Knock Knock Macaroni

One of our first grammar skills this year is using quotation marks. To spice things up a bit I used macaroni noodles. We used knock knock jokes for practice.

First, I wrote out the jokes without quotation marks.

Second, students had to add in the quotation marks.

We wrote on black paper with white crayon to make the words and noodles pop!

Finally, we used white glue to attach our elbow macaroni noodles.

The kids loved the project, and spent the rest of the week giggling over their knock knock jokes.

Back to School!!

First Grade fingers are technically second grade fingers this year. I have looped up with my kids and I couldn't be more excited. Since we are a year round school, it's a good thing I love my kiddos, because we have now spent 5 days a week together for the last calendar year. It will be very hard to pass them on next year though. :(

Our situation is less than spectacular. We are renting a small room in a church building, the same one our first grade was/is in. The staff is great and they take excellent care of us, but my room is unfortunate. The Chinese Chapel also rents the room, and are the permanent tenants. Therefore, I have to clean my room out completely every Friday afternoon and set it up again on Monday morning. Who doesn't love coming early on a Monday to make a classroom functional!? At least on Friday afternoons I have my small army of helpers. They find it fun clearing out the room.

My desk on Monday morning.

At least there is a white board and a used bulletine board!

Banquet style seating is great for most things. Not a classroom though.

I did find a few shelves in the church storage room to use. Now we have a bookshelf and a shelf to use as backpack cubbies! I'm pretty excited.

 

Our new bookshelf, and a very ecclectic stack of pillows.

 

Dictionary Dice Drills

If your students are like mine, they struggle finding words in a dictionary. I created a dice roll game to help them practice. We do add a vocabulary word to our personal dictionaries every week, but some of my students are still taking nearly 10 minutes to find a word! (We've done this since October.) This is a literacy center game that can be played multiple days in a row. With three game boards this should keep them busy and practicing for a while! Click here to find the game and let your students have fun using a dictionary too!

Ruler Bin

Our rulers never could find the right home, so we decided a container was needed. I'm all about reusing, so I grabbed the Clorox wipes container we just threw away, washed it out, and decorated it with paper rulers. Now they kids know right where to go when they need a ruler!

April Showers Art

This week we worked on the color concepts of black and white in art class. Students drew lines on white paper, cut it out, then glued it to black paper leaving spaces. They turned out pretty well!

We also made April Showers umbrellas. You can find the template I created here. The kids had a blast choosing their bright colors and painting their umbrellas! My favorite part of painting projects are the adorable orange aprons I picked up at the dollar store for them to wear :)

March Fun!

So far this March we have focused our morning work writing around St. Patrick's Day. The kids wrote letters to a leprechaun explaining why he should share his gold, or what their plan was to take his gold. They wrote about their favorite green things and what they would do with a pot of gold too. It is always fascinating to see what they come up with. We had a spectrum from save the gold so I'd be rich, to buy lots of toys, to spend it all buying toys for kids who were in need. They never stop amazing me :)

For art last week we made rainbows leading to the pot of gold. I saw the idea on Pinterest, but had to make a few adjustments to suit what we had available in our class. I cut the paper the width of the ruler, decreasing by 1 cm each strip. Red is the longest. Then we stapled them together on each end to make the arc. The raindrops the kids traced on a fold then cut out. It is 3 drops glued together to make 3-D drops. We glued 2 cotton balls to each side of the staple to hide them. They I added the pipe cleaners to hold the raindrops and the rainbows. The kids loved it, and as they are obsessed with rainbows currently, it was a project that kept them fully engaged and happy! Who knows, maybe the sun will come out soon and we can see one in person too! 

On Friday, while the kids were in music, a leprechaun visited our room! He sure was mischievous too. We set a trap using our reading pointer, the empty math  practice box, and our treasure chest. The kids were certainly hopeful to catch him, but we let them know they are very sneaky and we had never heard of one being caught. When we returned from music the treasure box was open and the treasures were scattered, he put silly sunglasses on some of our stuffed animals, he toppled over all the water bottles and even two chairs! He also left us a note on the board that we couldn't catch him. Worst of all, he took a bite out of one of the cupcakes! They just loved it and continued searching the room in case he was still there. Lucky for them, he left everyone a few pieces of gold too :)

Recent Art Projects

We have recently done a lot of art projects. We do art concepts, study certain artists, and do seasonal projects as well. Some projects are just for fun as time fillers in our afternoons. Here are a few of our recent ones:

Snowmen from an overhead perspective.

 Perspective is a hard concept for kids. We did this project to try to show them what that word means, and that not everything is viewed straight on.

 

 

 

 

Blow art monsters created using water color paint and straws.

The kids got a kick out of these. Most had time to write names for them, and one boy wrote a story to go along with his monster in his free time.

Kadinsky Trees

Kadinsky was an abstract artist and we made abstract trees to learn what that word meant. This was a 3 day process, but they turned out so cool it was worth it. The kids had a lot of fun being creative on these too.  In the future I think I will save this project to do in the spring when the flowers and trees are beginning to bloom.

Snowman Silhouettes were used to work on foreground and background. We did the background one day and the foreground the next. We should have made the swirls all over the page instead of just on the top to make it more apparent which was which.  This lesson also introduced they idea of silhouettes and shadows.

Primary Colors

We are also starting on colors in our art classes. We learned about primary colors, then the kids had a choice of painting a beach scene or a bowl of fruit using only primary colors. They got very creative. The next lesson they learned secondary colors and got to mix colors together, which was also super fun for them!

Art Garland

We aren't allowed to poke holes in our walls and our bulletin boards are often already filled with something, so we used 3M hooks, yarn, and paper clips to make an artwork garland across our classroom. It took forever to tie those paperclips on, but it is so easy to display their work now!