Check It Out!!!

 

Check out  Fun In First Grade! 

She is awesome and features new teacher blogs every Tuesday.  I am one of the blogs featured today.  She asks lots of good questions so you can get to know me better!  The other teacher she features today is awesome and has a super cute freebie in her TPT store that I will be using with my class sometime in the near future.  It is a writing prompt, complete with checklist.  The prompt is:  If I Ran My House....seriously how fun!?!?!

While you are there check out all the amazing things on that blog!  I frequent Fun in First Grade often to get ideas and inspiration for my own classroom. 

Life...

Not sure how many of you have realized that I have been MIA the past few weeks.  Nothing major has happened to explain my absence.  I didn't win a Carnival Cruise (thank goodness, not sure I will ever go on a cruise now) or win the lottery.  Life just happens.  I have two adorable little girls that take up a lot of my time at home and most nights I feel like they deserve my attention more than my blog deserves my attention.  Here are my little cuties in the bath last night!

 

I have been really busy at school also.  We are in the process of switching over our curriculum to be 100% common core.  We are starting to implement now and are to be finished and ready to fully implement in the fall.  I found out I will be staying in first grade next year instead of moving back to kindergarten.  I was disappointed at first, because there is just something magical about kindergarteners, but now I am really excited to get to implement a lot of the things we have already decided to put in place for next year.  I am on our schools math committee and have been working a lot on our fluency tests.  We have decided to give the first graders 3 minutes to do 40 problems with 90% accuracy.  What are your schools doing?  My kids did really well on addition through ten.  All but one of them passed the second time we took the test and continue to pass every Friday.  Now, subtraction has been a little trickier for them but the majority of the class is to the point where they are continually passing.  We also decided to do an oral fluency test.  Our first attempt at this test was to give the kids 40 problems and as long as they need to finish...BIG MISTAKE!  We switched it to 20 problems and they have 1 minute to orally answer them.  I gave the addition version of the oral fluency test on Friday and it went MUCH better.  What does fluency look like for your first graders?

BOOKS?!?!?!

What are some of your go to books that fit into the common core criteria?  I have been slacking on my Friday book posts (again, life happens).  But I have been starting to keep a list of books that I love and what standard I see them fitting into and how. 

I have a lot more I would like to say(like I discovered DOJO), but I will save that for another day...who knows, maybe I will get two blog posts done in a week....oooooooh!  :) 

Are You A Pooper, Scooper or a Pointer?

For those of you wondering what the heck I am talking about, you have never read The Dog Poop Initiative by Kirk Weisler!  Which is my  Friday Book I LOVE! Click on the book to be taken to Amazon.com's description of the book.

This is a FABULOUS book that talks about 3 different types of people.  The people who cause problems, the people who see there is a problem and point it out, and the people who do something about the problem.  It is a great story for this time of school year when kids seem to randomly forget how to solve their own problems.  (Am I the only person this happened to?)

I came into work on Wednesday morning frustrated after waking up to a semi flooded living room due to a ton of rain coming down onto frozen ground.  I swear my kids have great timing because as I was in the cafeteria chatting with kids before school started one of my little girls came up to me and brought me these:

With this note attached:

Man, I am going to miss these kids next year!  I had the same kids last year when they were in kindergarten.  Saying good bye is going to be tough this year!