Tuesday, August 30, 2011

learned a new trick :)

Hey Blog land... I have a few things that I wanted to share that I've made over the past few weeks. I have modified some ideas that I found from some blogs out there. The first thing I wanted to share with you was inspired by Cara's clip chart system she made over at the the first grade parade. She has a precious Hollywood theme and her chart looks ah-may-zing for her room. Our theme this year is 'Going for the Gold' at our school, so I wanted a chart that matched our theme. Thus, I created this (mine looks a little different. I added texture on my bgrounds and they kept showing up in a square box when I tried uploading them to google docs to share with y'all):


To go along with the clip chart, we use this rewards binder. After the kids earn five 'Olympic Gold Medalist' or {outstanding} they can pick a reward from our Rewards Book--and I can not for the life of me remember where I found this idea. :( The book and some of its rewards are below. I reeeeallly like this system better then giving them something that will more than likely satisfy their interest for a few hours and then is forgotten. And not to mention, I don't have to pay a penny for any of the rewards! BONUS! :)

Hopefully the links work and everything is smooth for downloading/viewing. It's my first time uploading things... so please be patient with me if they don't work! :) Will try to post a go-fish numbers game and recording sheet later this week that I made for our math tubs. And possibly some pictures of my classroom--tried to take them today but my bestie (who sadly moved grades on me this year to 3rd) swung by my room and was ready to leave, so I didn't get a chance to take pics. What can I say? I miss talking with her :/

Happy Tuesday! Home stretch after tomorrow!

Monday, August 29, 2011

one week down... apparently 174 days left?

...or so I've been told by another co-worker who is sadly counting down already (she's got some challenges this year).

I have a great group of kiddos this year--little chatty, but I'm hoping we'll break that soon. We're currently on the every-other-day-we'll-control-our-talking-and-get-our-work-done stage. This year is a little different because we have ::Gasp:: breakfast in the classroom. Anyone out there in blog world currently do that?!? It's nice to have the kids come into the room in a controlled manner but at the same time 7:30 is waaaay to early to have kids in the room. I'm having trouble actually getting things done before they get in the room (and I arrive at 6:50 everyday!)

Last week we did some fun things--none of which I took pictures of :(  I used a lot of ideas from different blogs out there (monster glyphs with slight changes, first week of school book, etc.) to change things up for me. Three years of the same-ish stuff was getting a bit old for me. Tomorrow I will introduce our new math tubs (wish me luck). Tried to get to it today, but my kids just wanted to be sleepish through our Brainpop, Jr pictograph video/discussion. (HOW STRANGE! They were sleeeepy this AM). They sure did wake up when we did our shoes that tie/shoes that don't tie picture graph. They got a hoot out of taking one shoe off for the graph--and then walking around while we collected data for a graph about who can tie/who can not tie shoes. So tomorrow we will attempt the tubs. It will be oh-so fun! :)

Quote of the day: "I have the turkey!" Roxanne, holding up her 'T' apple from our scavenger hunt. (I hid apples with the ABCs around the room and was trying to convince a sweet baby that the apples got off my desk and came up missing while I was eating my turkey for lunch)