Apple Subtraction Stories

Everything is cuter with an apple theme, isn't it?

Here was a super quick little math activity I did with my kids to practice starting with the whole when we subtract.

I just drew a tree onto paper and copied it. Then they colored their tree. Then we used old-school bingo dotters to add the apples.  The green ones weren't the most beautiful, so I tried to improvise with the hand-drawn circles. Next time I will probably have them just color in a lighter green.

 Some of my stronger writers wrote their own sentences, and some of my strugglers just filled in the  sentence frame.

If you're interested in the documents, just click on them to download.  Happy apple season!

Stop. The. World.

My life has changed so much since I last was here. I changed school districts, went back to first, and then changed schools again! I'm now in a non-title school teaching first grade. And I feel like I can breathe again. I feel so good that I actually came up with a creative idea all by myself. It's been a LONG while since I did that. So here it is! 

We've been learning all about text features in nonfiction tests. We've labeled me, each other, the room. We've labeled. A lot. Then we wrote captions for random photos on the Internet. We used magazines and sticky labels and made these: 

I dug through my classroom library and pulled out all the nonfiction books I could find that included captions and labels and gave them out to my kids. They used the iPads to take pictures when they found one. After they had found a few we shared them on our appleTV and decided if they really were what we thought they were. I printed the pictures, we sorted them the next day onto the posters, and voila! My new principal now thinks we are doing really hard stuff!