Happy Veteran's Day!  We had a busy day in first grade celebrating our Veterans!

Tuesday, we read a Pebble Go article about veterans to build our background knowledge.

Today, it was all about honoring our Veterans.  I had 2 things I wanted to accomplish today...and we made it...by the hair on our chiny, chin, chin! {Ever had one of THOSE days???  Yep, that was me today!}


Last week, I sent an email to parents asking for any Veterans in our first graders' immediate family.  We spent the morning writing thank you letters {on this Veteran's Day paper!} to the 4 Veterans that were sent to me.  The kids really took a lot of pride in this and so it was a more time consuming project than I thought it would be!

Since we had 4 veterans to write about, each table group was assigned a vet to write to.  And I divided my extra groups up so that about 6 kids wrote for each person.  After we finished the letters, they worked in their group of 6 to make book covers for the letters.  I gave them the green construction paper with a military hat outline on it.  They used tear art to create a camo hat and fancy title letters for their cover!


We also made poppy pins to wear in honor of the sacrifices our Veteran's make for us every day.  We read the history of Flanders Field.  We watched the short video clip of Linus reading the Flanders Field poem. {And by the way, if you've never been to the WWI Museum in Kansas City to see the poppy field display, you've missed out.  One of the more moving things I've seen.}

Then, we made our own poppies!  Here's how...

You will need:
*2 red cupcake wrappers per child
*1-2 inch strips of green construction paper
*paper clip or clothespin
*black crayon

Steps:
1.  Flatten both wrappers.  Cut about 1/2 inch off of one of the wrappers.
2.  Add black "seeds" in the middle of the smaller wrapper.

3.  Glue smaller wrapper to the middle of the larger, uncut wrapper.
4.  Twist the green strip to make a stem.

5.  Hot glue the stem to the back.
6.  Hot glue the paperclip or clothespin on top of the stem.
7.  Attach the pin to your shirt!

So fun and the kids absolutely LOVED wearing these today!  Such a beautiful reminder of the sacrifices that are made each day!  Thank you Veterans!
To use my Arkansas lingo, we are "smack dab" in the middle of our Animals Unit, which means we are all about using non-fiction features in informative writing during writers' workshop.

I've blogged some about the graphic organizers I use to teach informative writing, but I wanted to give some love to some other anchor charts that are super important in my room during our non-fiction writing units!

We have been studying non-fiction texts and their text features during Readers' Workshop...

{still waiting on my crazy color ink to arrive so I can print these cards and hang them up....I've already taught them with kids and shown them the cards on our smart board...just waiting....still waiting... #thestruggleisreal}  You can grab those cards HERE and hopefully have yours up on your wall faster than I can! :)

As we read and researched animals and our human body during our Science Squeeze {aka...teeny tiny block of time dedicated to science....can I get an amen???}, we recorded topics that we became "experts" in so that we would have a class list of topics we could write to teach about!

In writers' workshop, after spending some time on our non-fiction graphic organizer {grab a copy HERE}, we moved on to teaching our readers like authors teach us!
{Find both of the anchor chart templates here.  Just print and fill in with your kids!}

Each day I taught a mini-lesson focusing on one of these points from the anchor chart.  We also connected each strategy to the text features we are studying during readers' workshop....

We teach with diagrams and labels because non-fiction authors use those text features....

We make our smart words bold print because that's how non-fiction authors teach get us to notice their smart words...

We also charted smart words as we researched birds this week to get some practice listening for and picking out smart words from a source!  It's easy to do when you are looking at the text because of bold print, but it's much harder when you are just listening or watching a video!  First graders easily confuse a smart word and a fact sentence, so this practice was really, really good helpful for my firsties!

And the last strategy...We write twin sentences because non-fiction authors use those to help define the bold printed, smart words...

I modeled writing using that strategy and then we practiced independently.  During share time, I chose students to share who showed the strategy we focused on for the day!  And they are really catching on!  Using real non-fiction text features during writers' workshop really has a way of engaging kids because it makes them feel like the "real" authors they are!

These lessons are from the writing portion of my Animals Unit and that packet includes anchor chart templates as well as detailed daily and weekly lesson plans for writers' workshop!
Hello November!  The leaves are gorgeous, and this crazy Arkansas weather is finally settling in to some cool, Fall weather so I can break out my boots and scarves!

Based on the hit video, my first grade mathematicians solve for box by singing...

What Does the BOX Say??

This past week, I used this because we have been focusing on the structure of our math mysteries with Math Practice #7: I can look for and use structure. {Grab the posters HERE.}

We've been mixing up our math mysteries by doing story problems with the middle missing to (missing addends, etc...)  I thought solving for boxes at the beginning, middle and end of our equations would be a great way to connect our fact fluency to what we were doing during math mysteries!

Just "new" it....LOVE!
I love that this packet makes kids notate their thinking and explain their strategies instead of just memorizing or copying off of a friend!  Takin' that math thinking on up to the next level, ya'll! :)

And while the kid samples above show lots of great thinking and strategies, most of my babies looked like this...

#keepinitreal

But that's okay...because now I know just from this little activity that we need to start talking about showing some flexibility in our strategies and showing lots of different ways to solve problems!

....good thing there are 35 pages of no-prep fun solving for box!  We've got a lot of growing to do!  Catch this steal of a dollar deal HERE...
The wonderful thing about doing a little preschool at home with my toddler is getting to do school in our pajamas!

This is the last week of our October Break, so we busted out a little mini-pumpkin unit for "school time" this week!  Here's a look at the unit!

1.  Pumpkin Observations

The first day, we "observed" the outside of our pumpkin and talked about what we noticed that our little pumpkin had...

We observed a "boo-boo" on the bottom...
 a stem...

And I helped him notice the bumps on the outside...

My Pumpkin Book of Observations

We wrote our observations in our pumpkin book.  {{side note...forgive some of my printouts as my printer ran out of black ink and I couldn't get more in time to finish this week! BOO!}}

We read the sentence together and then Cooper found the picture to match the text in our book.
We glued the picture in our book...

And traced the words with our very, very special "pumpkin pen."  My little has problems using enough pressure to write with crayon, so I decided to try the special pen so he wouldn't have to use as much pressure...I wanted him to be able to see what he was writing and the pen helped with that!

Adding dots under the words of our books really helps Cooper with his pointing, so I added tiny pumpkins under each word to help his pointing...works like a charm!


2. Pumpkin Letter Match

After we worked on our book, we matched upper and lowercase letters.  Even though my pumpkin packet has all of the letters, I decided to only match 6 letters at a time to make it less overwhelming for Coop.  Plus, since my printer was out of black ink, it probably wouldn't have helped to print all of them out this week! ;)

 He loved finding matches!  We even played the "real" way with the cards turned upside down.  This was a little harder for him to do because he tried to turn over two capitals to match...easy fix for this next time we play {or when you play with your toddler} is that I'll add a sticker to the back of the cards...one color for the capitals and one color for the lowercase so he can easily tell to match one from each color!


3. Pumpkin Insides

The second day, we worked on observing the inside of our pumpkin.  We took this project outside since we would have a bit of a mess!  We did most of our work in the large plastic tub to help with clean up, which worked great!


Sweet Cooper does not like messes at all...which has its perks, but the down side is he refuses to stick his hand in a pumpkin!  So, I made him come up with another way to get the seeds and pulp out.  Little stinker is a creative thing!


We talked about the vocabulary words "seeds" and "pulp" and I had him show me each one...poor stem broke off of our pumpkin!

Then, we took turns filling our tiny pumpkin with dirt...
 planted the seeds...
 added some water...
and found a special spot in the sun for our pumpkin planter.... {how cute is the underwear peeking out!}

Years ago, before our animal unit was moved to the fall, I did pumpkin projects with my firsties and we planted seeds in our big "class" pumpkin....but I loved using this mini-pumpkin for Cooper.  It was the perfect size for my little tot! :)

As we talked about our vocabulary words during our observations, we added our vocab cards to our "pumpkin word wall" upstairs at our school station!  We added pumpkin and stem on day one, seeds and pulp on day two when we cut the pumpkin open, and then added sprout and vine after we planted the seeds so Cooper would know what we were watching for!

4. Pumpkin Counting Collections

Then, we came inside and washed our seeds to count!  I just slipped the page for counting in a ziploc bag to protect it from the slimy seeds.
When we do pumpkins in first grade, we count our seeds counting collection style...but for my little tot, I wanted him to just work on building sets of seeds to match numbers.  He had a blast doing this!  I even saved the seeds after we toasted them so that he can use them over and over!

5. Pumpkin Cookies

We finished up this unit by making these amazing pumpkin cookies together so that Cooper could try out a little pumpkin! Pinterest for the win again!

Cooper had so much fun with this unit!  And mommy had fun making memories and learning all wrapped up in one!
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