"Join the fun!"

How is it that Saturdays seem to pass by at a normal pace, no matter what I am doing, and then Sundays go by in the blink of an eye?  I swear, every week, Sundays get faster and faster.  Of course, it probably doesn't help that I do most of my school work on Sundays, but still.  I feel like like the hours between the two weekend days are somehow not spread out equally . . .

Well, I digress.  After some planning, football, and more planning, I figured that I needed to blog :)  I have so many things from last week that I have been saving up--be prepared, y'all, this may be a long one!

Word families
We've been starting our work on word families--not sure if you remember, but I had a ton of fun reading books like Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat to talk about these groups of words.  Well, this is some of the work that my kiddos did on these word families; they had to trace over the letters of the words that I provided for them (words we had talked about in class), and then come up with two of their own.  We had generated some pretty long lists as a class, so it was more a matter of the students remembering some words that we had talked about that matched the family they were working on at the moment.  When they were finished, they got to draw pictures.  I don't have any pictures of student work, but I thought you'd enjoy these:

 

Word families get me excited because it is a great introduction into teaching rhyming words, which I love.  It also makes me really excited to teach poetry later this year!  If you would have asked me my opinion of teaching poetry a couple of years ago, I probably would have given you a funny look, because I never enjoyed taking poetry classes in high school or college, but teaching poetry to young children and focusing on the fun basics of it is something I adore.

A new skill

Reading upside down: I've known about this skill for a while now, but let me tell you, my abilities are getting better and better every single day.  I sit at a horseshoe-shaped table for each of my five reading groups, so all of my kiddos are surrounding me with their books.  Because they are the ones reading them,  I get to enjoy the flip-side of them--upside down pictures, too!  Another skill that I am getting really good at, but also another to add to the list of "they don't teach you this in college!"

Scary books

Speaking of my reading groups, one of the groups started reading a book the other day called "Halloween."  It was a pretty basic book, with things like, "Here is a haunted house," and "Here is a black cat."  Of course, it had other words too, but it had words and pictures of all of your basic Halloween things.  One of my students finished reading the book so I told her that she could work on reading it again while the rest of her group was still working.  She looked at me and said, "Again?!?  But Ms. W, that was really scary!  I don't know if I can read it again!"  So precious.  (This is also the same student who reminds me every day that she can't wait to show me her "punkin" earrings later this month.)  It was so fun to hear her gasp when she got to the pages with ghosts, even though she knew it was coming!  So innocent, I just love it!

More books!

You know I love a good author study, and so I was so excited when we began reading some Mo Willems books this past week (Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! made an appearance on the blog last post I think).  By the end of the week, I got to read Knuffle Bunny (one that I checked out from the library--I can't believe I somehow don't own it!) and City Dog Country Frog, one of Mo Willems' lesser known books, but such a great read, with a wonderful moral.  Up next week for author study: Frank Asch.

Pencils

I think I have a new idea for manufacturers of office supplies: sell pencils that are already sharp.  I know, I know--these are called mechanical pencils, but if you think that those click-y writing instruments are meant for six-year-olds, you are wrong!  Sorry, can you tell that sharpening pencils drives me nuts?!?  It's a job that I let my kiddos do by themselves, but it's a lot easier for them to re-sharpen pencils than start from scratch and completely sharpen 'em.

On top of that, our pencil sharpener broke on Friday :(  RIP, X-Acto (that's not really his name, just the brand).  For some reason, I think he might have had a warranty, so I need to go through some paperwork, because if that baby can be replaced, you better believe I'll take care of it ASAP!

Recess fun

Just another funny quote to pass along to y'all (if you've made it this far!).  On Friday, we were walking in from recess, and one of my kiddos was asking me if it was fun being a teacher at recess.  I was a little confused with his question, so I didn't really give him an answer, but instead asked why he was wondering.  He said to me, "well, Ms. W, it just seems like the teachers might get a little bored watching all the kids play.  You should really join in the fun some time!"  If only you knew how much I'd love to swing from the monkey bars sometimes . . . .

Rainforest fun

This past week, we focused on the rainforest habitat, and it was a blast!  I wish there was a rainforest close enough to take the kiddos to, but unfortunately the Equator is a couple thousand miles away, and only really a plausible field trip for Miss Frizzle and the Magic School Bus.  The highlight of our week was the "Animal Coverings" books we made--complete with real fabric and all!  Some of the animals:

How neat, huh?  The kiddos loved this project, and when it came time for our assessment on Friday, every single student matched every single covering correctly :)

Speaking of the assessment, I got a kick out of some of them.  Backstory: when I was student teaching in first grade, my cooperating teacher and I had students take out more than one color crayon when completing a matching part of an assessment.  This way, the kiddos got excited about using crayons, and as teachers, we would know what they were trying to match by just following the colored lines and not having to worry about random pencil lines.  So, this is what most of my class's tests looked like:

And then I had my class entertainers who thought that Ms. W would just love some mind-games:

 

Aren't they funny? 

From the archives
As I was uploading pictures, I realized I forgot these two favorites from back when we were learning about patriotic symbols--look at the way they drew themselves (and the whole class) saying the Pledge of Allegiance!

 

Alrighty, for those of you that are visual people, hopefully this post was satisfying to you :)  And for those of you that like words, I hope I provided enough of those, too!  I can't believe another week begins tomorrow--the year is flying by already.  Cheers to another Monday!

Love from Room 106,

Allie