Word Work & DIY Magnets

Hello, all! I was having a discussion with a fellow blogger a week or so ago, and finally came to the realization of why I don't post much over the summer. I have nothing to blog about! Now that I'm gearing up for the next school year, I've got LOADS to share! Also, I gave my blog a LITTLE facelift... Added some navigation buttons at the top and spruced up the side a bit. Hope you like!

First of all, I just posted a new product! my Word Work Bundle is jam-packed with 87 pages to get your littles practicing their spelling words! There's some pages designed to be used with any list, and there's some pages that focus on Dolche's 1st and 2nd grade list. Check it out!

*Click picture to view on TPT*

Add it to your cart and snag it during the big TPT back to school sale! I'm adding an additional 20% off in my store during the sale...

I also posted a picture of the magnetic letters I made for my kids to use at the word work center, and I wanted to give you a quick demo of how I made them... SUPER EASY!!

First off, you'll need a few things:
-Magnets: I found ones that are .75 in. wide.
-Circular hole puncher: it should be the same size (.75 in.)
-Strong, clear glue
-Clear glass marbles (should be roughly the same size as your magnets)
-Scrapbook paper
-Printer

To start off, I zipped my scrapbook paper through my printer to print out the numbers and letters I wanted to make. I tried using a sharpie to write the letters, but the glue made the ink bleed. Printer ink = no problem. If you get the same size magnets I got, I used KG Primary Penmanship size 42... All her fonts are FREE for personal use, so check them out!!

Anywho, Once you've got your numbers/letters punched out, add a small amount of glue to the magnet and press that sucker on top. You'll definitely want to do this part on some newspaper or a craft table. I used the sports section, since it's rather useless in this household. You might have some glue squeeze out the side... Just wipe it away. Add another small amount of glue and press the glass marble right on top. That's it. It's seriously that easy.

I made an alphabet set and some fun ones to use on the board, and I'm in the process of making numbered magnets to use for lunch count... Stay tuned for how I'm going to use them!!

Good luck and have fun! The possibilities are endless :-)

Snow Day!

So. My morning went a little like this... Woke up, roads were bad-ish, but had no call from the school. Went to school. Walked in the door, principal said "hey, don't you know we have a 2-hour delay?" Then my phone rang. I was there, so I got some work done. Then they cancelled school. BLAH.

BUT. The best part? High school and middle school had already gotten to school by the time ours was cancelled, so they put in a whole day even though we didn't go at all, which means we don't have to make the day up!! Woot! So, I went home, played in the snow with my pup, and finished up me 3 hours of video training on how to recognize and report child abuse. We even had to take a quiz. I passed. Hooray?

Anywho, here's some of what we've been up to in first grade the past few days... I finished my Christmas door, which if you remember from last year, we all tend to go a little over the top. Well, this year we're not going QUITE as over the top, since there's literally like 2 days of school in December. Hard to be motivated to put up door decorations that will be ripped down the next week. I know, I'm a Scrooge. We had to pick songs, so I went with "We Are Santa's Elves" from Rudolph, and turned my door into Santa's workshop.

It looked REALLY lame and boring, so I added a nice list with all my kiddos' names, and a Christmas countdown. Super low key, but it's still fun. I'll try to take some pictures of other doors in the building this week!

If you follow me on instagram (@mrfirstgrade) you've seen what our elf, Mistletoe has been up to! Here's what he's done the past few days...

Hope you're enjoying December with your kiddos!

Spooktacular Halloween Activities!

Hey all! Long time, no post. Story of my life. AND, this is my 100th post! To celebrate, I'm sharing my newest TpT product!!

There's TONS of fun things in this pack!!

My favorite part of the pack is this super easy LOW-PREP candy corn glyph! The students do all the work (none of that copying thousands of pages on construction paper!!)  He's super cute and bound to create lots of fun for Halloween!!

It's on sale for the rest of the night, and the first one to comment here will get a free copy!  Don't forget to leave your email address :-)

Spring Fever

It's official. My kids have spring fever. It's official. I have it, too. I hate to admit it, but today I had one of those "is the year almost over?!" days. I hope I'm not the only one that feels that way from time to time. I love my job, I love my students, but today was rough. It could be that I was gone Friday and Monday on a family camping trip. It could be that my grad classes are killing me. Who knows. I've got some plans in the works to beat this, though... Stay tuned!

I've had these pictures on my camera for a few weeks now, and just haven't had time to post them... This is a craft I like to do every year around this time. It's not *tough* but it does take some listening skills and lots of patience. I was SO impressed as to how well my little firsts followed directions for this one!

To make these sunflowers, you'll need to do a little prep work. Until someone starts making bright yellow coffee filters, I'll have to keep making my own. I've got it down to a science, though. I use a whole box of yellow food coloring, and I dilute it in a cheap bowl that I found in the dollar section of the grocery store. If you don't want your fingers yellow for a few days, I'd recommend wearing gloves for this part. I don't because I don't really care all that much! You'll need enough coffee filters for each of your students to have 4 yellow ones. Let them soak for a short bit, squeeze them out, and plop them on a cooling rack to dry. I put newspaper down so my wife wouldn't kill me.

You'll need a few other things, too. Each student needs an oaktag circle to glue the sunflower onto. I found that a tuna can is the PERFECT size. You'll also need to trace a circle on 1 plain coffee filter for every student. You can have them do this if you're feeling brave, but I just like to have it all ready to roll.  Color in the white circle with a brown crayon, and cut it out.  Take 4 yellow filters, fold them together into quarters, and tract the leaf pattern onto the folded pile. Cut on the lines, and you should have 4 flower-like shapes. They do NOT need to be perfect! Stagger them, and glue them one at a time, onto the oaktag circle.  Save the scraps, because you'll need to glue some of them into the middle for texture.  When you're ready, glue the brown circle on top!

Voila! There you have it. I like to hang the sunflowers in the window because they look really cool with the sun coming through, but there isn't enough room in my new classroom. My last room had 6 giant windows that were perfect for displaying projects! I usually put the names of the students onto the leaf, so they know which one is theirs... Fun fun!

Enjoy!

We *Heart* the Earth

Earth Day has quickly become one of my favorite holidays at school. I've always been a recycling nut, especially at school. I found this awesome activity while blog surfing a few weeks ago, and knew my firsts would LOVE making it. You can find the activity HERE (for freeeeeee) on TpT.

Check these bad boys out!

I checked out a TON of books from the library at school, then we talked about ways that WE could reduce, reuse and recycle. My FAVORITE response, by far... "I just reduced, because I went to the bathroom!" Sort of true, but I wasn't in the mood to explain that one.

I thought this part was going to be too hard for my kiddos, but they REALLY enjoyed themselves! They look pretty snazzy in the hallway, too, if I do say so myself...

Each student also wrote about ways that they were going to try to (or already do) reduce, reuse and recycle.

I also read The Lorax, which is my most favoritest book in the whole entire world. Last year, I had my kids make Lorax mustaches and write about how they would change the world. Unfortunately, I won't have enough time this week to do it, since we have FRIDAY OFF! That's right folks, you heard me right. It's a snow make-up day, and thank God we didn't have enough snow to need it. I know I'll probably end up at school anyways, trying to catch up on that giant pile of papers in my "to file" pile... Ugh. It never ends.

Do you have any favorite Earth Day activities? I'm always looking for new ideas!

The Lady in the Moon

Hello! We use Reading Street at my school, and are reading Lady in the Moon this week. Don't get me wrong, I really do like our reading series, but every once in a while a really boring not as fun story pops up. For me, this is one of them. There were some fun bits that we enjoyed reading, but other than that, my kiddos were a little restless in reading groups. SO, I decided to spruce things up in our room with these Chinese lanterns. We really enjoyed reading about the Lanterns, so I KNEW my firsts would absolutely love this little craftivity. Very easy, and definitely a fun one!

Here's whatcha do. Find some Chinese clipart to spruce up the page (I like to use an oaktag because it holds up a little longer). The most important part is the row of dots at the bottom of the page. About an inch from the bottom, and about an inch apart. These will be very important later, so tell the students NOT to color over them with a dark color. Let the students color the page until their little hearts are content.

When they're all done coloring, have them fold the page in half, hot-dog style. Then, starting on the side with the fold, cut straight up to each dot. TO MAKE THINGS EASIER, I folded the pages and made the first cut for my kiddos, just to make sure they didn't chop it in half! Once it's all sliced up, open it up and staple the top and bottom to form the lantern!

Super easy. Super fun. Kiddos will love it! Happy almost-weekend!

Valentine Fun

So, I may be a little last minute, but here's some Valentine things that are going on in my world right now... I made these crayons for my students last year, and they were a HUGE hit! Very inexpensive. Very easy.

I went to the local Dollar Store and bought a few boxes of crayons. After practically bruising my thumb from scraping wrappers off of crayons, I found a MUCH easier way to peel them. Plop those suckers into some water, let them hang out for a short while, and the wrappers literally fall right off. Who knew?!

Snap the crayons into little chunks, OR use an old pair of scissors to cut them up. Using a silicon muffin pan, I baked my crayons at 320 for about 15 minutes. Take a peek, you'll be able to tell when they're totally melted through. I let them rest on a wire cooling rack so they would harden faster. BE CAREFUL, because the silicon mold is VEEEERY flexible, and the wax will be super hot. Pop them out when they're hard again, and voila! (I just typed viola and had to fix it. I'm such a musician). Easy peasy. 

Also made some Valentine's garland that's draped all over the room. Again, SUPER easy. Our die cut machine has a heart that presses out a heart AND an outline at the same time. Our school was using the hearts for a school-wide fundraiser for the Heifer Project, and I stole politely asked for the outlines. Make a cut at the bottom, slide another heart in, then tape it shut. Repeat this process a bazillion times and VOILA! (accidentally typed viola again).

AND, last but not least, I can't WAIT to make these Splat the Cat's with my kiddos tomorrow!! (If we don't have a delay...)

Happy V Day!

Super Bowl Fun

Happy Friday, everybody!!

I hope you all had a wonderful week! We started things off with a "snow" day on Monday (which was lovely because I was totally unprepared for the week). My wife's school cancelled too, but she didn't find out until she'd already gotten there. Huge bummer! I don't know about you, but these short weeks can sometimes be worse than the normal ones! Anything out of the ordinary schedule just drags on and on... Am I the only one that feels this way??

Anywho, I totally forgot about 2 very important things until the very last minute. There's some groundhog that's going to look for his shadow tomorrow morning. Oh, and apparently there's a big football game on Sunday. How could I forget about BOTH of these events!? Since I only remembered last night, I realized I would only have time to have fun with one of these events. I chose the Super Bowl, remembering something I'd seen on Pinterest AGES ago. Here's the original pin.

Check out these bad boys.

My kids had SO much fun making these!!  I have 24 kids in my room, so I figured I should have around 16 of each color ready to roll just in case.  Would you believe that I had 17 kids want to make flipping Ravens players?!  Luckily I have an aide, so I quick zipped across the hall to run off enough pages to make one more purple player.  Ugh!  Also, I need to share what's making me smile right now... I swear, we have the cutest puppy in the world.  He's saying "Daddy, get off your blog and come love meeeee!"

Have a super weekend!

Barf City

Oh my garsh. Flu season is in full swing at my school. I had 7 kids out yesterday AND my aide was out too. Needless to say, the day was a little nuts! We just read Ruby in Her Own Time, and I was planning on having my little firsts make time-lines. Well, it's a little hard to start a project when you're missing 1/3 of your class! I felt like we were SO unproductive. Today I only had 3 out, so we were able to start the project this afternoon. 

HOWEVER.

Some of my kids who WERE there should NOT have been there. This afternoon, I swear half my class was complaining that they were about to throw up. I've gotten pretty good at determining whether or not a child is about to vomit in my face, and these kiddos weren't faking it. Praise baby Jesus, none of them got sick in my room. Been there, done that, not fun.

While working on time-lines, I was checking what they had written (their homework a few days ago was to list one thing they'd done each year of their life). One of my kiddos had written that he had his tonsils out, so I was just making small talk with him while checking his spelling. 

Me: "Oh, you had your tonsils out?"

Student: "Yeah, cuz I puked on the couch."

Seriously?

I'll snap some pictures of our time-lines when they're finished. In the meantime, here's a fun little craftivity we did the other day to spruce up our L.A. focus board. Ruby the duck learns to do things in her own time, so we made some ducks to hang out on the bulletin board. I found the pattern online for free here... Check them out!

Here's to hoping your students are healthier than mine this week!