Mother's Day Tea Post! (2015)

OMG.... I totally behind on blogging! I just found this blog post all ready to go but never published! Enjoy, I love celebrating Mother's Day and I hope you get some ideas from my blog!

My first post for May 2015, yay! I made it! I am 14 days away from the end of the school year. This is the time of year that I neglect my poor little blog and fully focus on getting across that finish line! So for now here is my Five for Fraturday!

On Monday, we had our second successful Mother's Day Tea Party! It was wonderful and everyone had nothing but nice things to say about the day. We sang songs, crowned our special guests with hats and fed them until they were full! Picture overload below:

Our "I love you because" pictures

So many yummy treats!

The loot we gave our moms!

Photo booth

Our beautiful guests!

So right after my great success, the stress got the best of me and I came down with a bad cold. So this is what I brought to work everyday. I'm still not 100% better but I hope I am by the end of this week for my sister's graduation!

Our two stories for this week were Me on the Map and Moses Goes to a Concert. I love both these stories one involves a lot of geography, which we've been working on all year, and is a repetitive story and the other story talks about the disability of being a deaf student. Both these stories intrigue my students and we have fun doing activities attached to these stories. I used Clutter Free Classroom's Me on the Map Geography Project to help my students better understand the big and little picture of geography. They then shared their project with my second grade peaches who had completed the same project a year ago. The first day of reading Moses Goes to a Concert we did a picture walk. I wanted my students to better understand what our character Moses has to do to listen to music. I gave each of them a balloon and then two at a time they came to the radio to feel the vibration of the music from the speakers. It was a great experience seeing their eyes light up as they realize they can feel the rhythm/vibration through the balloon.

We are in review mode in the classroom and this past week we reviewed adjectives. I made a little stick figure and asked my students to describe the face he was making and the answers were just hilarious! I was thinking his face was silly but they had so many other words to describe my picture, enjoy!

On Fridays I try to have fun with my peaches during math. So this past Friday I showed my students a fun new website that they can work on during math time. It's called Math Seeds and it's made by the makers of Reading Eggs. Let me just say that my kids LOVE it! They take a placement test and then start on lessons right away. My peaches love it and would play on it all day if I let them. It's the perfect center for math time. We also love the old school games that only need dice and counters. They love playing against the teacher and each other.

Five for Fraturday 4-24-15

Trying to get back in the habit of blogging! This month has been super busy! So here's my Five for Fraturday! If you wanna link up just press the button below:

Last Wednesday was National Bookmobile Day! A Bookmobile is a mobile library that travels to areas and schools that do not have huge libraries, school or local, to choose from a plethora of books. Our Bookmobile comes every Wednesday. To celebrate Bookmobile Day the peaches got to color Bookmobile templates and our amazing Librarian Terry promised cupcakes the following week. This week we were in for a treat by having yummy chocolate cupcakes courtesy of Terry in celebration of the Bookmobile! She came in and gave our kids some facts about the Bookmobile, it's been servicing our county since 1948, and how special it is for our small school. Our kiddos love Bookmobile and squeal with delight when they hear the beeping of the Bookmobile as Terry parks it in our school yard. As you can see, we celebrate our Bookmobile every Wednesday through the kiddos excitement and enjoyment when they hear the Bookmobile arrive.

Our Bookmobile

 

 We have been busy bees in the classroom learning about Toque Macaques. Disneynature came out with another amazing movie called Monkey Kingdom. The great part about these movies is that Disney has a teacher resource and lesson plans that you can utilize in the classroom. Many of the activities are above my peaches heads so I broke it down even more for them using lots of graphic organizers, mini books, and activities. We talked about what they knew about Toque Macaques, viewed the trailer, learned about Hierarchy of the Toque Macaques and answered a Can, Have, Are Chart. To celebrate Earth Day we attended a showing of the movie at our local theater and got a sneak peak of next years movie, Born in China. 

In the land of Language Arts we've been studying digraphs all week and will continue next week. I created a digraph scoot where my peaches had to figure out what digraph was missing from the word. My kiddos enjoyed it and will have a digraph write the room to complete next week.

My favorite part of learning digraphs is using fun resources I've purchased from TPT. Thanks to Sarah Jacobson from A Sunny Day in First Grade my peaches had fun crafting Checkers the Chicken, categorizing with Theo the Thief and I was so inspired by this digraph fun that I created a pattern for our own Theo the Thief.  Isn't he cute! I give credit to this cute raccoon to Pink Cat Studio, she has the most adorable creations!

In second grade we read my favorite story, Thunder Cake! I couldn't resist the opportunity to get my kiddos engaged in the story by reading this non fiction book about Lightning. They were blown away by all the facts in this book they could hardly wait to read the story. Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco is about a young girl and her grandmother. The young girl is frightened by the coming storm but her grandmother shows her how brave she can be by going on an adventure to collect ingredients for the cake. My peaches enjoyed counting with the girl as she figured out how far away the storm was from her grandmother's house.  To celebrate this book we always cook thunder cake in the classroom. It was a great success! 

We journal every day in class and my peaches come up with some cute art work to go with their sentences. Here's my favorite one from last week. 

In Math we are piloting Go Math for next year. Luckily, my peaches haven't covered measurement yet so it worked out perfectly. They LOVE IT! I feel like I'm just a facilitator of their learning. The online program is super interactive, they review the skill and then have evaluations to turn into the teacher so we can use the data to reteach or extend lessons. The second my first graders logged in they have been in love with the program. I also use it for my second graders for the class work portion of the lesson. They enjoy it as well. The only drawback I've seen so far is that in the interactive portion, if the child selects the wrong item it does not tell them they are wrong it just continues the lesson as if they chose the correct object. Also, it's great for schools that have computers or iPads for every child. I could also see myself using the program as a whole group activity if computers weren't available for each student. Overall, I would highly recommend the program, Go Math, to a tech-savvy school. In May I plan to pilot Math Expressions! 

This year in art I attempted a giant feat, paper mache! Dun, dun duuuun! We've been working on these bad boys going on three weeks! We made our paper mache, painted them and then added our continents. I can proudly say they are all done and happily decorate our classroom. My favorite day was painting day. I had a peach blew up his paper mache, because it was deflating, while the paint was still wet. I must say the results were comical. 

I've saved the biggest news for last! 

So I've been working as a Paraeducator at my school for six years. When I was hired I figured I was just helping the lead teacher with all her students. However, it was so much more. I was in charge of kindergarten through second grade. Not only that, but I held other responsibilities that help run a school. It has been a great experience and I love all of the students and families I've gotten to know the past six years. To be part of this small school is to be part of an extended family. A week ago I attended a job fair so that I could impact more children in my community. I visited various booths and basically told them "I'm game for any grade and don't care how far away your district is!" It was nice to have so many schools vying for you to teach at their school. I've been to interviews where I was one in who knows how many applicants. After these interviews, I was left with an uncertainty as I didn't know what the outcome would be. I beamed with excitement as each table seemed to be a perfect fit. I'm so happy to say I will be teaching my own classroom next school year! After I signed my contract I thought about all my students at my current school. What am I going to say to these little peaches that won't crush their world? How am I going to explain that I'm leaving? I've already had a couple of nightmares where they end up saying they hate me. So I'm reaching out to you, yes you, have you ever had to tell your students you are leaving the school? What worked for you? Any picture books you would recommend?

-Disclaimer: if you are part of my small school community please do not share this news with them, I have yet to tell them. I plan on telling my kiddos two weeks before schools out!

My new school district

The pen I used to sign my contract