Magic E freebie

We are hard at it, working on magic 'E' words. My kiddos are really doing great! One of the first things I ever found for FREE on TpT was this darling activity by Jessica over on Teacheristatales. I'm sure you have probably seen it on Pinterest. Click HERE for a link to her TpT shop and this freebie.

It's a great activity to practice silent e or magic e, whatever you call it. 

I found another great activity by Annie over on The Moffatt Girls blog. She made some cute color by number pages that you can download for free from Teacher Notebook. Click HERE for a link.

And still I found another cutie activity. Don't you just LOVE Pinterest? This is from Zeek's Zoo blog. Click HERE for a link.

There are tons of awesome ideas for teaching silent/magic 'E'. I LOVE this bloggy world and all the great ideas and sharing that goes on!

So I'll add my own little Magic 'E' idea. It's not as wonderful as some of the other great things out but it's my way of giving back. 

It's a fun way to assess how your little ones are progressing.

You can grab a FREE download by clicking on the picture.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you found something you can use in your classroom.

Sight Word Poems

I found this great sight word poetry book from Scholastic last year. 

It has 100 fill-in-the-blank poems using common sight words. It's a great way for the kiddos to spell, write and read sight words while completing a fun poem. With our 'fun fat crayons' (the large Kindergarten crayons), I have my kiddos highlight lots of other things in the poems as well. If we have been working on l-blends we will color them blue. We might mark all the capital letters green and punctuation marks red. They like to find the rhyming words and connect them. The sky is the limit. There are soooo many things you can do with just one poem. My firsties look forward to doing one poem a week. 

My kids have a binder where we collect all our poems and songs. They like to read and sing the songs as one of their 'just right' books in Daily 5. Then at the end of the school year they get to take it home. It's just a fun way to get familiar, just right text in the hands of my kids.

I hope everyone is having a great week! Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone survived the fun of Halloween!

Here's some pictures from my super fun but very draining day.

This is my fabulous first grade team!

A cone head zombie and the green power ranger reading about pumpkins by candlelight.

A vampire and a zombie doctor reading spooky stories by candlelight. (battery tea lights)

A witch and a Harry Potter playing Boo Bump.

Our room moms had us playing a fun game from minute to win it!

This little ninja is playing Halloween Word Winners.

The pink Power Ranger stopped by to read Halloween stories. (A room mom!)

Pete the Cat Subtraction lesson

You know how every once in a while you'll have a lesson that just goes perfectly! The kids are all engaged and well behaved, and everything just clicks. Well, I finally had that happen today. I didn't think it would happen this year with the class I have especially this close to Halloween but it did!!! It also helped that I had 4 absent so that brought my total down to 27. Anyhow, I absolutely LOVE Pete the Cat and now my class does too. I taught subtraction using the Pete the Cat book- "My Four Groovy Buttons".

I know I've blogged about Subtraction and Pete the Cat before and posted a freebie I made for math stations. You can read that post HERE. But today's lesson was a great way to teach or review subtraction. I read the book and then gave all the kiddos a shirt mat and some buttons.

I had them put 5 buttons on their shirt. Then we sang the song from the book, "My buttons, my buttons, my 5 groovy buttons..." Then I said, "POP! 2 buttons just rolled away. How many buttons are left?" We took 2 buttons off our shirt. Then we wrote the number sentence on the recording sheet.

We continued doing more with other numbers up to 10. I had a few finding patterns and discovering cool things about subtraction. My firsties were loving it! They didn't want to stop. Man, I wish my principal would have been doing my evaluation. It went great! I hope it's not a once in a school year happening.
If you'd like a copy of my shirt and recording sheet just click on the picture below.

I hope everyone has a super week and a hauntingly great Halloween. Oh and love & prayers go out to those of you on the North Eastern coast!

Halloween Fun!

Okay, I'll admit it- Halloween is NOT my favorite holiday. I DO love to see the little ones have fun dressing up and parading around the school and neighborhood. But I hate the scary, gory stuff and all the sugar kids consume. It also is a wasted teaching day. So I'm trying to come up with some time fillers for my kiddos to do on Wednesday that are somewhat academic. (I say that with tongue in cheek!) I found a cute FREE bump game we're going to play. It's from Ashley over on First Grade Brain. You can check it out on TpT HERE.

In between costume parades, yes that is plural, we have 2 parades. We are a large school, so to accommodate parents and parking, we parade twice. Anyhow, in between parades and a party I've got a few other things planned. I made a Halloween Read & Write the Room for our self-start and to keep them busy while I take everyone's picture. They hunt the room for 13 Halloween words and write them on a recording sheet. You can click on the picture for a FREE download.

Then for wordwork we'll be doing Halloween Word Winner. You can click on the picture for a FREE download again.

I have a battery tea light for each firsties and we'll be reading Halloween stories by 'candlelight'. Here are some of my favorites.

I'd LOVE to hear what your plans are on Halloween to keep your firsties busy.

Writing, Winners, & Kindles

My kiddos did such a great job writing about BATS this week. I got this free packet about BATS from Jodi over on her blog Fun in First Grade. Click HERE for a link. They LOVE non-fiction writing and want to do more. So I made a generic graphic organizer for my little firsties to use. It's one of their choices in Writer's Workshop.

I made a basket of easy non-fiction books for them to read first. Next, they fill out the graphic organizer. Then they write.

If you'd like a FREEBIE of my organizers click HERE. It is 9 pages. It includes graphic organizers for non-fiction and 2 for biographies plus several different writing pages. Later in the year we will do biographies and this will work well when we interview each other and write about our friends. It will work well for writing about famous people too.

 And the WINNERS of my 400 followers giveaway are:

CONGRATS!

 BIG THANK YOU to all of you who entered and follow me and read this little ole blog!

 I'm VERY EXCITED about my new Kindle Fires and so are my kiddos.

I'd LOVE to hear everyone's ideas and what you do with Kindles and iPads in the classroom. I've just begun to explore all the fun possibilities! Please leave me a comment!

Spooktacular Sale!

 I'm having a sale!!

Check out my TpT shop for 20% off until Sunday!

Click HERE to link over to my shop.

Have a GREAT WEEKEND everyone!