Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Dinosaur Fossil Fun

At Glenpool Elementary we use Reading Street for our reading series, and this week our story is called "Mister Bones: Dinosaur Hunter." I am lucky to work with an amazing team of first grade teachers, and one of my close friends Aubrey (another first year teacher like myself) had an AWESOME idea to create dinosaur fossils with three simple ingredients: Flour, salt and water! We mixed it in a large bowl and then the kiddos had at it! We played with the dough, smashed it down and then used our fingers to make a dinosaur footprint! We talked about fossils and are creating elaborate stories about where we found our fossils, which dinosaur we believe they belong to and how we excavated it! 

We are having fun learning more about dinosaurs and I hope you enjoy the pictures of my sugar pies creating! 

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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

BUILD Math Centers


BUILD is a new math centers program I am using for our classroom. I found this idea on adventuresinteaching.blogspot.com and loved it! Build is an acronym for B-buddy games, U- Using Manipulatives, I- Independent Reading, L- Learning about numbers, and D- Doing Math. 

We are rotating these centers in the afternoon after our main math lesson. We will spend 20 minutes at these centers and rotate to a different letter in BUILD each day of the week so by the end of the week each student will have rotated through all the centers.

This week for buddy games the students are to partner up and quiz on another with tens and ones rods. One students holds up tens rods and ones cubes and the other student identifies the number the cubes and rods represent.

For Using Manipulatives I started out by giving the students pattern blocks and work mats to create pictures. In the future I will rotate in coins, clocks, and cubes with varied activities to solidify the skills they have already acquired. 

Independent reading is just that- reading! The books at this center all have math concepts as the story line, like "The Greedy Triangle" and "Five Little Monkeys".

The Learning about numbers center focused on using cubes to help create fact family sentences. Each student wrote a fact family like 5+3= 8 and 8-3=5 and checked their answers with cubes.

Doing math was an extension activity we started last week with Valentines Day. The "Be Mine Boxes" allow the students to write a number in 4 different ways. They represent the number by writing number sentences, write the number word, tallies and tens and ones.

I am eager to continue to explore the many options these centers allow and I am happy to give my kiddos another outlet to practice their math skills in a fun and exciting way!


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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Valentines Day!

Valentines Day Party! We made Valentine Scrapbooks, graphed sweethearts, oh- and ate lots and lots of candy! Thanks for all my goodies =)
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Monday, February 13, 2012

100th Day Celebration!

We celebrated our 100th day of school at Glenpool Elementary on Friday February 3rd.  Students were asked to create a project to celebrate - make something that had 100 things on it! As you can see I have some very creative students!

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Welcome!

I am so excited to welcome you to my first grade frog blog! I hope to use this blog as a forum for the parents of my sweet little angel's to keep up with what we are doing in our classroom. But I must admit, as an avid (maybe addicted) educational blog follower myself, I hope this blog is a great resource to other educators. I will try to post weekly updates of the fun goings-on of my very green and very froggy first grade classroom. Hope you have patience as I learn how to do this whole blog thing! Thanks for following along!