What We’ve Been Up To!

Have I really not blogged since Wednesday? That is really not like me. One word: cheerleading.  The girls had their first competition this weekend, as well as two games and practices every night.  One more month of craziness and then…well…then, I won’t know what to do with myself except enjoy blogging more and feel like a normal teacher/person again. 🙂

Last week was our first week back from break and we were b-u-s-y in first grade!  Here’s what we’ve been up to!
We learned our new January math games for Math with Someone.  (All of these games are freebies I found. Click the picture to take you to their TpT link!) My kiddos love them!
Snowman Cover Up by First Grade Garden – A great addition fluency game!
Slides & Ladders by Kathy Law – Addition Doubles! They also asked if we could sing the doubles rap while we learned it. So of course, we had to. I never pass up the chance to sing off tune with my firsties.  ðŸ™‚
(This game is a staple in our room. My kids can’t get enough of it. She has them for all the seasons, too!)
Then, we learned all of Hope King’s winter math games.  I use these for Math by Myself and it has worked out wonderfully this year!  I have 8 tubs of her number cards and the kids simply grab a tub that has the cards, a dry erase marker/eraser, and a hundreds chart in it to help them, and head off with a game.  It has made management so simple because I am not constantly teaching new games all year.  The games gradually build on themselves and the kids are able to differentiate the games according to their own needs.  They are fabulous! 🙂 
This little girl made two digit numbers with her cards for a comparing numbers game.  Some of my kiddos are making three digit numbers, while my Tier III kids are still comparing one digit numbers at their own pace. 
We also worked on writing narratives.  We used Jamie Rector’s January Writing Activities: Aligned to Common Core Standards pack.  We will be working our way through this pack all month as we practice narratives, opinion, explanatory, and shared research writing.  This is happening during our RTI time, as we focus on writing interventions this month. Let me just say, this is an awesome resource! My kids are doing so well with it. 
First, we brainstormed activities and things we like to do on a snow day.  (Who doesn’t like snow days?!)  

Then, the kids planned their story by brainstorming and sequencing the order of their narrative.

Their stories turned out amazing! I had most of my kids write two full pages – which finally made sense and had detail. Yayy!
Our gingerbread unit is in full swing.  We are reading the following versions during our unit.  Each day, we compare and contrast two stories or characters within the texts.  We also have a big class chart that we record the setting, characters, problem, and solution on each day.  They are having so much fun and look forward to our new gingerbread stories every afternoon!
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The Cajun Cornbread Boy
To end our week, we each made a hypothesis about what would happen if a gingerbread cookie really did swim across a river on his own.  Then, we tested out our hypothesis! We each put a gingerbread cookie into a cup of water and observed our results.  Gross! We figured out our conclusion: The gingerbread cookie would have gotten very soggy and probably would not have made it across the river!  ðŸ™‚ I wish I had more pictures of this to share but it was Friday afternoon….need I say more?

Thank you so much for catching up with us! 🙂 I hope everyone has a great start to their week.

Happy Learning,

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