Week 3 Yippee!!!

Hello friends!   How was your week?   It was pretty busy in our classroom this week!   I thought I would join up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for this week's post.

 

 It was Valentine's week and we decided to make cards. We started off by painting some hearts pretty pinks and adding some glitter and stars.

 

We coloured in some cute love bugs to paste on the inside of the cards. Click on the picture to find the download.

The cards we were making were inspired by Art with Jenny K's craft below.

We didn't have time to do the whole activity but we did still cut the hearts up and paste them back together on the front of the cards. They turned out very cute!

 

 

Finally, we wrote 'Happy Valentine's Day' on the inside and pasted this super cute poem on the back.

I found the original poem over at Mrs Albanese's blog. I just typed up my own version.

My teaching buddy made these super cute tags for some Love Day gifts for the students. We just bought some Tiny Teddy packets and stapled these to the top. They were very cute!

I hope you all have a great Valentine's Day - whether you celebrate it or not! My husband is not a huge fan of the day but has sent flowers to school for me every year that we've been together, anyway. Since it is on a Saturday this year, this was what he did instead.

He knows the way to my heart!!!

Week 2 Yahoo!

My first post with my new 'look'. What do you think? I'm in love with it! Gabby over at Gabby's Classroom did an AMAZING job at redecorating my blog. She was so quick, helpful and reasonably priced, too! Be sure to check out her work, if you're considering a blog makeover!   Now, onto some classroom chit chat.   Week 2! I can't believe 2 weeks are down already! Only 8 weeks and we are on Easter break. Crazy!   This week was another busy one, with lots of writing and number work. I forget how wonderfully innocent and young first graders are. It melts my heart to see the kids giggle at the tiniest things that we say or do. Makes my job that much more rewarding!   We revised short vowels in CVC words and made silly vowel posters to help us remember them all. This idea came from my amazing teaching buddy :)   We started talking more about partitioning and how numbers can be made up of many combinations. We looked at rainbow facts again, made a class poster and used blocks to represent the different rainbow facts.   One of the kids' favourite activities was one that my teaching buddy lead. Ten children stood as 'soldiers' and had to march forward to show the different friends of ten. They loved being involved and using their bodies so much that we did it nearly every day last week but changed it from soldiers to being crabs (and crab walking to the side to show parts) and ballerinas (and prancing to the side).

This week we also read 'Oh, the places you'll go' by Dr Seuss and did a little balloon collage to go with it. The craft idea was from @smartieeepants on Instagram. One of my very favourite Insta accounts to follow. I just found the ballon and basket templates online, cut up little square pieces of coloured paper, took pictures of the students and printed them teeny weeny.

We decided to print number lines to put at the top of our whiteboards, on display. THIS happened because silly sausage me put the pouch in wonky!! Only teachers would understand the pain of seeing this!!!

  I hope everyone had a fabulous week, too!

Week 1 Fun!

1 week down. A squillion to go!!!

We met our Year 1 students this week and they are seriously beautiful! I couldn't be happier or have had a more positive start to the year.

The children are so keen to learn and SO sweet. I wore a dress on Thursday and had not one but TWO students stop me and tell me how pretty my dress, shoes and earrings were :)

I have taught First Grade before but it was in my first two years of being a teacher AND we have now had the Australian Curriculum implemented, which has changed what we teach a bit too.

For the past 3 years I have taught Second Grade and it has made me forget how little they are coming from Prep (or Kinder) to Year 1. Needless to say, I have had to adjust my brain this week and get into Year 1 mode again!

Here are a couple of things we did this week that I managed to snap some photos of:

 This idea is all over Pinterest. Name rockets! You wouldn't believe how excited the kids were to make these. They wanted to take them home straight away! The children had to count how many letters were in their first name and then get the correct number of coloured cards. They wrote a letter on each card and then glued a triangle topper and a 'Blast off' sign, where they wrote how many letters were in their name.

 We cut up a squillion little squares to use for collage!

The first activity was a name collage which turned out MUCH cuter than we expected.

 We were going to let them use paint dabbers and the paper squares but the squares just looked so good that we didn't bother with the dabbers.

We are also going to use the paper squares to collage a craft to go with 'Oh, the places you'll go!' next week, so stay tuned!

I hope your first week back (Aussie friends) is/was as fabulous as mine!

It's never too late for Christmas ideas!

Hello friends!

I've been meaning to share with you the Christmas and end-of-year activities that I did with my Year 2s at the end of last year. My end of year was so crazy that it completely slipped my mind and before I knew it, it was time to go back to school again!

However, I believe it is NEVER too late for Christmas ideas (I am constantly taking screenshots and pinning ideas throughout the year in preparation). FYI that is where I get nearly all of my ideas - from everyone else! I am so grateful that there are other creative people out there willing to share their amazing ideas because I don't know what I would be doing without them!

So, yes it is February but here are some of the things that we did:

 Our class made these 'stained-glass windows'. They turned out AMAZING and looked so good on the windows. We had lots of compliments. The idea is from Kinder Craze.

My lovely teaching partner at the time had made the most adorable terrariums with the kids as parent gifts. I loved the idea so much that I made them with our class, too. They weren't as good as hers but were still very cute! I think I'll do them again this year :)

Schools are very strict on use of chemicals (understandably) and what the kids use for experiments. Instead of doing these together, we all used pipe cleaners to make snowflakes and I sent the recipe home for them to do if they wanted. I took this one home and did the experiment for the class. I brought it in the next day and they loved seeing the crystals that had formed. I was SO impressed with how it turned out! I used the experiment from Martha Stewart.

I saw this idea on Pinterest and knew I wanted to use it as an end-of-year gift for the kids. The original idea is from here. I just recreated my own labels, bought large, medium and small marshmallows, pretzel sticks (that I snapped in half) and choc nibs then put them in a small plastic bag. I couldn't find anything for the nose, sadly, but the kids loved them all the same!

We made reindeer cookies that turned about pretty adorable...and delicious! I just used milk arrowroot cookies, choc tiny teddies, silver sugar balls, icing and choc-organge balls (jaffas).

PHEW!

It was a great end to the school year!