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

I’m a slacker so here’s a picture packed post!

Hey fellow teacher friends! Hope your week is going well… one more day ‘til FRIDAY! Woot! I have slacked in the picture department, so I figure I should post a couple of things we have done around the room. We did an alphabet scavenger hunt around the classroom and the next day the kids got a new letter and looked through magazines to find pictures that began with the first sound of their letter. I just LOVE to pieces the “fone” picture! I think it was my fav!

We did our self/friend unit last week and then made self-portraits that turned out to be A-DORABLE! They’re out in the hall with a poem we read that I didn’t get a pic of yet. The kids really enjoyed figuring out how to do their hair! And I <3 the 2nd person because she gave herself pink fingernails! So cute!

Our first Science Unit was with heat so we made a chart about what we knew about heat and then watched a BrainPop, Jr. We discussed what we learned from that video and added (in red) what we learned from the video. Then we did a fun experiment in our journal. We were exploring heat with our mouths and M&Ms (can you say INSTANT hit?!?) We put an M&M in our mouth and recorded our experiment and its findings. This is Roxanne’s journal:

We played a game from Cara’s Place Value (just a plug for it because it’s AWESOME!) I am a teacher who loves these types of activities as a whole group lesson and then transferring it to a Math Tub so we did ours individually and I set out 10 bags (20 in all-10 brown bags, 10 white bags-since I have 21 students) with different objects in it (unifix cubes, keys, links, little animals, counters, beans, poker chips, etc.) They went around the room and did each bag while recording their numbers. I usually do something like this (with skittles last year) but I think this recording sheet was so much more helpful for them to transfer that number to paper. I saw a major difference in their understanding of it after this activity.

To continue with place value, we made number rockets (you have to check out this Alien Counting song… I will have to get the singer’s name because it is HA-LARIOUS! That’s what sparked this rocket activity. Each kid rolled a die and placed their first number in the tens place and second roll in the ones place. They then decorated their rocket and on the back of their number, they drew their tens/ones to visually see it. They were pumped about it and this will go in a Math Tub once everyone is completely finished. Some of them turned out pretty awesome if I do say so myself. Here is my example on the promethean board and another student’s front:

Here is a finished rocket:

 

So our district has implemented SSR (or DEAR time as it’s known in my room.) We are working on 5 minutes of sustained silent reading to help build fluency for the new STARR test Texas is going to this year(our goal is working towards 15 min. by the end of the year). I pick one student to read to BEVO (Hook ‘em Horns!) everyday. He is our pillow pet. This picture was too cute to pass up and share with you because drumroll… I have my own JUNIE B JONES IN MY CLASS! Doesn’t she look JUST like her?!? I can’t post her face front on but she’s got the glasses and yes… she literally dresses that Junie B-ish every day! Too precious! Check her out as she reads Splat the Cat to Bevo!

Last pic share… PROMISE! This one particular writing mini-lesson, we used Bevo to help us describe things. Here he is so you can get a better look at him. I did my best (which is all I can ask for—that’s what I tell my kids). I am by no means ANY type of artist… I’m lucky if I can make a stick figure look decent. So anyway, drew Bevo while the kids ate breakfast and then we sat down and described him. We talked about how important it is for our reader to get a good picture in their head of what you are trying to tell them and how describing words can really help the reader see what the author is trying to share in their mind. This is what we came up with:

I had them close their eyes after we completed our chart so I could read their words to them. As I read the words to them the neatest thing was watching their faces picture Bevo in their mind. Their faces were so surprised that their words described him so well. Too precious! Most of them said they could picture him perfectly in their minds. I then set them lose to describe something to a reader.

I hope y’all have a HAPPY Friday! I know I will! We’re making apple frogs, applesauce, bobbing for apples, and finishing any last minute apple stuff! Gotta get some grades in there too and computer lab! Should be a packed day!

creating young writers

Almost two weeks down... can't believe how fast time flies! I have definitely been WAY over-prepped and haven't gotten to half the stuff I made copies of or half of the fun ideas I had planned... but I guess that's not a bad problem. I'm still trying to get the hang of our schedule and when to stop/start different subjects. We switched our recess time from 2:30 to 2:15 so that I could come back in the room and not be all flustered about trying to get our new planners that the entire school is implementing into the kids backpacks with notes from the office and all that in their Take-Home Folders. Stressed out teacher is what that equaled. Today was better with going to recess earlier. Me likes.

We're off to a good start in our writing process. Last week they did a free write before I taught them anything (so I could evaluate where we are in the process) and I was a little uneasy about it after day one. We read Arthur Writes a Story and then worked on starting the writing process by thinking about what we know. *great book for this concept b/c Arthur starts off with his own idea and then changes his story based on other peoples because he thinks it will make it better. In the end, it turns out that his story was not really believable and his class/teacher liked his original idea better.

After reading Arthur and discussing our own ideas/trusting ourselves, I modeled how this works for the kids. I brainstormed ideas that I know about, we talked about creating an image in our mind and then drawing it on our paper. After a day or so of that, we switched our focus onto really labeling our illustrations and writing a short one/two sentences about our picture--then going back to adding more pictures/labels/sentences when we think "we're done--we've just begun". (this was pretty neat because I got to share my story about hiking in Yosemite this summer and then got to show the kids video of the waterfalls/river there when they asked if I went swimming in it--all of them were so amazed since they had never seen one before! Way cool to share that experience with my kiddies).

We did circle maps about ourselves and today we discussed different topics we can write about and why we write. Made this for a visual for the kids to reference whenever they are at the, "I don't know what to write about stage."

 

Happy Friday to all you amazing teachers out there! :)