February in the Classroom

Hello there!  I hope your weekend is cozy, slow, and productive.  What’s been happening in your room amidst the groundhogs, hundredth day, and presidents?  Here’s what we have been working on!  Grab a snack…It’s over 20 pictures long.

Wednesday was our 100th day.  By a little miracle from the heavens, it was also an early release day for PLC.  It made for the perfect amount of crazy in one day.  It really was a sweet and fun stress relief day! 

Throughout the week we worked on When I am 100 writing.  Our district requires 4 writing pieces that go through the writing process.  We chose to use this writing activity to meet this quarter’s writing process requirement.  Here’s how it went down in my room.

On Day 3 we edited.
First we edited our work for capitals and using a highlighter. We highlighted all the words that were supposed to start with a capital. When we found a letter that wasn’t capitalized, but should have been we circled it with our highlighter.  This is taught during morning message and we use whole body reading to help us know where capitals and punctuation belong.  (More on that in another post!)

Next we traded our paper with a peer.  The peer read our work out loud to use so we could hear how it sounded from another mouth.  The peer used their highlighter to double check our capitals.  

Day 4 we wrote our final drafts.  For the reward of all of our hard work, we got to see ourselves 100 years old!   (I used Old Fart Booth app)

 This was such a funny moment…I had a group at my back table and they saw their 100 year old selves.  They held them up to each other and one sweetie said to the other, “It’s ok maybe you won’t live to 100 and you won’t really have to look like that.”

Tada!  Finished products!  I tried to get the writing to show up but clearly I am camera challenged!
If you would like this 100th Day organizer and paper for next year, you can get it HERE!

In math last week, we worked on addition and subtraction problem solving.  On Friday, students created their own math story problems by choosing a bag and a number story sheet.  The bags have a math mat and manipulatives that match. 

  Another tub we worked on this week was Kitten’s Treat Shop.  Students collected pennies, nickels, and dimes and then counted at the end to see who had the greatest value of coins.

We have volunteers that prep for us each week!  It’s a life saver and I am going to show you how to make it happen for you and your team too!  Those papers in the above picture were given to me that way.  It’s amazing.  It’s not hard to get this to happen for you!  Let me show you!

We have a counter space out in our flex room.  (if you don’t have a flex room, then designate a spot in each teacher’s room for their tub, or one teacher’s room for the master folder and the teacher tubs) 

Each teacher has a tub with their name marked on it.  (We have 5 first grade teachers on our team)  In the picture above everyone but two of us had already taken their full tubs into their rooms to put everything out for next week.

Peeking into my tub…

We have our planning meeting as a team on Wednesdays after school to
decide which standards we will focus on for the following week.  We have one tub for masters and inside the folder, we mark any and all things that we want prepped for the following week.  Then On Thursday morning we all pass the folder around and put our name and amount we want copied, laminated, or prepped of each activity.   Sometimes there are centers in there to be prepped, but this week was pretty easy.  (Says the teacher that didn’t have to prep anything)

(Turn your head this one is sideways) Here’s what it looks like now that it has been copied. notice the coffee stains on the label.  #reallife  #volunteersarethebestpeopleonearth

Each activity in the master folder gets a post it and if we want that activity we mark it down. 

How do we round up the volunteers?  We use sign up genius.  We picked Thursdays and we send out 4 slots each month.  Out of all 5 of our classes, we only need 2 parents that are loving and kind and don’t mind helping out.  There hasn’t been a week at all this year when someone wasn’t there to do the work for us.  It’s a miracle.  If you only do this for yourself it would still be worth it.  They save us hours of time every week.

Have a great week!