Again, it has been too long since I've posted.  We have had a very busy spring and I'm excited to congratulate our student teacher on her graduation this weekend!  

Thanks to missnelsonattpt@yahoo.com for the Mother's Day freebie posted on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Our student teacher had recently worked on a series of writing lessons about adjectives and similes to add "juicy details" to our writing.  This Mother's Day poem was perfect!  We created a large-group chart first to get the ideas flowing--many of our students came up with more personalized similes, but for our more concrete thinkers, the chart helped.  

 Since we just finished up a big unit about plants, students made a hand-print flower for the cover of their card and put their simile poem inside. Many kids wrote a personalized letter on the inside cover as well.

May brings one of our favorite units:  American Symbols.  We like to do this unit at the end of the year, around Memorial Day, and hopefully many of the concepts stay fresh in the kiddos' minds until the 4th of July.  This year, our students are really strong at writing non-fiction, but I've noticed that we are a little weaker at creative writing.  Students usually write non-fiction books about our state and symbols of the US, but this year we decided to switch things up.  For the first time, we are doing an American Tall Tales writing unit.  We have been reading a lot of different tall tales and making text-to-text comparisons.  We identified the elements of a Tall Tale and created a chart to keep track of the different characters we read about.  We have enjoyed reading about Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan and John Henry.  We still have Mike Fink and Pecos Bill to read about.  Steven Kellogg has some wonderfully written and illustrated Tall Tales.  Students are now working on their last "big" writing of the year.  They are writing their own tall tale.  They are turning out so great!  The kiddos are making text-to-text connections left and right and it has opened up discussion about the time of westward expansion, pioneers and American Symbols.  On our last day of school, we invite parents to come for breakfast and students will have an opportunity to share their "fancied-up", published stories.  

In addition to visual American Symbols, we take this opportunity to teach students some songs that symbolize the United States.  Some of the songs that we include in this unit are:  This Land is Your Land, The Star Spangled Banner, What a Wonderful World and On Wisconsin.  We also enjoy singing Dr. Jean's song about the 50 States and the President Song.  We will sing these songs for the families on our last day of school.

Wow, it has been a while since I've posted!  We have a wonderful student teacher who has been taking the lead lately.  One of the highlights recently was finishing up a mapping unit.  Our first grade team has the tradition of ending the unit with a pirate treasure hunt!  Our student teacher from a few years ago started this during her lead week and we have been fortunate to have hired her and kept her on our team after she graduated.  Students get a map of the school and we have clues that take the kids to different rooms or areas of the school.  With each clue, they need to find it on the map and mark it with a special symbol.  Our final clue takes us to the treasure of gold beads, gold "doubloons" and golden oreos.  It's a great behavioral incentive, and a super fun way to finish our unit about mapping! :)

We have been working on a Polar Animal unit this past month.  Students have been learning about penguins, polar bears and walruses.  I'll admit it, I'm a Teachers Pay Teachers addict now.  So many cute ideas already prepped!  Our polar bear tree chart comes from an arctic unit by Deanna Jump.  The kids did an amazing job writing nonfiction stories about the animals we were learning about.  We have some great visuals and shared writing for the students to go back and reread in the classroom!

100th Day of School!

Best 100th Day ever!!  Thanks to Deanna Jump from www.mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com, she posted about dressing up like 100-year-olds on the 100th day of school.   In a rut with our 100-day stuff, I decided to go for something new.  I hate Halloween and dressing up in costumes, but this was so worth it!  The kids were SO cute!  I brought extra dress-up clothes from my own kids' stash at home, so everyone was able to participate if they wanted.  I had morning bus duty on the playground, so I welcomed the students as Mrs. Auby, but got "called away" during their breakfast (thanks to a parent helper and my student teacher for covering the class!) and transformed into Granny Auby.  I read Wilfred Gordon Macdonald Partrige in my "granny voice" and the kids were such incredible listeners...good to see they respect their elders!  Mid-morning I forgot to use my granny voice and one of my kiddos said, "A-ha!  I knew you were really Mrs. Auby just dressed up."  Oh my...that made it worth it!  We made self-portraits of ourselves as 100-year-olds and wrote a "bucket list" of things we want to do before turning 100.  I think we've got a new tradition for the 100th day!

We kept our snack simple...they had to create the number 100 with their string cheese and "flips" before eating.  Toss in a snack-sized 100 Grand Bar and a juice box, and the kids were thrilled with their special snack.

Penguin Poems

I wish this picture had turned out a little better, but here's another poem activity we did last week.  We had been studying penguins throughout the week and students had just finished their non-fiction writing about penguins.  It was time to lighten things up and make some cute penguins to decorate the room.  And, since we had just written adjective poems a couple weeks before, it was time to think of some verbs for this poem.  We brainstormed all the verbs we could think of on how a penguin moves:  sliding, slipping, swimming, waddling, etc.  I was very impressed at how they recalled words from our non-fiction read alouds and shared reading texts from throughout the week!  They wrote their poems on the penguin's belly.   The kiddos were so creative as we watched a couple of inches of snow come down while creating our poems.

Hot Chocolate Poems

One of my favorite winter writing activities has become our hot chocolate poems.  We had been learning about "juicy" words to help make our writing more interesting.  In order to best describe hot chocolate, we of course had to sip on some while thinking of our adjectives.  The kids loved the warm treat and their poems turned out great!

This past summer I set up a donors choose project to create a quiet reading area in our classroom.  We didn't have any comfy places to sit to read. We have an old large-group rug, but other than that, it's the cold, icky tile floor.  The bookshelves we had were standard bookshelves we had purchased ourselves throughout the years.  It was difficult to keep books organized by level on standard-sized bookshelves.  We recently received all of our items--2 large bean bag chairs, a large bookshelf made to hold the long plastic book boxes to sort and level "good-fit books" and a new small area rug.  The class loves to come into this area and snuggle up with some good books.  It's so great to see!! 

The day before break, we wrote about how to make a Grinch smile.  Students came up with 3 creative and cute ideas on how to make the Grinch smile.  This one says:  First, give him some coffee.  Next, give him some bells.  Last, give him some berries.  Students came up with all kinds of great ideas from singing, giving him chocolate, presents, even mac and cheese!  So creative :)

This is how some of the kiddos' snowmen turned out.  So cute!  I was able to have a parent helper at each table to help students out during both phases of the project.  That was a HUGE help!  The first day, we covered our bottles with the tissue paper.  The second day, we decorated.  Students made gift bags with a dark blue bag and used cotton balls to create a snow scene.  Some were very abstract and creative, but they all turned out very neat.  The snowmen sat on our counter for a few days before they were sent home--it looked like a scene from Snowmen at Night.  We read through that book and pondered what our snowmen did when we all went home from school.  I've already gotten a couple more Pom juice bottles to start collecting for next year!

I love this time of year.  I love our Holidays, Winter and Gingerbread units.  Maybe because it's Friday and I have a couple days to recover from the crazy day...but I almost wish we had more time for this season!  I had to post the CUTEST project that our kiddos are going to make for their families.  The idea is from Family Fun's most recent December issue.  These are my practice ones (my 3-year-old helped me make the Pom juice bottle snowman, so I figured if he can do this, so can my first graders!).  To prep the bottles, take off the label (I had to use nail polish remover to get rid of the printing on the Pom juice bottle), and cut the bottom off the bottle so that you can place it over a battery-operated tea light (I found some at the craft store 5 for $5).  Using a white glue and water mixture, you "paint" on white tissue paper squares onto your recycled bottle.  I used a glitter spray paint to paint the caps, although, you could just use the same decoupage technique with black tissue paper as you do with the white tissue for the body of the snowman.  I used orange tissue paper to make a nose, shaping it with a little help from the glue mixture, and sequins for the face and buttons.  I couldn't find small buttons in bulk at a reasonable cost fast enough at the craft store before my Littles starting losing it, but that would be super cute, too.  We'll be making these around December 14th, but I couldn't wait to post a pic of these!

So, now that I've started the blog up, one thing to note is that my teaching partner and I are HUGE Disney fans.  This summer we read through the Daily 5 and CAFE books to refresh our literacy.  One thing that stood out to both of us when reading those books is instilling a "sense of urgency" with the students.  Meaning, students need to know that we have a finite amount of time to prepare them for 2nd grade.  Since the first day of school, we have been counting down from 180 days of school--not to count down to summer, but to remind the students that we only have "x" number of days left to learn all of our first grade stuff.

We went to Disney World at the end of October.  I saw the antenna toppers at one of the gift shops and thought they would make great pointers for the classroom.  I popped them onto a wooden dowel and voila...fun shared reading pointer! 

"I'm thankful for..." pilgrim writing activity we did this week.   Thanks to Pinterest for the idea!
We had them up for our big Harvest Feast with families today.  The students had very meaningful things to write about!  

This week in math, the students made turkeys using their hands.  It's now a reminder on how to count by 5s.

Last week we learned about portions and what a healthy plate should look like.
We used choosemyplate.gov for a visual to show that we should have half our plate covered with fruits and veggies.
Students created their own "balanced plate" to show what they learned and what foods they would pick.

We are taking a brief break from our usual writing curriculum to do some more creative writing activities. With our nutrition unit underway, we read a cute book called, "Yum! Yuck!" about a little "Grizzly" baby who wants something else on his pizza. Momma Grizzly tries to figure it out, but all baby says is "That's what I want, that's what I want, that's what I want up there!", pointing to the shelf. (Text to self connection here...I SO relate to the mom's frustration, having 2 toddlers at home!) After reading the fun book, we brainstormed all the words we could think of about pizza. Students wrote pizza poems and published them onto their own slice of pizza.

I LOVE this book! It's one of those books that I wish I had written. Ed, Ned and Ted are dust bunnies that like to rhyme words. Then, there's Bob. Bob doesn't rhyme. (Bob is actually warning them about impending doom from a broom and eventually a vacuum cleaner.) I read this book before our Friday "chunk" chart activity to get the class thinking about rhyming words and word families. We read it twice and the kiddos begged to read it again! Every week when we're generating all the words we can think of from a word family we have been focusing on, we inevitably have a few kiddos that change the last consonant or vowel sound to change the chunk. I love this book because the kids can identify when Bob doesn't rhyme. Definitely going to read this book over and over!

So, here we go again!

I have read and followed many talented teachers' blogs lately, getting ideas and inspiration to keep me going in the classroom. 4 kids at home, 15 in the classroom, makes one a very busy teacher! I am so thankful for my job-share to help me balance life and just as important, an incredible teaching partner and friend. Since getting connected with Pinterest, it's time we start giving back and sharing some of the fun things we do in our classroom. I have to admit that this year has been heavy on new curricula from the district...some things good, some things...well, we have yet to publish a verdict on some things. With years of creativity being replaced by formal curricula, this blog can be my motivation to keep the fun in first grade and be ok with skipping a formal, published lesson (handed to us by people who work in offices, not classrooms) every now and then.
Shhh...just don't tell them ;-)

If You Want to Be a Badger...

I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I set up my first classroom as a child in my basement. My toughest students, my younger brother and sister. My top students, my big stuffed St. Bernard and white teddy bear. They always cooperated and never talked back.

As it came time to choose a college, I knew I wanted to be a Badger. A huge fan of Badger sports in tandem with my love of music, I knew I wanted to be in the UW Band. Music was my first interest, and originally intended on Music Education, aspiring to be a choral director at the high school level. After some doors opening and some closing, it became very clear to me that kindergarteners were a better fit with my personality than high schoolers. I also realized that I could very easily use my passion for music in the early elementary grades. There was something about the kindergarten grade that had me hooked: the excitement the students have for learning, the drastic growth and development in literacy and math and teaching the foundations for concepts that students will use for the rest of their lives led me to a degree in Early Childhood through 3rd Grade certification.


Despite earning a degree at one of the top rated Schools of Education and student teaching abroad in an inner city school in London, they did not prepare me for the real world of teaching. I learned more about myself as a teacher and teaching practices in the first couple years at Thoreau than I did my years at the UW. 12 years later, I am still learning, changing and modifying my teaching practices and philosophies to meet the needs of a diverse group of students.

At first, just keeping up with the changing curriculums and new literacy ideas kept me busy (I think Julie and I have at least 5 different math curriculums in our cabinet that we've used over the years!). Now, adding technology as a supplement to our curricula is another aspect of teaching that I need to try to get a grasp on. I feel fairly competent with technology in my personal life--skyping my nephews in D.C., uploading pictures and chatting with friends on Facebook, even recording my re-written version of Smokey Robinson's I Second That Emotion for our Balance and Motion unit and burning it to a CD so Julie can sing it with the class on my days off--but, when it comes to adding technology to my curricula, I feel like I'm at a complete loss at where to begin. Hopefully, this class will help me figure out how I can take what I already know and give me ideas on how to use them with my K/1 Badgers.