekend so I can't say too much! It's really going to throw me off that Easter is at the end of March.  Bunnies and clovers in March?

Anyhow, onto my weekly linky party post!

I don't know about you, but I adore these week in review linky parties. I don't have a lot of time or energy to blog during the week. I enjoy finding new to me blogs every week and getting some great ideas to use for the future.

1. Valentine's Day was a blast! We had a visit from the Sweetheart Snatcher and exchanged our treats.

2. Check out this Valentine's hair! Oh. My. Word. Is it not amazing??

3. We taste tested Hugs and Kisses.

4. We finished up our study of diagraphs and made 2 easy crafts.

First up was the peach craft. We brainstormed words that ended in "ch" and made an anchor chart (which I forgot to take a picture of).

(Yes, my students did say it looked like a tush, but what can you do?)

Our beach scene.

On each shell, students wrote words with ending diagraphs "ch" "sh" and "th."
I'm putting the finishing touches on my Diagraph Packet and it should be up this weekend!

5. I have *finally* figured out Google Docs! This is my first attempt uploading something to Google Docs, so if it fails let me know.  If you are looking for the Piggy Bank templates from a few weeks ago, here they are!

Click HERE for the templates.

Super excited for my 3 day weekend! I hope you have a break too!

Cranky Pants & a Freebie

When I woke up this morning, I accidentally put these pants on.

Source

All the way to school I prayed that I would not be cranky at school. I was consciously trying to turn my day around, especially since nothing bad happened to me.  

Luckily it worked!  I even overheard one of my firsties reading the directions of an assignment to herself.  That is BIG in first grade, people! I was so dramatically excited (I may have fallen on the floor) and gave her a Star Dollar (part of my reward system) for being such a smartie.

We are in the process of making our Valentine's gift for our parents. I intended to take a picture of the final product, but I had to run out of school in the middle of my after school art class due to a migraine. Those migraines are serious business! I crashed for about 2 hours and am feeling much better.

We are studying the 5 senses in Health and I figured it would be amazing to see what my firsties thought of love.

It's a freebie at my TPT store, so if you need a last minute Valentine idea go and grab it! (I am still trying to figure out how to insert Google Docs into a blog post so it's easier to grab freebies.) Let's just say some of my first graders think love feels like skin.  Ooh-la-la. You better pray for me to make it through Valentine's Day on Thursday.  They are in L-O-V-E.

TGIF!

Woohoo! We made it to Friday, people! It was one of those weeks where after school I came home and immediately put on my pajamas. I'm hoping this weekend my motivation to do anything will come back.

1. We started studying diagraphs and made this adorable Valentine's craft.

2. Is it just me or is inflectional endings super hard to teach? We started with past tense verbs and made it rain with those verbs. Any craft with scrapbook paper = awesome.

This craft is from Across the Hall in 2nd grade. You can purchase the templates and activities to go with the book The Day It Rained Hearts here. I used everything in the packet this week - it fit the needs of my students perfectly!

3. It's teeth time! We did the typical hard boiled egg in Coke and juice.

The smell in my room was amazing.

4. I felt like we made a zillion crafts, which leads me to tell you about my glue stick issues. I found a solution for issues with my pencils. Glue sticks are another issue. I've asked parents to send in additional glue sticks and I swear it's like my kids eat them.

I spent $20 on these big glue sticks last weekend and some students FORGET to put the lid on. Glue sticks are my new nemesis.

5. In math, I had some much fun with Michelle's Once Upon a Time Unit, I barely had time for the actual worksheets from the text.

How cute are those clocks??

I also gave my students cards numbered 1-12 and told them to make a human clock face. I should have videotaped what they did (and who became bossy). At one point I said "A clock is a circle, people." Then I selected a few students to be the short hand and long hand. They had so much fun learning about time.

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I'll leave you with this little gem. Don't you love phonetic spelling sometimes? The best part of this is that it was a character trait printable.

The student said it was "shiny." ;)