Favorite Christmas Stories and Our First Sale!

Hi Everyone!

We hope you had a nice relaxing Thanksgiving. We can hardly believe that December is here! We got to hang our lights and our spunky holiday penguins up outside our rooms while we had a break during conferences.  It looks so colorful and festive! We are excited to return to school and see all of the other wonderful hallway decorations and all the smiling faces.  Everyone just seems to have a little more swing in their step during the holidays.  This is our favorite time of year.  We just love the magical feeling in first grade as the students are anxiously waiting for Santa's arrival AND we get to enjoy some of our favorite stories! 

This year we are able to read some of our favorite books as part of our LA curriculum and have been putting together some fun retelling packets to help our students with their reading skills.  You can find them all in our store.  I am sure we will be adding more as we go along!  We are so enjoying making them and can't wait to share them with our kiddos! 

And now, our BIG NEWS!  We are joining with TPT for the Cyber Monday and Tuesday sale.  We are so excited to throw our first sale and equally excited to shop!!!!  You can go to our store by clicking on the sale button below created by the amazing Krista Wallden at Creative Clips.  

Happy Shopping!

WHooooo's Been Busy in First Grade and a freebie!

We have been busy in first grade finishing up our Nocturnal Animal Unit while beginning our Circle Story Unit and squeezing some Native Americans and Pilgrims in when we get the chance.  I don't know about you, but I am ready for some Thanksgiving Break.  Time to relax and get my shopping on!

Anyway, I wanted to share with you the owl anchor chart we used.  I got the general idea for the anchor chart over at The First Grade Parade.  Cara made the cutest bat with her kiddos and I adapted it for our owl discussion.  You can find her chart here.

This is how our owl turned out.  Note that some of us had more schema coming in than others.  One of my little girls was so proud to tell me that "Owls can't cook!  It true!"  :-)   I just LOVE first grade!  Well after reading Owls by Gail Gibbons, we know everything there is to know about owls.  You can find the packet we used to accompany the book below.

 When we were finished with our owl, the class wanted to make little mice running away from the owl before he made them dinner!  While we were busy learning about owls in our reading classes, our art teacher was teaching the first graders about warm and cool colors and making beautiful owls to add to our hallway display.  They turned out so cool!  Don't you love them!

Circle stories were introduced this week with If you Give a Dog a Donut.  We retold the story in words and then we illustrated what happened and labeled our donut with the pictures to show us that a circle story never ends.  They loved it! (I got this idea from a colleague who made a very neat retelling cookie for her mouse!)  We then got to do Erin's  packet and they got to get into the cause and effect reading skills in other Laura Numeroff books. 

Erin's packet can be found here.

And now the freebie. This is a math freebie we used this week to review related addition and subtraction.  It really was telling when I corrected them.  This a great way to determine who really has a solid grasp on the related facts and who doesn't.  Enjoy!
 

click on the pic for your freebie!

We have linked up with Manic Monday at classroom freebie this week. Don't forget to check all the other great ideas linked up here! Have a great week!

Circle Stories and a freebie

This one is going to be short and sweet.  We have been trying to get report cards ready and share all of our information for conferences so we are on brain overload.  Our first graders change classes for both Language Arts and Math so there is a lot of coordinating that has to take place before the student's reading teacher can meet with parents for conferences.

We are also introducing a new LA curriculum in our district that is theme based.  We love all of the great books we can pull into our instruction and our students are just loving it!  Our new unit "circle stories" is starting this week and even with all of the chaos, we are having some fun making some new retelling/comprehension packets for our students.  We are also trying to make some cute centers to reinforce the phonics we are working on.  Well we started where you would expect with Laura Numeroff and Erin has made this great packet to get us started and focused on the theme.

You can click either picture to get this packet.  Aren't the graphics from mycutegraphics.com adorable!  I used them to make this freebie compound word center too.  Look for more LA centers with Laura Numeroff's wonderful characters to come.

click here to get your freebie!

We hope you all have a great week!  Don't forget to head to Manic Monday at Classroom Freebies for more terrific freebies.  And please follow our blog if you like what you see!

Monster Writing, A Freebie and A Preview!

We are feeling all things Halloween in first grade this week!  Tonight is our community parade and the first graders could not be more excited! With so many of them walking IN the parade I don't know who is going to be watching! :-)

We decided not to fight the excitement and work with it today.  We made torn paper monsters and wrote about them.  They turned out So Cute! We used to give the students patterns for everything, but have decided that things turn out even better with their personal touch so we give them a little guidance and let them go for it. The only thing we showed them for these monsters was how to tear the paper without ending up with a really teeny monster.  We think they did a great job! The writing is still in progress, but we wanted to share the monsters with you and show you some pics of the kiddos working on their monster stories.  We use Step Up to Writing and  just love it.  You can pick up your copy of the writing packet by clicking the picture.  

 

Click here to grab your copy!

We are also joining the Manic Monday linky tonight at classroom freebies.   This is just a very simple roll and color pack (4 pages), but it is great to give those early finishers and our first graders love anything that involves dice!  Enjoy!

Grab your freebie here!

AND NOW... we are so excited to show you a preview of our latest packet!  We spend the month of November learning about the Native Americans.  Our kiddos LOVE it!  They are so interested and so involved in anything Native American.  They get so excited with every new region and tribe they learn about!  Well, we have just posted the study guide that they will be using this year.  We are excited because this is going to make our teaching so organized and easy for our students to follow AND we were able to use our own clipart!  So fun!  If you grab it, let us know what you think!  

Check it out here!

Hope you all have a great week and a Happy Halloween!

Spider Fact or Opinion

Wow!  It was a crazy day today in first grade and I am ready to call it a night so this will be short an sweet!  I don't know if it was full moon after shock or many busy weekends, but we were full of energy in my room today!  I hardly got  a chance to sit down and unfortunately didn't get a chance to take a pic of the scarecrow craftivity and writing I wanted to share with you.  I will try to get that done and posted tomorrow. Please take some time to come back and check out that freebie!  They turned out really cute.
  
In the meantime, I whipped up a quick spider fact and opinion activity to link with Manic Mondays.  I hope you can use it!  Don't forget to click the Manic Monday link and check out the many great blogs and their freebies.  Oh, and please take the time to follow our blog.  We would love to know who has been visiting! :)

Click the pic to get your freebie!

Have a great week!

Adjective Pumpkins and A Freebie

 Hi Friends!


This week we have been working on adjectives.  Every year I fool myself into thinking that because my kids have done so well with nouns and verbs, adjectives will be a breeze and... every year...they aren't! So many of them will give me a noun rather than a word to describe it.  

Well this year, it was little easier with the adjective practice that Erin put together.  I would like to take credit for any part of this packet, but I can't.  Erin was right on top of this.  She is very good at breaking a skill down to its parts.  You can find the packet here. 

I am also planning on using the culmination activity that she did with her kiddos on Friday. They turned out so stinkin' cute!  She said that I could share them with you.  You can click the student writing page to get yours free!

 

We hope you enjoy!  Don't forget to check out Manic Mondays for more great freebies!

 

 

Urban Suburban Rural, This Week and a Freebie!

Wow do my kids love a project!  This week we made and labeled urban, suburban and rural areas.  They loved it!  Such a simple idea.  We took 9x13 construction paper and folded it into three.  They then turned the top into a city, the middle into a town and created a farm on the bottom. After they were complete, they labeled the areas as urban, suburban and rural.  My class has never been so quiet!  They were ALL into their work and they turned out Soo Cute!  Take a look at these hard workers!

This week we will continue talking about our communities and will talk about how small our community is when we look at the world.  We'll  introduce new vocabulary Earth, continent, country, state, etc.  We be using our My Place in The World packet.  You can find it here.

This week is also the week we talk about fire safety. We have linked up with Classroom Freebies again and have shared our Fire Safety Packet.  We will be using it to make a class book, do a safety sort, illustrate stop, drop and roll and share safety tips with others.  You can find that freebie here.  We hope you enjoy it!

Find more great freebies here!

Thanks for visiting our blog!  Please follow us if you like what you see.  Enjoy your week!