A Chilly Update

My furnace won't turn on. It tries, it clicks and hisses but no warm air blows out. Of course this happened over the weekend and when my husband was out of town. My chilly fingers are going to have to make this update brief.

My 2nd graders did the disguise a turkey project I have been doing for years. They wrote their own version of the turkey's escape.

This hamburger had real sesame seeds!

A pile of leaves.

An alien.

A Dodgers player.

A chef

Since we only started cursive a few weeks ago I let them choose if they wanted to write their final draft  in cursive or not. Most were excited and did. Love these kids!

My 1st graders are working on nouns so I adapted this turkey Cara shared a couple years ago. We wrote noun on the belly and brainstormed people, place, and thing examples for the feathers.

The 1st graders also enjoyed reading The Great Turkey Race by Steve Metzger and writing where they think the turkeys went at the end. This worksheet was from Tammy Lee.

I LOVE the Statue of Liberty!

I think the turkeys went to Paris. (See them climbing up the Eiffel Tower?)

The turkeys went to Hawaii.

I'll be back soon with some new things I'm cooking up. Hmm...maybe I should turn on the oven to warm up. 

Thanksgiving Nouns Freebie

We are working on nouns in first grade so I made a quick sorting center to use this week. I plan to use this as a Read the Room but it could also be used at a student's seat.

Click on the picture or {HERE} to download this FREEBIE. I'd love to hear from you if you download it.

I'm off to watch my new favorite show Reign on the CW.  I know they can be kind of cheesy but CW shows are my guilty pleasure since I don't do the Housewives, etc.

Freebie Mental Images, Read the Room and More!

I've been a bad blogger. Sorry friends, you'll have to put these goodies away for next year. I have my 3rd cold so I am not going to beat myself up about it. I am feeling beat up enough already.  :-(

Here's what I have been up to:
 I used this center with my 2nd graders. It practices changing nouns ending in y to plurals. Read the room is always a hit!

Click on the picture to see it in my store.

I found this Halloween poem to use for a mental images lesson with my 1st graders.

 I read the poem twice and then asked them to draw a picture of their visualization. Afterward, each student had a chance to show their picture under the document camera. This led to a great discussion of missed details. For example, one girl made the hat purple instead of black. Check out some of these cute bald witches!

You can grab this freebie by clicking {HERE.}

I used the Skeleton Hiccups and the q-tip art project I usually do with my 1st graders with my 2nd graders instead but I had them write their response in cursive! 

Aren't they doing awesome for only 9 days of cursive instruction?!

The 1st graders read Spookley the Square Pumpkin and LOVED getting to make their own and write about it using descriptive words. This class was into making Spookley babies! LOL.

Okay, I've just finished a WHOLE box of Kleenex so I am calling it a day! I hope my body gets used to the germs at this new school soon!

The boy is back

My 8th grade son is back from his DC trip! It was hard having my baby fly across the country and be away for 6 days. Luckily the government was back to work in time for all his tours!

 We finished up our bat unit using my Bat Informative Reading and Writing packet. The students loved it! I focused more on nonfiction text features this year. After teaching the features, I let the class go through our nonfiction books armed with sticky notes looking for text features to label. You would think I was giving away candy, they were so excited for their chance to use the sticky notes

craft by Cupcake

We read Where's My Mummy and wrote about what our "mummy" does when we are scared.

We read Spookley the Square Pumpkin and then made our own original pumpkins.

My second graders made a jack-o-lantern and wrote a narrative about it.

I love having a bulletin board by the door. The kids often stop and read each other's work which I think is pretty adorable.  It is such a small school they know the kids in the other grade and seem to enjoy sharing a board.

I started teaching the 2nd graders cursive this week. I guess my school used to have first graders learn cursive. Can you believe that? The Spalding program we use has different cursive so I can't use any of the fonts I have. I miss the curls and tilt to be honest. Spalding looks so boring though I can see that it is probably easier for the kids.  I made my own font but it is tricky getting the letters to link nicely. Anyone ever make a cursive font and have any tips for this? I broke down and wrote lessons by hand. I feel like I am back in the dark ages. LOL.  Here is a screen shot of the font I made. My handwriting is usually better but I have to slow down and be so careful to make it the "Spalding" way.

I do really like the Spalding phonograms though. It is what I was doing but MUCH more in depth.  I'll post more about that another time. My bed is calling me.

Bats and a FREEBIE

This week we started studying nonfiction using my Bats Informative Reading and Writing packet.
You can read all about the packet in more detail in this previous post.

We have been reading many bat books and determining if they are fiction or nonfiction. As we learn new facts about bats we add them to our circle maps.

I have been teaching about nonfiction text features as we come across them. I added them to our frame of reference in pink. They picked up diagrams easily but glossary is a tough one for firsties!

I had the students circle three facts they thought were interesting on their personal circle map.  Then I modeled how to fill in the flow map planning sheet using a power number topic sentence.

We did one fact at a time, starting with a transition word. I had the students share out the fact they chose  from their map and start it orally with the transition word. They did really great!

A few smarties really wanted to write more so I told they they could if the sentences were related. One girl wrote:

Bats are helpful to humans. They eat insects that hurt crops and spread seeds so more plants grow.

WOW!

Next week we will write our final drafts and make our bat craft. I'll try to take more pics of those!

The first graders are also working on ABC order so I made a Halloween cut and paste. I posted it for FREE, all I ask is you leave me a comment here and/or feedback on TpT.

Clipart from KPM Doodles

I have to give a shout out to Kerri over at Teacher Bits and Bobs for the great Johnny Appleseed drawing tutorial! I wanted to do something different with my 2nd graders and this was perfect! Since I have such tiny bulletin boards I did cut the sizes down so it fit on 9x12 construction paper.

The 2nd graders get to go to a pumpkin patch this week so that should be fun!