'M' is for mouthy....

Since April is poetry month, my firsties and I have been talking about poetry this week. It's been fun reading dinosaur poems for our unit all week... but today, I changed things up a bit.

I read an ABC poem about this ant who is scared of all the big animals that are walking above her anthill. Totally cute. Well, the word orangutan is used in the poem. So after I finish reading the poem, I ask my sweeties if they know what an orangutan is. I have this little boy (who can sometimes drive me up a wall) who innocently says, "It's a thing that you throw and it comes back..." It took just about everything I had in me to not crack up at his answer because I just thought it was the cutest response EVER!

Then later, another one of my cutie-pies came up to me while they were creating their own ABC poem about themselves. She walks up to me all cute and confident with the biggest smile on her face and says, "Ms. Prince, I put mouthy under M because I can be mouthy sometimes..." (think she's heard that one once or twice somewhere at home?!?)

I... could... not... control my laughter this time! She told me something else on her poem that I can't remember at the moment and all I could say was, "Sam, you sure do know yourself very well!"

It's moments like these that make years as hard as this one has been worth it :)

Kony 2012

I know I haven't posted in AGES, but this is worth posting.... Kony 2012. If you haven't seen this yet on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, you HAVE to watch it. It's 27 minutes WELL worth your time (and will especially hit home to those teachers out there!)

Go rangers!

So Parent/Teacher Conference Day is oh-ver! Only had 11 out of 21 show up, so it was a slow day for me. And of course, it was the parents that I didn’t need to speak to that did show up. Ah well, what ‘cha gonna do?!?

About to be Austin-bound with one of my co-workers. We are hitting up the Longhorns/Kansas game tomorrow night and gonna do some shopping and hanging out. Fun times ahead.

Sadly, this means I will have to miss watching my Rangers take on the Cards tonight in Game 7 of the World Series. So I am professing my support now in hopes that they bring it home tonight! I was devastated last night after being one strike away from the championship TWICE and then losing the game. Hoping our bullpen pulls through tonight and doesn’t get all nervous. GO RANGERS! Happy weekend, y’all!

Grouchy ladybug + potatoes!

Time, time, time! That’s what we’ve been learning about this week in class. And of course you can’t teach time without a GROUCHY LADYBUG! We made our grouchy ladybug clocks and then labeled the parts of the clock (face, minute, and hour hand). The kids had fun with this activity.

We then made our own Grouchy Ladybug class book. I copied the pages for each of the kids and wrote the time that the ladybug came across each animal on it. They were responsible for writing the digital time on their sentence(s). They turned out adorable! I can’t wait to put them on construction paper and laminate them so the kids can start reading it!

              

 

Our Librarian had this fan-tab-u-lous idea for the kids to participate in this fall season. Two years ago we made our favorite character from a book using pumpkins. This year, she used POTATOES! At first when I heard this I thought, “ha, yeah right, this is so not going to work OR look good at all!” I could not have been more wrong guys! Check out these potatoes:

                       

 

And my personal favorite:

Fly Guy! Of course, my sweeties said, “where’s Fly Eye?!?” lol… Sorry for the billion pictures.. they were all so good and I couldn’t just pick 4-5 to share!

Happy Friday! Have a great weekend! I know I will… I’m going to a co-workers house tomorrow for pancakes/chocolate milk brunch and then we’re gonna go watch the new Footloose movie (cause I can’t get the stinkin’ song out of my head!)

no Halloween for me :(

Y’all… bit of extremely sad news for me today. Our campus got an email from our Principal that told us that we cannot use the words, witch, ghost, or Halloween (or anything that might be considered “scary.” I was extremely sad because I was going to do these CUTE witches today and couldn’t do them. This means we will probably be the only campus in America that can’t do anything Halloween related :(

Since I couldn’t do those witches, I had to fill some time this afternoon before we went to library. So we read Eric Carle’s Little Cloud book and then designed/created our very own little cloud. This was a really great one by Jolee:

She even has the Rabbit Ears… who has rabbit ears anymore?!? This was another great one. We read No, David the first few days of school and Alexavier went and grabbed the book to make something he remembered from the book (pure BRILLIANCE I tell you!)

 

Here’s Raekeya’s Peace Sign:

So I realized that I never got back online to finish posting pictures of our last week of community helpers so I wanted to finish posting those as well.

 

Our buses that we made after discussing what their role is in the community.  I think it’s cute how school is spelled “shcool” cause we are “cool” in school. Haha… Oh, and I should mention that I totally ran out of yellow tissue paper which is why none of the buses are finished.

We learned about carpenters as well. Then the kids were able to construct different things and we talked about how hard it was to create and build something stable. We then talked about how it takes a special person to be able to see the angles and having the vision to create something.

This group constructed a bridge from the blocks.

One group constructed a chair. The picture on the right was actually an invention as well. She said you put something on the top of it and it shoots out through the opening whenever you need it to. What a thinker!

We made doctors and then made our own doctor bags! The kids loved being Doctor So-and-So!

Our Police Officers… aren’t they so stinkin’ cute?!? We colored the officers and then the kids wrote what they knew about police officers. I was really proud of their writing seeing as they did it by themselves during our FOCUS time when I was working with my babies doing interventions. We also did our fingerprints using stamps. I put those out during Open House and the kids were able to show their parents with a magnifying glass how different each fingerprint is! It was a hit!

Hope y’all have a great rest of the week. I’m praying I can get through these next two days with no incidents y’all. I am having a rough time this year with my little ones. They are doing some things that children who are 6-7 years old should NEVER be doing!!! I’m at a loss and have even asked my AP on what to do about certain behaviors. It’s so sad.

too funny to pass up

Ohmygoodness, y’all! Tomorrow is Open House and we have been working on Community Helpers this week (I will post some of our activities later). Today, we wrote about what we know about Police Officers and I just HAD to get online and share this with all you teachers out there! I have just about shared it with everyone I know because it has just cracked me up today!

It says, “Police have guns. They shoot people. Bad people. They are really incredible. They are very nice….”

and for the part that just has me crackin’ up and sharin’…

“you’re goin’ downtown. Take ‘em in boys!”

haha… okay, seriously! Maybe it’s how Trista read this to me (so serious when reading everything else and then so much enthusiasm in the goin’ downtown and take ‘em in boys! part.

My question: What has this girl been watching?!? I tried asking, but she didn’t know the name and was just beside herself that I didn’t know what she was talking about!

Anyone out there know? (Cops, maybe?!?)

Anyway, this was just to good to pass up, so I had to rush online to share with y’all! Hope you enjoyed her story as much as I did! And you gotta love the little walkie-talkie and the dialogue box with the “take ‘em downtown boys” quote!

Be back later to share some community worker stuff we’ve been doing this week! 2 more days til the weekend! <3

Apples… apples… apples!

Goodness, I l-o-v-e teaching and doing this fun-tastic unit! We started our week off with apple patterns. The kids did this while I made our first taste-test for the week (apple butter).

We did some apple measuring which you can find here. The kids really enjoyed this… although I must be honest and say that I was a bad teacher and was unprepared for this fully. I went to look for my scales where I have kept them for the past 4 years and they were not there!!! I had to borrow from a fellow teacher and none of my other co-workers had one! AHH!! So my kids had to do this with only one scale—it got a little noisy (again, b/c of my lack of preparing). So I took it up so we could do it later when I got some balance scales from our math lab—low and behold, I FOUND my balance scales (after school) in the same spot they had been in for the past 4 years but in a NEW BOX! Yikes! I had moved them into it over the summer to organize it better and totally forgotten. Oopsie! Sorry kiddies! Anyway, here are a few pics of them measuring their apples.

 

Our next taste-test activity was these a-stinkin’-dorable apple frogs. I made these with my kids last year and they just “ate them up”—okay, okay, bad pun!!! :)

Super easy to make… just need sliced apples, peanut butter, grapes (cut in half—I use scissors to make it go faster), and chocolate chips (for the “pupil” as one of my genesis’ informed us today!) After chowing down, my kids asked for these “every day for snack” and “when we learn about apples again!” Haha… gotta love it! *Peanut allergy substitute: Shared this with a co-worker who has peanut allergies in her class and we modified it with cream cheese instead' of peanut butter.

“Apples” Poem I wrote… we used it to find rhyming words and chunks we know (or as my kids call say, “I see a chunky monkey!”) We found –ing, –th, –it, –all, –ap)

They got a copy of their own and put it in their writing journals to illustrate what the poem means to them.

Thought this one was cute…

This one was creative… you can’t see it too well but she cut it out in a circle and then added a stem and leaf for the top. I told her how creative and awesome it was and she said, “it’s cause I’m a genius!” lol… guess I’ve said that once or twice this year ;)

We made this cute Johnny Appleseed using tracers. I thought Bayleigh’s was fun and creative! Never had a kid label his pot with a J for Johnny (but this student has really taken to our labeling our pictures mini-lessons so it’s not shocking that she did this!)

Cara’s KWL chart… we will finish Monday. I like finding out what they want to know (how apples get sour/how they “git rottin”)

Parts of an apple… The kids made these with tracers and labeled the parts while I tended to our yummy applesauce! They then put them in their science journals.

 

Deanna Jump’s Who Took the Apples from the Apple Tree? class book:

         

           

Can you tell that I don’t like white space?!? haha… I just love Trista’s “surprised” look on her face! Priceless!!!

We wrapped up this week by eating our applesauce and theeeen… bobbing for apples. (had one of my kiddos from last year swing by this AM and he saw we were learning about apples and said, “I remember Johnny Appleseed and it was so fun bobbing for apples,” luckily; none of my firsties heard it this year. So this was a total surprise for them! yay! Two of them actually got apples (and of course it was literally the NEXT person after I switched off my camera!) 

Didn’t get to, but will do this next week:

Life Cycle of an Apple Tree in their science journal. I have my own and have already made copies but I think this one is a LOT cuter! Thanks Cara for posting it for me and everyone else who emailed you!

Apple word puzzles using short a words (-ap, –at, –an, –am). Kids will use a spinner to create words and put them on their puzzle. They’ll cut it out and create their own word puzzle.

Next week… community helpers! Isn’t late September/early October just the *best* time of teaching?!? Kick-starts all the fun units for the rest of the year!!!