Pumpkin Pals

In the past, I have sent home medium sized pumpkins for the children to decorate as a family project.  This year, I used an idea from another teacher friend!  I still sent home medium sized pumpkins with each child but this year they had to decorate them as their favorite literary character.  When they brought their pumpkins back they also brought the book to display with it and share with the class.  This made the activity more of a learning experience and was so much fun!  Here are pictures of how they each turned out.

Aspyn with Barbie

Blake with the vampire clown

Ashten with Red Fish

Jackson with Lightning McQueen

Delani with Barbie the teacher

Jayce with Junie B. Jones

Joree with the Itsy Bitsy Spider

Jocelyn and Tangled

Dayne and the Plucked Duck

Autumn and Dora

Seleide and the spotted cat

Justice and Pooh Bear

Devin and Mike the Monster

Taylen and Brer Rabbit

Alyssa and the Mouse

Jonothan and the scarecrow

Mason and the spider

All our pumpkins on display for parent/teacher conferences!

Contractions

Contractions are sometimes a hard concept for us to grasp onto in first grade!  Last week we used cards to match up the two word combinations that make different contractions.  It was a fun way to practice them!  The cards are now in the "extra time" folders for the students to use whenever they get finished with their work early!

 Alayna and Devin working on matching up their cards!

All matched up! :-)

Fire Safety Week

We recently studied fire safety!  As a home project I asked the students to bring a fire escape plan for show and tell.  Here are a few of the examples! They did a great job and now have a great plan if there was ever a fire.

Manipulative Math Fun!

Before we started in on our math worksheet the other day we decided to get some manipulatives out and explore a little with them!  We used our shapes to make our own pictures.  We then wrote how many of each shape we had in our picture.  It was so fun!

Dayne, Jonathan, Jackson, and Jayce making their shape pictures.

Devin and Alayna working on their shape pictures.

Joree and Jonah working on their designs.

Jocelyn working on her design and Nubia beginning to write.

Busy writers!

More busy writers!

.....

A great example of what the writing lesson looked like.  Good job Jackson!

We recently celebrated Johnny Appleseed!  During many of our subjects our lessons were apple themed.  Here are a few examples...

I read the story The Giving Tree to the students.  The book is about the relationship between a boy and his tree and how they make each other happy even as the boy grows older.  After we read the story we brainstormed about things that make us happy!

The students were then given a piece of paper with 4 cards on it so that they could pick 4 things that make them happy, write the word, and draw a picture of it.

They glued their "happy cards" on green leaves made out of construction paper.  We then made this tree for our hallway!

We also enjoyed using apples for our math lessons.  One of the days we taste tested the different kinds of apples and graphed our favorites.

We also had a worksheet that had a large apple on it.  We used counters as "seeds."  We would put a certain number of seeds on one side and a certain number on the other and wrote addition sentences.

We LOVED apple week! :-)

Constitution Week

We had a great time during constitution week!  To celebrate we participated in a few patriotic activities.  Here are some pictures and descriptions of a couple of those activities!

 During this activity the students used the words Constitution Day to make more smaller words.  We had a table challenge and the table that came up with the most words won!

Before we wrote our acrostic poems we brainstormed as a class some good words about America.  They did such a great job with this!!

Here are some example poems:

Bulletin board explaining the constitution on our level!

The second day of school we had a great time continuing to explore our classroom!  In these pictures we were using some of our manipulatives and other items from the classroom that we often use for centers.  

Jonothan, Dayne, Blake, and Jonah make towers using unifix cubes!

Autumn, Jocelyn, Nubia, Alayna, Joree, and Alyssa use playdoh to make shapes and letters!

Francisco, Seleide, Justice, and Jackson practice writing their letters with dry erase markers!

Aspyn, Delani, Taylen, Devin, Ashten, and Jayce use plane shape manipulatives to make pictures!