Crazy Busy Life That I Love

I can’t believe I have let weeks go by since my last post.  I have been so busy with the start of a new school year.  I started my masters program, got a new group of kiddos, purchased a house and will be moving next week, and we think we want to add to our amazing family. I know I am nuts!  Here is a quick glance at some of my favorites from the past two weeks.

This summer I rewrote all of our ELA curriculum to fit the new Missouri Learning Standards and I decided to create units that would also hit all the science and social studies standards as well. Our first 5 weeks of school consist of character education along with a focus on key reading skills.  When we were focused on friendship week one we read The Rainbow Fish and the focused on characters, setting and retell.  Here are some of the lesson ideas along with a cute friendship fish.

We made a big fish similar to this one.  You can find the activity here.https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Rainbow-Fish-Friendship-Lesson-Year-1-and-2-Health-ACPPS019-ACPPS020-1628220 

We read a lot of different picture books and added actual pictures from the text to our anchor chart so the kids made a real connection to the standard being addressed.

A new book I discovered this year that was just too good to pass up was Elmer.  It is about an elephant that is different from all the other elephants because of all his colors and funny humor.  It is a great book to teach the vocabulary word unique and how everyone has something that makes them special.  The kids shared what made them special and painted their own “Unique” elephants. 

We brushed up on some sight word review from kindergarten with a little game of BINGO.  The kids love BINGO especially if they get to eat the markers afterwards.

The activity that I really liked was our morning meeting warm-up.  We have been practicing our rhyming and word families, so I decided to do a quick check activity that involved buddies, movement, and laughter.  The kids were given rhyming words on index cards.  I taped them to their head so they didn’t know their word.  They had to circle around the room and ask friends to read their word and look for their rhyming buddy match.  When they locked arms they came to the carpet and we checked them off together as a whole group and created an anchor chart with the words.  LOVED THIS ACTIVITY for so many reasons.  It took 10 minutes, I had the kids reading, moving, and practicing a skill. 

I am going to be posting some freebies tomorrow night so please check back.  I am created my A+ tutoring binder and I have some easy intervention activities that I will be sharing.