What's been going on...

My classroom is in a weird spot in our school. I am not in one of the pods with the other first grade classrooms. I am in, what we call, the fishbowl. A room in the middle of the main hallway that everybody walks by everyday. I didn't think I was going to like it at first, but it has grown on me. I feel like we're in our own little bubble away from the very loud kinder babies and classes that might be using the pod computer lab. It does get a little loud outside of our room occasionally but not as often as I originally thought it would.

An  upside to having this classroom, is the great deal of wall space that I have all to myself in the main hallway. I get to put up several different completed projects and everyone gets to see the awesome work that we're doing. If you're having a hard time picturing my room placement, check the picture below. Those two windows with the hallway view make me laugh but that is the wall that I get to use for our work. (FYI: Everything is so bare because this picture was taken back in August.)

 Currently, I've got our 4 seasons dioramas (that I actually need to take down) and our 'shape'ly snowmen on display, as well as our ancestery flags on the classroom door. My favorite display has got to be the snowmen. We spent four long weeks learning about shapes and created snowmen out of shapes for one of our mini-lessons. Then, to integrate writing into this activity, I had my kids work on their description words by describing their snowmen. Let me tell you, descriptions are not easy for first graders. I had so many that wrote in their story, 'my snowman has two eyes.' I tried to explain over and over again that this wasn't specific enough and that they needed to include the shape name, color, and size in the descriptions of the snowman's features. My sarcasm finally got the best of me after I read that same sentence in the 15th story, and I asked everyone that gave their snowman two eyes to raise their hand. To the shock of my students, everyone raised their hands and I finally saw some light bulbs go off. It was definitely a beating but the hard work paid off. When I finally got everyone to finished their descriptions, I put all of them together and stapled them in the middle of our snowman display. Then I printed up a cute "Can you find my snowman" cover to put on top. My hope was that people would walk by and read a few descriptions and try to find the snowmen that are being described. When I take this down, their descriptions will go in their writing journal.

Before Thanksgiving, we learned about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, as I am sure most first graders did. We discussed in detail the fact that all of us come from families that immigrated here, unless we are from Native American descent. Part of their homework that week was drawing/coloring/creating a flag that represented their ancestry. Aside from the US flag and Texas flag that I received (??), I was very happy with the result. I put them up on our classroom door with a sign that says, "Where on (Picture of Earth) are YOU from?"

This past week we discussed New Year's traditions and resolutions. I am hoping to put some of them up either inside my classroom or on the other side of our door. They are so funny! One student said that his resolution was, "to clean his room two times a month." ha! We are also going to be learning about Martin Luther King Jr., Marc Brown books, and how to classify objects. Should be a fun week! Then, a three day weekend!!!!!