Pajama and Reading Day!!

What a day!  Today was one of my favorite days of the year. I love books AND I love pj's and today we celebrated both!  We started out our day with a big breakfast. We had waffles, sausage, bacon, donut holes and lots of yummy fruit.

 

 While we were eating our breakfast Mr. Dawson stopped by and read us one of his favorite books. The kiddos love when Mr. Dawson stops by and they loved his story

 Then we all headed over to Mrs. Waugh's room for a little craft time. Everyone had a canvas cinch sack that they decorated with fabric markers. They came out so cute!

                                                            Aren't they adorable????

After our craft time everyone headed outside for recess which gave us teachers a quick break and then before we knew it, they were back inside and ready to go.








We had a quick snack and then headed to Mrs. Fillmore's room for another story.







                                        




Mrs. Smith came to read two of her favorite books.  Then Mrs. Fillmore shared two books from her favorite author, Patricia Polacco.

After a pizza lunch and another recess, some of the high school students came to buddy read with us.













There were big and little students reading in all three classrooms, the hallways, on the stairs, and even in the teacher's room!                                                     

 


After we were done with buddy reading with the high school students, we had another surprise guest reader. I wonder who it was..............











Mrs. Bamford!!!!!!!  Mrs. Bamford loves to read!!! She always makes time in her busy schedule to read to us!

 



Next it was time for our last activity of the day. We gave our kiddos little hardcover books. They decorated them with their markers.

A few more pictures.......

and it was time to pack up to go home.














                                        The day ended with 30 very happy children..........





                                                           and 3 very tired teachers!!!

                                                               

First Grade Friends

"Quack, Quack," came out of the blue on Monday afternoon. The room and kids were being so quiet working independently (yes, I said independently) at their desks and I was getting ready for the next activity. One of my students spoke up and said, "Where's the duck?" I chuckled to myself at how easily they believed a duck was in the room. Then it sounded again, "quack, quack." I told them that there wasn't a duck in the classroom and their response was, "Didn't you hear the quack, quack????" I explained to them that I had heard it and yes, it sounded like a duck but that doesn't mean there is a duck in the classroom. Soon after, the quacking stopped and we still had no idea where the "duck" was.

Later on, I checked my email. I then realized my friend, who teaches in the next town over, had tried to reach us through facetime on one of our iPads. That was our duck sound!! The iPad was ringing! They were working on a St. Patrick's Day word problem book that I had given them, and they wanted to share what they were learning with us. How fun!! We were able to call her back and her students showed us the word problem booklets that they were working on. They read us the word problem and then showed us how they figured out the answer. The best part was when one of her students said they had to figure out how much Lucky and Lily would each get so they marked an X on Lucky's and put a dot in the middle of Lily's and some of my students collectively went "Ohhhhhhh." They now had a new strategy for figuring out word problems. It made me remember, students learn from each other at a much faster pace then from an adult. Here are some pictures from our new first grade friends working on word problems.

They put their word problems up on the Smartboard, while others used dry erase boards to work on.

Our class was working on fact families.

Each one of my kiddos picked three numbers that made a math sentence. They glued the three numbers at the top and then wrote four math sentences using the same three numbers. This project was a review of fact families from earlier in the year. I was glad to see how well they all remembered what they were taught!

Once we were finished, we shared our fact families with our new first grade friends.

All in all, St Patrick's Day was a lot of fun with a lot of learning.

 Most of my kiddos had at least a little green on.



                              BUT........

These three girls really "had their green on"

Valentine Boxes!

 We have been looking forward to this day for a few weeks. For the past few years my students have invited a special someone into the classroom to help make gingerbread houses. This year, it seemed like the time from Thanksgiving to Christmas went by way too fast. I decided to switch things up a bit and instead of gingerbread houses my kiddos invited a special someone into our classroom to help with our valentine boxes. We had so much fun and I was so impressed with how they looked! Check them out below:

Love this "monster" box on the right!!  On the front it says, "Me like valentines! Feed Me!!!!!!" It's too cute!



 

 

Just above is the table with goodies that we served our guests!  My wonderful and talented sister-in-law did did the baking and decorating. She made gorgeous mini cupcakes, heart shaped brownies that were decorated and I made candies and chocolate heart shaped lollipops.

Grandparents Day!

What a day!  We had so much fun with our grandparents at school today! While we were waiting for them to arrive we worked on a grandparent paper.  It said, "I love my grandparents because..."  They did such a great job on them. While we were waiting to go to the gym to perform, seniors from upstairs kept coming in to get students to go the gym to get their picture taken with their grandparents.  Such a great idea!  Here are some of our papers that we did.

They are so cute!  I love the drawings too!  This is just a sampling of the ones that I had.  





Around 9am, we headed to the gym. We started with Pre-school and Kindergarten and then it was our turn.  We sang "The BIBLE."  They did a great job!









After each grade sang, we went back to our classrooms and grandparents came to visit. Each student had a list of things to show their grandparent.  For those whose grandparent couldn't make it, they took pictures with our iPads.  Check them out:

Once the grandparents left we got a little silly.  :)