Christmas Gift Tags

 

I needed some Christmas gift tags for my students to put on their parent gifts and thought I would share.  The cute Santa is from My Cute Graphics.  There is a color copy and a black and white copy.  Click on the pictures above to snag yourself a copy. Merry Christmas!

TpT Sale and Brand New School

For the past year, we have been watching our new school being built and I am excited to say it is almost finished.  I will be teaching in that brand new building this year!  {happy dance!} 

This is the front of the building: 

My stuff all moved into the new room:

And more stuff:

After putting away most of my stuff, I started arranging the room:

The old furniture from the old school looked outdated and mismatched  so I painted it.   It looks a thousand times better. {I did realize that the older I get, the less I like to paint.  In fact, I decided that I HATE to paint.}

After painting, I had to do something fun so I decorated the front of my computer desk.

I also worked on my Focus Wall. 

I love the title and I made it using Amy Groesbeck's Editable Subject Banner.

I used Chirp Graphics Free Chalkboard Label Frames to make the subject titles.

I am planning on purchasing Creation Castle's First Grade TEKS Bundle of I Can and I Will Statements to display under each subject.  That is one of the many items already in my cart for the big TPT sale Aug 1-2.

Speaking of the TpT sale, all of my items are on sale as well.  Click on the link below to go to my store.  Be sure to use the code:  BESTYEAR when checking out to get the extra savings.

I will post more pictures of my classroom as I get it done. 

Happy Teaching!

Literacy Groups In Action

I thought I would share what is going on in literacy groups this week.  Right now, my literacy groups consist of 3 things:  phonics skill, reading, and sight word practice.  When a group comes to the table, we usually work on our phonics skill first.  This week, we are working on blends with r.  Today, students circled pictures that started with dr and fr, then they flipped over and circled the blend that each picture started with.

Then we read.  I have different groups reading different books based on their reading levels.  Below, you can see pictures of two different groups reading.  I have students read using whisper phones (that my hubby made- I used the directions from Priscilla at teacherificfun.blogspot.com.) This allows me to lean in and listen, intervene and question students as needed.  All the kids are engaged in the reading the whole time.

We also work on sight words.  I use the rapid response sheets that I made to go with our Journeys series.  You can grab those here, here, here, and here.

You can see the sight word rapid response sheets in the picture below.  I didn't grab a picture of the students actually reading those.

Literacy groups are actually the favorite part of my day!

Happy teaching, friends!

Snapshot of our Week

I finally grabbed my phone to take some pictures on Friday.  I thought you might like a peek into our week and maybe it might spark an idea or two that you could do with your students.  

We've been learning how to make a ten to add.  We spent two days on this during our math block and at small math groups and my firsties were doing this like pros at the end of the second day.    {Picture me doing a happy dance.}

We have been learning about character's feelings in reading this week.  We've been reading "Jack and the Wolf."  Below is an anchor chart we did together at the carpet.  I had the skeleton of the chart filled out before we met (all the things you see on the left and top of the chart were done by me before this lesson.) The students themselves came up with what to put in the boxes.  I also had a copy of the story in my hand and we turned to that page and discussed it before deciding what we wanted to write in the box.

We've also been learning about bats this week in our ELA block. On Monday, we read some nonfiction books about bats to build our schema.  We then made a class circle map listing some facts we learned.

On Tuesday, we wrote 3 bat facts in our bat flapbooks.  And then on Friday, we finally made the bat craft that we attached our flapbooks to.

Here is a peek under a couple of  flaps:

                                                                

And a few close ups of our bats:

  

Happy Teaching Everyone!