Happy New Year!

That's really it, just wanted to say best of luck to all of you in 2014!
:)Amanda

as promised :)

Beginning December projects:

For these first two, we reviewed shapes and talked about "December" theme items that might come in the shape of a triangle. Then, we dyed popcorn by putting already popped popcorn in a baggy with a little bit of paint and shaking them up good! Once the pieces were glued down, we made our triangles into real pictures! Love this art project!

 

Next up: The Shape Snowman dancing in the falling snowflakes. A classic, but I love it every time!

 

 Today's quick afternoon reading lesson: There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bell!

Coloring, cutting, sequencing, gluing, and labeling - whew!

 

Check back for more to come! 

:)Amanda

Happy Holidays!

I didn't get a chance to take pictures before our snow day on Friday, but here's one to hold you over until next week... I'm not really sure this picture should be forever available on the internet, but here goes! My kiddos have such a silly teacher :)

Photos to be taken/posted as soon as possible: Shape snowmen, Popcorn art, Free painting, Labeling work, and Snowy day Ten-Frames

Happy December everybody!
:)Amanda

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks to all of you for following/reading my blog posts this year! I am really trying to update more often and add photos! I need to figure out that anonymity piece though (putting smiley faces on like stickers or blurring out faces - most of the time it ruins my pictures, so I'll work on finding a happy medium here). But anyway... you are appreciated just for reading my updates, my venting, my excitedness, my ramblings - so I am celebrating YOU this Thanksgiving! Thanks for having an interest in my classroom and my students!

I have had a really fun time celebrating Thanksgiving with my class this year - I am hoping I started a "Something I'm thankful for..." Show-and-Tell day because that was REALLY fun! Our students and paraeducators all participated and we saw some very cool things! I loved hearing some guesses after our initial "clues" were given - and a lot of times they were right! Thanks to everyone who participated for bringing in your cool items and sharing your stories of who gave it to you, who you share it with, and why you were thankful for it! The quote of the day, was from one student that said: "But the season is about giving, not getting. I'm thankful for my family and friends! Well, plus my snow globe!"

Happy Holidays, everybody!
:)Amanda

Lots to update!

I cannot believe how fast October flew by, and now we are already two weeks into November! I have not posted a new blog entry in a while, so I'm sorry about that - I think this is about the point I reached last year and just gave up - but I'm trying to get back into the habit... so here are a few things from the last month or so that I have been meaning to share!

What feels like months ago, we were working on letter Ff and 

made these super cute paper plate frogs! I love the long tongues!

 

Then, during ::Pumpkin Week:: we played a few rounds of pumpkin bowling before this happened!

 

 Yep, you read that right - pumpkin bowling!! We used toilet paper rolls for pins and a small pumpkin for a ball - taped a bowling lane onto our floor, stacked up the paper into a pyramid, and added up how many pins we each knocked over! I gotta say, I thought the math would be the most fun part, but watching the pumpkin explode was definitely the highlight!


Last but not least, I want to tell you all about this awesome article a fellow teacher brought to my attention and I have since passed on... for some reason I cannot rotate this photo, but google Contemporary Arts Center's newest exhibit for kids - "The Dinosaur says Moo" and check it out if you can!

I guess that's it for now - right now I'm planning letter J and K lessons, a lot of fun fall crafts and activities to go with some read-alouds and I'm REALLY looking forward to our show-and-tell something we are thankful for day on Monday, Nov. 25th!

Until next time :)

...been a couple weeks...

Well, we've continued letters A-F, we're on Gg now - fresh from Fall Break and ready to work! I am in love with these cute giraffes (for letter g) we made on Monday so I just had to share a few of them! Pinterest-inspired of course, but with the students' own little twists :)

Elmer the Elephant Week!

As promised, although sorry it's a little late, here is some of the great stuff from our last week's theme unit - Elmer the Elephant by David McKee! We read 6 of the Elmer books, voted on our favorites at the end of the week, and completed daily "following directions" art projects along with worksheets that tied in with our math work!

Bar Graph - "Elmer" (the original introductory book) turned out to be the winner!

Some of the group art-work was just too cute to take down, so I hung the mosaic "team-work" Elmer and our Handprint Herd together over the cabinet in our room! Love the idea of a "We are one awesome herd" bulletin board or door display, but this is what I had space for and I'm thinking it'll stay up for a while!

 By the way - that mosaic Elmer was such a cool project! The kids really got into it... I made one big elephant cut-out on black butcher paper, cut it into 8 sections and each student was responsible for mosaic-ing his/her own section with help from an adult if needed. Then we had to work as a team to put all of the pieces back together to make one big "patchwork" patchwork elephant! I just LOVE it!!

Last but not least, here is a quick pic of 2 of the worksheets I made to go with our read-alouds. On the first day, we read talked about descriptive words and colored elephants differently for a "Special Day Parade" and of course, counted the elephants too! The second pic here is from Day #4, a review of some pattern-making that we had touched on in math lessons throughout the week - students completed letter patterns and then made their own elephant patterns with colors or more letters!

I had a lot of fun spending a week with Elmer and I think our kiddos did too! One of the books - Elmer and the Big Bird - presents a great anti-bullying message so I think I'm going to keep that one checked out from the library for another week and see if I have any student council members that would like to read it to some of our primary classes!