Open House

Well, I survived Open House and have enjoyed 4 glorious days of spring break. It is crazy to me that we're half way through March and only 10 weeks away from this school year being over. Being incredibly busy sure does make the time fly!

Back to open house; the only way I know how to describe open house preparation is to say that it is utterly and completely exhausting. As I've previously mentioned, my school uses our ocean unit as the main attraction for open house. Over the past few weeks, we've been to the library to research the five oceans, participated in an ocean video conference with another school, chose an ocean animal to research using nonfiction books, had marine biologists bring in preserved marine animals and fossils, integrated technology by recording researched facts on the iPad, and learned facts about many different ocean animals. It has been fun to participate in so many different activities and see the kiddos light up and enjoy learning. The exhausting part comes when trying to decide what to display. Teachers (at least most that I know) feel a certain amount of pressure to display an elaborate and impressive open house display. Wonderful, creative, magnificent work that the kids have created and parents will love. However, you're not allowed to devote too much of your time to the creation of these masterpieces. Principals want the parents to be awed and the kids to be proud but they don't want to see any of this cutesy coloring nonsense going on during instruction time. (Disclaimer: MY principal has not said this or made any official rule changes. Just expressing how I feel.) All this to say that we had to take all of our ocean projects (that were already pretty low on the cutesy scale) and scale down the cutesy even more and up the educational factor. I know, not the end of the world. It is amazing to see how excited the kids still get about being allowed to color though. & don't even mention markers. You will get some squealing out of my kids if you use the magic word "marker!" While it was exhausting for me and a bit stressful (can you see asleep before 9pm?), it was great for my kids.

Sick of my rambling?

 Here are some pictures of our finished product. The first is the inside of our room just after open house, with jellyfish facts and octopus facts hanging from the ceiling. Sitting on each table is/was a folder holding the rest of each child's ocean projects, their math journal, science journal, and problem solving journal. They also had coral at their seats that they were able to create when the marine biologists visited.

 This second picture is the outside of our room. (My room is called the fishbowl because of it's crazy placement and very fishbowl-like feel so I made it a literal fishbowl. Perhaps ocean-bowl is more appropriate, though.) Hanging in the windows are more octopus and jellyfish facts, as well as shark facts, fish facts, whale facts, and two of the student's "first grade treasures." Hanging around the windows are my little oceanographers. The stories under their oceanographer detail why they would want to be an oceanographer, what they would bring on an ocean expedition, and what they would bring back from an ocean exploration. The inside of our windows look the same but I somehow forgot to get a picture of that before leaving for spring break.

Taking away the cutesy and adding in writing to every project, is what was so exhausting. No matter how many times I re-explained it, said it, pleaded, begged, and screamed - editing is really hard for first graders. (Ok, I don't really scream. I just have a very stern teacher voice and patience ran out about two weeks before open house.) I didn't want to put up absolutely perfect work because I wanted the work to be an accurate reflection of each kiddo. However,  I absolutely refused to put up work that was full of misspelled word wall words, completely void of punctuation, and littered with lower case i's. I feel that at the very least, first graders that are 10 weeks away from leaving me should be capitalizing the word "I," attempting to put punctuation at the end of thoughts, and using the biggest resource in our room to check their sight word spelling. Needless to say, there were many conferences had during this process. Many rough drafts and rewritten drafts. Ab. So. Lutely. Exhausting.

I feel like I've complained a lot so let me be clear - I am thrilled with how everything turned out. Every single student showed up with a parent and it was so wonderful to see the kids take ownership of their classroom and show their parents around. The parents loved it too. I received several kind comments that night and emails since expressing gratitude and appreciation. Here is an action shot during open house:

Impressive, right?

What you see on the screen was really the "big hit" that night. Each student drew a picture of the animal that they chose to research when our nonfiction library books were being rotated through first grade. Then, they took the information they collected and wrote a small paragraph about their animal. I then took a picture of their animal using an app called face talk on the iPad and recorded the kids reading their paragraph. When finished, the mouth on the animal moved while the student talked. It was so cool!

Well, I feel like I've rambled enough and even on spring break, 11pm is still past my bedtime. Hope everyone has enjoyed the time off, if you're lucky enough to get it! We are having our wedding food tasting tomorrow! So excited!!!

But first, here are the rest of the pictures I took of our open house projects. 

 

Classroom Picture Update

I promised updated pictures of my room a while back and finally had time to straighten things up and take some pictures on Friday. Enjoy!

Word Wall with Math Strategies above. Book boxes and school supply boxes (all from Target) in the cubbies below. 

Next to the word wall is the rest of our math wall and where the kiddos hang up their backpacks and jackets. On the adjoining wall is an area for student work that desperately needs to be switched up. Those foldables have been up for an embarrassingly long time.

Next to the student work display is a dry erase board and then my small group table and teacher area.

Opposite the word wall is the main focus board with our calendar & materials, hundreds chart, money posters, and our birthdays by month. Then we have our library with our daily 5 posters, various anchor charts (fancy words, peer-edit comments, reader's workshop), and our CAFE area. (Don't mind the huge shape in blue tape on the floor - we are starting area this week.)

And that brings us to our Science and Word Family areas. This will soon be transformed to an aquarium like area for our Ocean Unit that is on display for Open House.

I created two new items this week that took me quite a while. The first is a schema board that I am using during our classroom discussions when we start a new unit. The second is a Nonfiction Text Features anchor chart with pictures that briefly explain what each feature is used for. Since we're starting our ocean unit, both have been greatly used the past week. My kids will be selecting an ocean animal to research so the nonfiction chart will be referenced every day until Spring Break. (which is only 19 school days away!!!!)

 

That's all I've got, how'd you like that? Shout out to Kelli Raspberry!

Case-of-the-Mondays? Not this week!

Thank goodness for a three day weekend! This past week was crazy. Middle of the year assessing is still throwing off our schedule. DRA testing, Papi's, CogAT, BLAH! On top of all of that, we had a thunderstorm/snowstorm on Tuesday! Snow, or really any precipitation, causes Texans to lose it. Honestly, I'm surprised school didn't get cancelled or at least started late. Our city usually shuts down when we get any kind of winter weather. But no, school started on time and it made everyone's mornings a little more interesting. It made my 40 mile commute much longer than it normally is but I didn't run into any problems on the roads that I took so I was thankful for that. This is the only picture I managed to take of it that day - looking out of the window in the hallway outside of my classroom towards our playground. It further illustrates my classroom's placement between the kinder/first grade and the second/third grade pods.


My goal for tomorrow is to be productive. I'd really love to sleep, work out, shop, etc. but when you're a first year teacher, you can't waste a free day. There is ALWAYS something to do. For example, I have about a million pictures of fish to cut out. (Anybody else out there use Investigations as part of their math instruction?) We're starting our measurement unit in  next week and I need lots of things cut out for my kiddos to measure. I also need to plan our review day for our third Math CBA. That's Curriculum Based Assessment, for the non-teacher-readers out there. I don't feel all that confident going into this CBA. I should since we have worked on word problems so much that my dreams are about different ways to teach them or different problems and wordings to use. It's been rough, though. It is really difficult for sweet little firsties to decide when to add or subtract and where to put the given numbers in a math fact. One of my team members made the anchor chart below, that I will try to reproduce tomorrow as well. With my own little bit of flair, of course. (Side note: I hope to one day create anchor charts as adorable as Mrs. Carroll @TheFirstGradeParade.) I am also hoping that this added visual will help my students decide when to add and when to subtract. (Please ignore the misspelled word. It happens.)

Does anybody have any tips for word problems? Have any non-school oriented plans for tomorrow??
Wish us luck next week! It'll be another long one with a whole day devoted to me administering the CBA to small groups. Yippee!

Gol' Darn Gone and Done It

Well, I've done it. I finally decided to join the blogging world. Cue the crowd applause! I have debated starting a blog for quite a while - I just wasn't sure if I'd have time to keep up with it or if I'd have anything to blog about. I'm not much of a seamstress or creative genius, I don't have kids, and I don't have my own house. What else is there to talk about in blogland if you're not posting about your children, latest craft, or decorating tips?

What I've come up with so far is:

~ School: I began my first year of teaching in August and it has completely consumed my life. I have known for my entire life that I belong in the classroom. There was never a plan B. It has always been teaching. After I graduated in May, I spent the entire month of June sending emails and filling out applications. (200+ emails and applications, actually!) It was tiring and incredibly discouraging at times, but it paid off and I finally found the job that I know God prepared for me - First Grade!! Blogging about things that I've learned about the profession so far, activities we've done, and some of the hilarious things that my kiddos do and say will probably take up a good bit of this blog.

Classroom as I found in in August:

 Meet the Teacher Night: Things look VERY different now. We've got anchor charts all over the wall and lots of words on our word wall. Will update soon.

~ Wedding Planning: During that aforementioned rough month of June, one big happening brought my spirits up: after three years with my sweet Newly (yes, that is his real name), I got engaged! We have set our wedding date for November of 2013 and while I have been slow to start making the millions of decisions that come along with a wedding, we have gotten a few of the "big" things taken care of; engagement pictures (see below), wedding date, dress!!!, wedding band, venue, and caterer.

Did I mention that we are HUGE Texas Ranger fans?? 

We did take some "normal" engagement pictures too. These are just a few of our baseball themed save-the-dates. Big thanks to Emma Goode Photography!

~ The occasional craft: Sadly, I haven't had much time to craft since I was hired in July. Even when I am at home and technically "off," my computer is open and I am searching pinterest for new ideas, working on lesson plans, or cutting out and laminating math station games. However, I foresee more time for crafts in the future. I would assume that they'll be wedding decor crafts but I am sure I can squeeze in the occasional home and school craft here and there too. In fact, to finish off my two week long CHRISTMAS break, I have a craft day date on Friday with a fellow first year teacher at my school, Megan. She's an awesome fifth grade teacher and she's starting her own Teacher's Pay Teacher's account. Check it out and follow HERE!

~Lastly, and certainly guaranteed to be the most boring of my ideas, The Great Wedding Tone-Up: I've never been a big exercise person. I do get some exercise and most people would consider me skinny (I'm tall and clothes hide a lot!) but I'd like to tone up and take care of some of the "jelly" that I've got going on. I need to get over my gym intimidation and wimpy tendencies and Just (stinkin') Do It! I am not sure where I will find the time, but it is mandatory that I do.

That's all I've got to share for now. Any blogs that I absolutely must follow? Or blogging advice?

Happy New Year, Y'all!