Flexible Seating Freebie, WBT Freebie and More!

Hi guys,

I've been out of school since the first week of June and I took the whole month off from being a teacher, which is very UNlike me! I didn't work on a single school related thing, and I'm very pleased with myself. Now that it is July 1st, I've given myself permission to ease into all things school related. 

In my preparation for my NON-themed, brightly colored, classroom with flexible seating I've whipped up a few goodies today. When I say "non-themed" I mean...

This past school I utilized a monster theme. The year before that I had a birds on a wire theme. And, the year before that I had an owl theme. Well, I'm themed out! I'm going simple. Or simply, "We're learning in here!"

Download these FREE flexible seating posters HERE. 

Download these FREE Whole Brain Teaching posters HERE.

And, if you love this super simple, clean design check out my Simple Classroom Job Cards HERE.

I am very much looking forward to a new school year. Last year, I didn't find much time to blog. But, I've got a new blog design in the works and I'm determined to hop back on the blog train and document the happenings in my first grade classroom.

Reading Strategy Videos on YouTube!

Memories Made in First is now on YouTube!

I've began creating reading strategy videos for the parents of my first graders. The first series of videos is called Strategies Beyond Sounding Out. Parents rely heavily on encouraging their children to "sound it out," because they are not familiar with other reading strategies. I wanted to empower parents to help their beginning readers at home! 

I hope the parents of my current students can utilize these videos over the summer and parents of future students will be able to utiize the videos too. 

So far, I've uploaded two videos.

The first video explains how to chunk words, or Chunky Monkey. Look for word parts (sight words, blends, diagraphs, common spelling patters, etc) to help solve words.

The second video talks about Skip It, or Skippy Scott...skip the tricky word, read to the end, and read it again.

These videos are also an excellent resource for novice teachers.

Please share these videos with your parents! And, don't forget to subscribe!!

This Volcano is Gonna Blow! (Procedural Texts)

If you are planning a reading unit on procedural texts, then I've found the perfecr website for you! artforkidshub.com has amazing teach-me-hoe-to-draw videos. The videos show an adult AND a child drawing creating an illustration. Some, but not all, of the videos have written step-by-step instructions that you can easily project.

I knew my class would be obsessed with the How to Draw a Volcano video, but it did not have the written instructions, so I had to create my own based on the video. I typed up the steps and glued them to sentence strips. In class, I placed the strips in a bucket. We played Main Idea Mystery Bag. Students drew sentence strips out one at a time. We read each detail and tried to guess the main idea. After 3 strips, a student guessed, "volcanoes!", but I pointed out the strips did not contain facts about volcanoes so the main idea couldn't be JUST "volcanoes" and we continued on. It took us 6 out of 15 strips to figure out the main idea was how to draw a volcano. After the class figured out the main idea, we ordered all 15 strips and read them. 

The kiddos were eager to give it a try, but we watched the art for kids hub video first. This got them super excited. When the video was over, we read the sentence strip again, one at a time, and created our volcano illustrations!

Later, I posted the steps on chart paper and we displayed our work in the hallway to show that we could, in fact, follow the steps in a procedural text. 

This next picture shows the volcano we created to show the main idea and details of the expository text about volcanoes. We wrote the main idea on the mountain and details on the lava strips (orange paper). This kiddos wrote the main idea was, "volcanoes erupt."

Presidential Sized Learning

Hey friends,

I've been sooo exhausted that I've all but abandoned my little ole blog! This school year has been the most stressful of my 13 years in the classroom, and I'm just pooped when I get home. But "they" say one of the best ways to relieve stress is have a hobby, so I'm trying to get re-energized by getting back to one of mine. 

Whoever determines when holidays are going to be celebrated sure packed a short month FULL of things to learn about -  Groundhog's Day, President's Day, Dental Hygiene Month, and Valentine's Day! 

We are busy gearing up for some presidential -sized learning in social studies this week!

My class  loves to sing, so I just keep composing new ditties. Call me Composer KaSandra ;-) That's how this packet of resource got started. I was just going to write some songs...HA! I finally called it quits at approximately 70 pages including 3 original songs, detailed lesson plans, directed drawings, writing prompts, anchor chart materials, visual aids, and activities. We will be putting it to the test this week and I plan to update this blog post with pictures of my class in action later this week. Check it out HERE.

Here's a sneak peek at one of the songs!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Day

Teachers, I know you will agree with me, to keep your sanity the week before Winter Break you will do whatever is necessary! I'm trying to keep engagement high and off-task behavior low by having a daily theme for the rest of the week. Today was Rudolph Day. 

We are learning about adjectives and rhyme & rhythmn in our poetry unit. I made sure to fit our learning objectives in with my theme. I got in some nonfiction too, just because I thought first graders would love this book about Reindeer. 

The original Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is poem by Robert L. May. I was worried that this poem would be too long and I'd need to split the reading into two parts, but the kiddos were glued to it. We stopped twice, once after the first few pages, and once again at the end of the story, to discuss the words the author used to describe Rudolph and we added them to our anchor chart. 

We used a short poem about Rudolph, printed poster size, during shared reading. We identified rhyming words and "found" the rythmn by clapping the beat. I forgot to snap a pic of the poem, so I'll insert it later. 

We also learned about reindeer by reading A Day in the Life: Polar Animals - Reindeer. Then, we made a tree map to display our learning. We split into three teams - can, have, are. The can-team recalled things a reindeer can do. The have-team listed things a reindeer has. The are-team had the trickiest job, but they figured it out and did a great job! The are-team focused in on what reindeer ARE hunted by. Our goal was to stick with evidence from the text and NOT add our own opinions about reindeer. 

CAN:

dig with theie hooves

swim in icy water

sleep standing up

warm air with their noses

travel with (other) reindeer

HAVE:

heater in the nose (the text said their special noses can heat up the cold air)

fur

antlers

hooves

ARE:

good swimmers

hunted by polar bears

hunted by people

mammals that have babies (we adapted this answer from what the student actually wrote)

The last hour of the day (after math & specials), we did a quick reindeer craft and watched the 1964 classic about Rudolph. I adapted this craft from I saw on Pinterest. The original can be found HERE. I changed the antlers, added hooves, and used a red pom pom for the nose. 

Speaking of Rudolph, last week during Creative Cookies (an after-school club), we made Rudolph cookies.

Tomorrow is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas Day. Thursday is Polar Express Day. Friday is half day, but we are going to learn about snow and Frosty the Snowman. 

Christmas Tags for Teacher Gifts

(insert "The Final Countdown" tune, circa 1986 by the band, Europe)...

It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN to Winter Break! Four point five class days to go...

Today I went shopping for my Secret Santa gifts. Of course, I came home and made gift tags for them all. If any of your Secret Santa or teacher gifts include a snowman, trail mix/nuts, wine, or markers, then these tags will work for you too!

Click HERE to download the tags. 

Merry Christmas. Enjoy your time off!

Pete the Cat Saves Christmas Inspired Activity & FREEBIE

This week we kicked off our Geometry unit by learning about plane shapes. I LOVE teaching about plane shapes because first graders LOVE manipulating them and there are just so many hands-on activities to do. And, of course, if you can throw in some seasonal activities it just ups holiday spirit and level of engagement in your classroom! So, I pulled out this Santa Pete activity from TpT store:

I created the recording sheet the night before we completed the activity in class. You can find it for  FREE here. 

Another plane shapes activity that my students really enjoyed was when we played "Mystery Matheticians" and solved some shape riddles. Shout out to Reagan Tunstall -this activity comes from her Guided Math Units. 

The kiddos had so much fun, I decided to let a little mystery spill over into our Reading/Language Arts block. This week we were writing 5 Senses Poems. So I came up with a Mystery 5 Senses Poem activity. 

This picture is of the mystery poem I created as an example. I forgot to snap pictures of the kid's sticky notes, but some were hilarious. The class split into groups. Each group had to fill out five sticky notes, one for each of the five senses. Then, the class read the poem and tried to guess "What is it?" There was a kinda foul odor in the boy's bathroom and one group went to town with it. Their sensory poem was about the boy's bathroom! Ewww. I suggest using sentence strips in place of sticky notes. 

Are you fortunate enough to have Ipads in your classroom??? My campus has a rotating Ipad cart schedule. Here are two great apps you should know about: 

The first one is called SeeSaw. My class used See Saw to illustrate plot elements and then record a voice over explaining the illustration. Then, we used it again to illustrate a connection we made to a story. My favorite conection was one a student made to Cinderella. He drew the wicked step mother and himself riding a bull. His connection was that the stepmother didn't let Cinderella do anything she wanted to and his mom refused to let him ride a bull!! In th pic below a student is recording the plot of Cindy Rocks and the Three Bears. 

I recently learned about an app called Chatterpix Kids. The app allows you to take a picture of an object and record a voice over. Add a mouth to the picture and the picture "talks." You can also add props and clothing. My girlies at home LOVE IT (they are 3 and 6). I think my class can use the app to take a picture of a shape fill-in and then record a voice over explaining which small shapes were used to fill in the large shape, or to snap a picture of a solid shape and talk about it's attributes. The possibilities are endless. 

Happy holidays!