Apple Stations

I would like to take this time to thank all of my wonderful parents who volunteered to run apple stations this week. 

 Students having fun learning about apples!

 So many colors!

The only 6 sided star that I have ever seen.

Cutting up apples and counting seeds.

Learning about fractions with apples.

Counting by 2, 5, and 10's. How many seeds are there?

After we learned about fractions, the students cut up the apples into smaller pieces. I placed them in a slow cooker and we made some amazing chunky applesauce. 

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The students were able to taste test the applesauce at the end of the day.

Apple Week

Lest week was apple week, which is one of my most favorite weeks because we do so many fun activities!

We start by learning all about Johnny Appleseed. We read many stories about the real John Chapman. The students complete a sequencing of Johnny Appleseed seen below.

We work on a guided drawing of Johnny Appleseed and add him to a tree and sunny background. I found the idea here at Blog Hoppin'

I will be posting my my student's versions soon.

On September 26th, which is Johnny Appleseed's birthday, Johnny Appleseed actually showed up! Thank you to APC Dramatic Arts Program for an amazing show. The student's really loved listening to Johnny tell us all about his life. 

It was a wonderfully interactive presentation. The students were asked to help plant an apple orchard, and they were lined up to show how big a log cabin was and how tall an apple tree grows. I have never seen so many hands raised to answer questions. It was great. 

Colors, Colors, and More Colors

At the beginning of the year, we celebrate color week. Each day is a different color of the rainbow. Each child brings in an item of that color to share in front of the entire class. I create a poster with the color name at the top and tape up the items with the student's name next to the item they brought. These posters will stay up in my classroom for months. The kids love the color collages. Here are examples of some of this years collages.

We do color activities all week, but the collage is my favorite. 

Chrysanthemum

At the start of the school year we have name week. It gives the me and the students a chance to learn each others names. I read the book Chrysanthemum. For those of you that do not know this book, it is about a mouse who thinks her name is just perfect until she goes to school and is made fun of for her long name. After I read to them, my students and I discuss the importance of being proud of who they are and how important their names are to who they are.

The students fill out the "My Name is special" worksheet about their name. As they fill them out, I work on finding what their name means. In the past, I have already done this at the time that we do the worksheet, and I hand them their meaning on a sticky note. Many kids already know what their name means, and I just confirm it. 

Here, you can get an updated version of this worksheet for free on my TPT store.

We also created wonderful little mice that you can find at First Grade Wow. My kids had a great time learning all about their names and doing this fun craft. 

Door Decorations

Every year I do a door decoration with a fun saying and the names of my students on it. This year, my school's theme is super heroes so I decided to do a super hero door decoration. I found an amazing example over at Queen of the First Grade Jungle. It really inspired me! Here is what I came up with…

I got the template for the student names from Elizabeth Pott's store over at TPT for FREE! You can get them here.

I think that my door turned out amazing this year. My students are stills really excited about it!

Moving to Room 8

As I said previously, I moved classrooms this year. In short, my classroom was a mess when I unlocked my door for the first time on August 15th. I had exactly four days to get it ready for students to enter. Having a blank slate is both exciting and nerve racking. My parents helped me out. You can see them putting up my alphabet. It was an exhausting task, and they bickered like an old married couple. My mom is a perfectionist and needed the M and N to be exactly in the middle. My dad worked from one side and my mom from the other, and the projector caused some major issues. In the end, it turned out fantastic. I had saved all of my fabric from my old classroom and was relieved to find out that the layout of my new room was identical, so once the fabric was found for the corresponding bulletin board, my boards went up fast and stress free. As any teacher knows, putting up bulletin boards and boarders can cause cursing and tears. I could not help but think that luck was on my side. 

In the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, the main character buys a house in Italy and fixes it up. After she buys the house she says "Pick one room and make it yours. Go slowly through the house. Be polite, introduce yourself, so it can introduce itself to you." I had a very similar approach to my classroom. I split my classroom into sections and went through each section, putting things away, cleaning up after the movers. I opened boxes and organized my storage closets with curriculum and books. I put together one bulletin board at a time. If I opened a box and felt that I did not need the contents at the moment, I placed I put the box away where I could access it at the time of use. Working this way made me feel calm and organized. I was dreading going through the process, but in the end I really enjoyed it.

Starting the Year

This year has moving full speed ahead and before it gets away from me i have decided to document my life as a teacher. This year started out like most of my years teaching...I had to move rooms. This time was very much like the last, my things crazily packed up at the end of the year and transported not so carefully to my new room over the summer. Moving rooms is always hard, but I am now next to the other lovely ladies that make up my amazing first grade team. I documented my room transformation, and things are still coming together.

My school is going through a transformation in regards to technology. We dismantled our computer labs and are moving toward being a one to one technology school. In the mean time, we are working with short throw projectors and Apple T.V.s that are not compatible with most of the staffs computers, and with all of the moves, our technology has been all over the place. I know it will be amazing when it is all worked out, but in the mean time, I have gone back to old school teaching. It has been quite the experience. I never new how much my projector helped my students focus on their work because I have never had to teach using only the whiteboard. After about a week, I realized that I needed to get my act together and work on setting up my document camera. It took sometime, but I finally managed to hook up all of the cords correctly and am now able to use my document camera with my new projector. Phew…..