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! 

Super Bowl Sunday Sale

I'm joining the girls at Blog Hoppin for their Super Bowl Sunday sale.  My store is 20% off today (and I'm throwing in tomorrow too).

I started playing fantasy football when I met my husband as a way to find some excitement in an entire day of watching football and became fairly competitive about it. I've won our league the past few years (even though this year I got ROBBED) and have become a giant Wes Welker and Peyton Manning fan.  Peyton is such a good sport and role model that I can't help but like him, and the Broncos in turn, even though I love the Chiefs the most. So happy Super Bowl Sunday friends!

I'm Still Alive! Here's a freebie or two for you.

So.... I've pretty much just neglected this little blog for a very ridiculously long amount of time.  Life with the littles just doesn't allow for a whole lot of time to create, blog, or very honestly, sleep.  But they're terribly cute so I guess it's worth it.

 Here's what I've been working on for a long time and just finally put the finishing touches on.

Irregular plurals are so stinking hard- especially when they didn't even have a great handle on regular plurals. So we went back to basics and started with just nouns that need s and es. This pack includes posters for each of the major rules (add s, add es, change y to ies, change f to ves and irregular.  It also has some reversible irregular flash cards so they can practice and self check.  I had them do a little scoot around the room with them first and then self check that way.  It has a practice page as well as an assessment.  I hope you like it! If you click on this Irregular poster, you can have this one for free. :)

This week we're continuing our research of Arctic animals.  Here's the little non-fiction book we're going to use to write small reports on each animal along with a few options for writing sheets.  It's free, too as a thank you for sticking with my blog-slacking.

Five For Friday- Heavy on the Language with an Appleicious Freebie!

Well Helloooo Saturday!  You are like a breath of fresh air after an incredibly long short week.  I decided to link up with Five for Friday for the first time in what seems like ages!

Language, Language, Language is the name of the game right now for me.  The way our grade level is doing Guided Reading rotations has me teaching zero guided reading kids :( but all 100 second graders their Language (I just can’t find it in me to call it Grammar… I feel like I should be rapping their knuckles with a ruler if I use that word) standards.  So I find myself repeating the same Language lessons three times in a row every morning.  I am telling you- collective nouns are going to KILL me soon!  We have been doing some pretty fun stuff to review those First Grade things that were a little sketchy as to our mastery…

1. Types of Sentences.  I made these anchor charts with the help of some Scrappin Doodles clipart and we wrote and wrote and wrote different types of sentences.

2. Verbs.  The TeacherWife has this amazing verbs pack and in it is a small version of this anchor chart that I just totally stole (don’t worry- I asked her if I could share). Isn’t it pretty before we completely covered it in post-its?

Each group got half of a post-it and got to choose a verb to write on it. They had to act it out on their way to add it to the chart. If they couldn’t act it out, then we knew it probably wasn’t a verb.  Although one little guy chose “fart” as his verb and I asked him to refrain from acting that one out, although it was indeed a verb…

3. Space Explorers. I pretty much love my bulletin board that is above my lockers in the hall.  For my little astronauts, I took some Melonheadz clipart and enlarged it a bunch, then sent it to Office Depot to print. I’m thinking about putting up some pumpkins next week so I wanted to get it on here before I take it down.

4. Appleicious Measurement.   This year we’re measuring to centimeters and my kids are OBSESSED with it.  I saw a version of this with a pumpkin and decided to change it a little for our apple week.  It was very fun. Here it is for you- for free!

5. Today our school district and community have their fall festival and I hauled my cuties out to walk in the parade.  They were perfect- even though Addison insisted on actually MARCHING because apparently, that’s what you do in a parade.  We fell slightly behind because of our marching pace and the float behind us was not such a fan. 

Check out some more links over at Doodlebugs!

Who Doesn't Love a Little Mr. Putter?

How many of you are Treasures teachers?  When I was in first grade, we just randomly used the stories that went along with it.  Well second grade is slightly different. It's kindof like the Bible in my life right now.  I am making due and actually, the literature is pretty great so far! I'd never actually read any of Cynthia Rylant's "Mr. Putter and Tabby" stories before but they are fantastic!  What a loveable set of characters!

In the story Mr. Putter and Tabby eat a LOT of english muffins and drink a LOT of tea.  Many of my kids weren't familiar with those things so we did a little taste test. Mr. Putter eats his english muffins with jam and Tabby eats his with cream cheese so we did the same and compared the results. I should have taken pictures, but I was exhausted!  And I am NOT a tea drinker, so I'm pretty sure it was not delicious, and most of my kids said they weren't really huge fans either.  It's honestly due to my really lacking culinary ability, more than anything else.  Then we worked on the vocab from the story and did some comparing and contrasting of the characters.  Last, we read a bunch of their of other stories and compared those!  Whew!  It was a BUSY week!

I just posted all of these activities on TpT if you're interested.

Pick up a Mr. Putter book sometime.  It will melt your heart.

We've been writing.... Here's a freebie!

I have to be honest- this change of grade level has been HARD!  The second grade team does things and communicates SO differently from the team I've worked with forever... Planning has become much more of a struggle than I can remember it ever being. But I am surviving! Some days more than others. 

Anyway... when in doubt about what you're supposed to be teaching- have your kids write, right?.  I love to see what they come up with, and then stick them in a class book and throw them in our library. They're always a favorite that kids grab when they have time to choose a book.  I made a couple of book covers for our writing so I thought I'd share.  Hope you like it!