Yes, Yes, Yaul!

Click on the book to be taken to Amazon!

 

Yes, Yes, Yaul is a fantastic book that my students adore.  It is about a turtle named Hip and a rabbit named Hop.  They love to rap.  They come across the porcupine named Yaul, who says no to everything.  They make it their mission to make him say yes to something. 

The best part about this book is that parts of it is written in rap.  When the writing is green, Hop is rapping and you should rap as fast as you can.  When the writing is red, Hip is rapping and you should rap as sloooooooooooooowly as possible.  The kids always enjoy hearing me rap the parts of this story.  Making a special appearance in the story is Moo Tang Clan, Kanye Pest, and Bee-Yonce.  

I use this story when I want to touch on fluency with my students and when they just need a good giggle.

 

Next week we are starting narrative writing.  I can't wait to share how my first lesson goes.  I am excited about it because I found a great packet on TPT on writing narratives AND I am getting observed during that lesson.  Updates to come soon!

Geometry, Fractions, and Books...Oh My!

We have been very busy in first grade.  I have a love/hate relationship with Spring,  I love the nice weather and being able to play outside with my girls.  (See below)  I HATE how antsy the students get this time of year.  They want nothing more than to be outside playing.  I try to take my lessons outdoors as much as possible this time of year. 

(As you can see, my oldest is a little sassy when she isn't in the mood for her picture to be taken!)

 

In school, the students have been busy learning about 3-Dimensional Shapes and let me tell you, Julie Gesin was a life saver, and she doesn't even know it.  She has this amazing packet on TPT.  Every single activity we did from her packet my students LOVED.  They were engaged and excited throughout the whole unit and ROCKED their end of unit test.  Not one of my kids scored below a 90%.  Amazing, right?!?!?!  So are you wondering what this wonderful, marvelous packet is???

(Sorry, I can't figure out how to make that picture bigger)

 

It is Fun with Shapes and it is in her TPT store for $8.25.  Well worth the money!

While you are at it, check out her blog!

Fun Fabulous Firsties

 

Julie...if you see this THANK YOU!

 

We are moving onto fractions next week and my girls have been healthy and life has slowed down a bit for me, so I decided I would create my own fraction mini unit.  I am really excited about using something I have created with my kids again.  It has been a while since I have had the time to sit down and work on stuff for school. 

 

Check it out at my TPT store!

 

Moving onto Reading...

This first one isn't necessarily a book that I love, but it is one my students fight over daily.  We had a book fair last week and I grabbed this book initially for my daughter, she loves looking at pictures of real animals.  I left it on my desk by accident and the next morning when the kids came in they were BEGGING me to read this.  It is now a book where there is a sign up for so the kids know who gets it when they are done... Are you ready for it...

I will admit, I read a few pages out loud to the class.  It is very informative but humorous at the same time.  Click on the picture to be taken to the book on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

Blackout by John Rocco is another great book.  I love when I get to use this in my class.  This year was extra fun because we had a day where shortly after school started we lost power.  The electric company kept telling us it would be back on shortly.  Well, it eventually came on 30 minutes before school was let out.  It ended up being a really fun day and the kids STILL talk about it. 

The day after our blackout we read this book and then the kids wrote about our blackout.  The illustrations in this book are phenomenal as well! 

 

My two little munchkins are BEGGING me to watch The Lorax with them!  Hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

 

 

Take Me Out to the Ballgame....

While I am not a huge baseball fan (as in, I don't yell at the tv like I do during football season), I thought it would be fun to do some baseball themed stuff in honor of opening day.  I also wanted to ease back into school after Spring Break as we still aren't having the best spring weather and the kids are getting antsy.

 

Players in Pigtails is an adorable book about the women's baseball league.  It even talks about the Rockford Peaches, which my students thought was awesome since we are about 20 miles from Rockford. 



 

Testing the Ice is another great book to read about baseball.  It is about how Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and how his kids viewed him as a hero for many different reasons.  The kids really enjoyed this book.  They also did a great job of making connections to Martin Luther King Jr. and some of the other Black History things we learned about in February.

 

Casey at the Bat A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 probably would have been a better choice for older grades.  It was WAY over the first graders heads.  There was a lot of vocabulary in the book that was foreign to them.  While I tried to explain what some of the words meant, it was probably a bit too much!

They enjoyed this youtube version so much more!  It is much more first grade friendly that the book.

Click here for youtube version!

 

I had my kids play Popcorn Word Baseball.  I found it on teacherspayteachers a while back and kind of forgot about it.  I stumbled upon it in my files and the kids LOVED it!

 

It was a great way to get them up and moving around the classroom.  It costs three dollars, but it is three dollars well spent.  I think we are going to continue our baseball adventures next week as well. 

 

 

 

Teacher Of The Week...

My best friend, coworker, partner in crime, and school neighbor was surprised by our local news crew today.  She was nominated by one of her students to be WREX's teacher of the week. 

Randi Carlson is an amazing educator.  When I was in college she is the teacher I wanted to be, and still strive to be.  She is so caring and patient with her students.  When my own children go to school for the first time, I hope that they get a teacher as awesome as she is.  Our school is so blessed to have her, and I am so lucky that my daughters have such an awesome God Mother. 

Congratulations Randi Carlson!

Check out her news story here!

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!