Who Am I Project

We just had our spring parent/teacher conferences and I always like to put something in the hallway to keep waiting parents busy. One of my favorite things is some sort of guessing game with their child. When I taught kindergarten, we did a shape glyph that was a fun guessing game for parents, too. This year, I decided to do a "Who Am I?" project. They turned out super cute. 

I chose to do the writing fairly guided this time by giving them the sentence starters. You could do it however, but this worked well for what I was wanting. A few ideas for clues: 

- My favorite subject is...

- I like to play...

- My favorite food is...

- I am good at...

- My favorite color(s) is/are...

- When I grow up, I want to be...

Here's the "Who Am I?" writing paper I used. 

After completing the writing, we had to get our profiles ready. I'll be honest, it was a little bit of a process to get the profiles, but for me (and the kids) it was worth it. I took pictures of all the kids' profiles, printed them, and cut them out to use as a tracer. You could try to get the kids to stand super still and trace their shadow, but for me that seemed to be more difficult. Ha! 

Then I traced all the profiles on one side of a big black piece of construction paper.

Cut the faces out of the construction paper and then glued a color of their choice to the back. 

Then we glued the writing on the other side of the black paper. 

To add another fun aspect and incorporate technology, we recorded our writing on FlipGrid so parents could scan the QR code and see/hear their child reading their writing. This would also serve the purpose as the big reveal!! Wooo!! 

I recently went to a local technology conference and this was the first time I learned about FlipGrid, so this was our first experience using it in the classroom as well. The students loved it and they especially loved adding the stickers to their pictures at the end. I limited them to three for our first few times. 

If you haven't checked out FlipGrid, you totally should. You as the teacher come up with the topic and the questions. Then the students just type in the code that leads to it and they start recording their response - no logins required, just the code. Super easy for the students to use. In fact, we also used it for our reflections to share with parents at conferences. I had them record answers to the following questions: "What is one thing you are doing well and one thing you want to work on?" & "What has been your favorite part of first grade so far and why?" This was fun to share with parents at conferences, too. If you've used FlipGrid before, I would love to hear your favorite ways to use it. We've just scratched the surface and I'm sure we'll be using it so much more in the future. 

I learned another cool tip at the conference, and maybe I'm totally behind the times, but it was the QR code extension on Google Chrome.  That's how I made all of the QR codes for each of the students' projects. You can make a QR code quickly for any webpage. Cool, right?

All in all, this project was a hit with the teacher, students, and the parents. The kids were so excited for their parents to see it and guess which one was theirs. It's also so fun to see because I can totally tell who almost all of them are just by their profile. Love it!!

Student Ornaments

I can't remember where I ran across this idea for student ornaments this year, but they turned out super cute! The only downside to these is that the kids didn't do too much of the work, but I love that their picture is on it.

I should've taken more pictures of the process, but here are the steps:

1. Take student pictures like they are having fun in the snow. :)
2. Print the pictures in color (if possible) - I fit 6 on a page I think.
3. Take on the tedious task of cutting around all those cute little kiddos.
4. Have your kids or amazing helpers punch out lots of little circles with a regular hole punch and white paper.
5. Using a laminator pouch, place two rows of curvy white paper down inside.
6. Sprinkle the "snow" dots inside the pouch as well. Add a little glitter to make it shine.
7.  Then place the kids' pictures down on top of the snowy hill with enough space to cut a circle around them. (I was able to fit 4 students on a page)
8. Carefully close the pouch and run through the laminator (with your fingers and toes crossed! ha! - it really wasn't that bad)
9. I cut a circle from our die cut machine and then traced the circle on the back side of each student and then cut them out. I didn't trust myself enough to cut them out with the die cut.
10. Punch a hole at the top and string through some fishing line or yarn and then you're all set!!

I had the kids wrap their ornament with colored printing paper and then sent them home. From the sounds of it, the parents loved them. Win!

What are some of your ideas for student ornaments? I'd love to hear! I never seem to do the same thing each year, although I really liked how these turned out.

Last Day of 1st Grade FUN!!

My first year in a new school district and new grade has come to an end. It was a busy year, but a fun one! Did it seem to FLY for anyone else or was that just me? I don't know if it was like that for me because it was such a full year of learning new curriculum and a new grade or what, but it went crazy fast! I will say, I had such a fun time on our last 1/2 day of school this year. It was great celebrating with my class and just enjoying the day together. Here's a look at what we did!

We started off finishing up our memory books that we worked on during the last week of school.

 We had to go around and put our autographs in everyones book. They turned out super cute!

 Here's a look at a few of the pages in the book. I hope they treasure these because they will be so fun to look back on way down the road. :)

Once our class signing was over, we had time to play some Minute to Win It games! They loved these!

This first one we had two teams and they had to fan their tissue paper fish into the bucket on the other side of the carpet with a paper plate. When they got it in, they had to run the fish and plate back to the next person in line. 

 Then we did the noodle challenge. Each kiddo got a piece of spaghetti noodle (we broke about 1/3 off to make them a little shorter) and two penne noodles. Without using their hands, they had to get both penne noodles on the spaghetti noodle. Pretty tricky for some of them, but fun to watch! ;)

 Next up was another team activity where they had to toss the ping pong ball into their team's cup from behind a certain line. Once they got it in, they brought the ball to the next person in line on the other side. I split each team in half so we had some "rebounders" on each side of the cup. This helped prevent spending most of the time chasing the ping pong ball. :) This one got pretty intense!! 

After that game, it was time to head out to the all school recess. We are just a K-1 building with 6 classes in each grade. It's a tradition that the 1st graders get to race the principal on the last day of school, so they race in the field from one fence to the other. It's pretty funny to watch and they are dead tired when they finish!

 

After recess, the first graders went to an assembly to watch a video of memories from the year, get a special gift from the principal, and get ready for the clap up. For the clap up, all the parents and kindergarten classes go out and line the hallways as the first graders walk through everyone clapping them on to 2nd grade and a new school.

When we got back to the room, we had time to have the kids help clean up the classroom (which they LOVE!). We played a "game" with all the sight words on our word wall which actually helped me sort them out and have them ready for next year's Journeys lessons. I passed out a few to each kiddo and when I called out the sight word, they had to throw it on the table and then I would collect and put them into the correct lesson's file for next year. It was a fun and efficient way of sorting out all those words. It was a last minute, genius idea that I thought of and it was so helpful because I was dreading sorting all of those words back out. 

Then it was about time for lunch. We had a picnic lunch together outside and then they went out to regular recess. As they played at recess, I set the room up for our final goodbye with a red carpet, message, and floats!

When they got back, we had our floats first. Yum, yum!

 Then we got ready for our final goodbye to 1st grade! 

 Earlier in the week, everyone had to write just one word about each of their classmates. I took those words and put them into a shape wordle with their name. For the final goodbye, I read off each kiddo's name and all the special words used to describe them. They walked the red carpet as I did this and then they got a big hug and good luck from me at the end. It was a special, perfect end to our year. 

We finished right in time to head on out to pickup. What an amazing last day of 1st grade! What do you do for your last day of school? I would love to hear in the comments. :)

I hope you all have an amazing summer!!

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A Short Thanksgiving Week

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had a great time with my husband's family and I'm pretty sure my tummy will be full for days! ;) I know it's been for.ev.er since I've blogged, but let's be real....this past year has been busy, busy for me and I haven't made the time between caring for our first baby, learning a new grade, and a new school. I've just been trying to stay afloat! I'm starting to feel a glimpse of my old self and maybe I'll start blogging a little more. Either way, I'm here tonight to blog about our short week before Thanksgiving break. I was a last minute planner for that short week, but I think it turned out pretty well. The kids enjoyed it and I got a lot of "your the best teacher ever" comments. That's all ya need right?! ;)

During our typical reading block, we studied the differences between things we do and use now compared to back then. I threw together a little product for this lesson which you can see below. 

I gave each of the kids a card with a picture on it. I encouraged them to use their very best coloring and use colors that made sense. They did a pretty nice job! 

 Then we came back to the carpet to sort our cards by things that are done or used now or then just using any prior knowledge we had. 

 This was the finished sort with just our prior knowledge. 

Then we read a story about many of these things and began coloring the pictures. 

 After some time spent coloring, we came back to the carpet to review our sort and make any changes that we learned about from the story. We discussed some of the items and compared them.  Then we wrote about how things we do now are different than it would've been back then. 

 The next day, we reviewed the sort and sorted again, read the book again, and did this piece of writing. They had to decide whether they would rather live now or back then and give reasons to support their answer. 

For math, we did some easy prep math stations that I put together. There were a total of 4 stations so we did two rotations each day. They loved playing games like these. 

The games worked on addition, counting on, decomposing, and writing addition and subtraction equations. To finish off the math block, we did some Thanksgiving problem solving.

 These were differentiated to challenge some of my higher kids.

For writing I always have my kids do a countdown to Thanksgiving with 5 things they are thankful for. I didn't get any pictures this year, but the book is in my store here. We also made these cute little turkey hats. My students asked if I was going to make one for baby Creyton, so here he is! My little turkey in his turkey hat! :)

So yes, in the midst of having a busy year, there is so SO much to be thankful for. This little man is one of the big things I am especially thankful for this year. Again, I hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful and I hope you are all getting rejuvenated and ready for a quick December! We will be on winter break before we know it! :)