Classroom Reveal!

It feels SO good to be done with my classroom! My little firsties will be coming Thursday night for back to school night, and I'm pumped! Before I reveal my room, did you hear that TPT is having ANOTHER back to school sale? I'll be discounting my entire store to join in the fun!

Without further ado, I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' to show off my room! Link up to show off yours, too!

Here's the view from the moment you walk in my door. Not sure who decided that those cabinets should be placed in the MIDDLE of the classroom, but we make the best of it. Good news is that the kids' stuff is ALWAYS out of sight. I have a set of mailboxes, so I use their cubbies for their Daily 5 book box. I will pre-load them with a handful of books after back to school night, because I'm starting Daily 5 Boot Camp on day 2! The posters above my sink are all book jackets, and the chalkboard posters are by A Year of Many Firsts... LOVE them.

Here's a closer look at my classroom library... I finally bit the bullet and bought that IKEA leaf I've been eyeing up for YEARS. Luckily, there's a metal contraption in the corner that holds all sorts of wires and such, so I used some UBER strong magnets and hung it. The rug is also from IKEA. Since I only have 19 students this year and about a billion cubbies, I put pillows in the few right by the library so they can sit in there. I also put out some stuffed animals if they want to read with a buddy.

Listening center for Daily 5. Got the chairs from Wal-Mart a few years ago, and the carpet from IKEA. On my closet door, I post what stories are in the listening center, and what track number they are (I make my own CD's for the listening center... read all about it HERE!) Also, our entire district is implementing a new anti-bullying curriculum, so the primary grades are all using Have You Filled a Bucket Today as a starting point. I'll keep you posted on how I use it in my classroom. Do you use bucket fillers? Please share your ideas!!

Thar she blows. A bunch of teachers in my building have fun frog themes or fun pirate themes... My theme is "borderline sensory overload" and I love it. So there.

This is supposed to be the teacher desk... In the middle of the room. I'm not using it this year, and I've started a trend in our hallway!! We're getting 2 more laptops for each room, hence the 4 stools, which are from... wait for it... IKEA! Legit $4.99 a pop. Bare cabinets will soon be sporting writing goals and anchor charts.

Also bit the bullet and got rid of my rocking chair... I'm still a little sad about it. For back to school night, I always have the kids write their name on the chart paper. It's an eye-opening experience and helps me remember that my kiddos are kindergarteners when I get them, which is still scary for me.

Starting left to right, the drawers are my writing center. Each drawer is a different option. Write a letter, post card, list, etc. Daily 5 i-charts and schedule, reading... I divided my board up into general comprehension strategies, nonfiction, and fiction. Underneath is just another spot to read and Jelly Bean, the world's fattest guinea pig in the world.

Since I got rid of my desk, this my command center. I have everything I need right behind me, and since I spend the majority of my day at my reading table, I decided to make it my home away from home.

Back to school night... I don't use newsletters, as you may have read, so I printed out directions on how to follow our class on Instagram, and the digital picture frame has Instagram pictures from the past year. I'm hoping the majority of parents just sign up that night.

I also set up a little giving tree and asked parents to take a leaf or two... Hoping the donations come flowing on the first day! The Giving Tree! Love. I can't take credit for it... Teacher friend, who has started referring to me as "Mr. Pinterest" came up with that all on her own and I stole it!

Is your room done? Link up! I want to see!!

Guest Post from MRS. First Grade: Recording Your Own Audiobooks!

Mrs. First Grade recording Green Eggs and Ham

Hello, all! This is Mrs. First Grade (that's right, I'm the lucky gal who gets to hang out with Mr. First Grade every day), dropping by to show you how to create your own audiobooks for free! As a songwriter who frequently records demo tracks at home, I've had the opportunity to play with multiple programs that can record audio, but I want to show you a method that's easy, intuitive, and works with the built-in microphone on your computer.

The first time I tried this method was when I took a graduate class on new media and literacies. I had to create a sample book talk on The Lovely Bones that included two voices and music, and it worked like a charm! Here's how to make your own.

How to Record Your Own Audiobooks

First, go to the Audacity website and download the program-- it's free and doesn't take up much space on your hard drive.

Then, follow the instructions to download the LAME MP3 encoder, which allows you to export your Audiobooks as MP3 files-- which you can easily open on any computer, tablet, or phone!

Once you've finished those two easy steps, you're ready to start recording! Watch my screencast below to get a glimpse into how it works. I take you through the whole process, from beginning to exporting.

It really is as simple as it seems! I hope you decide to give it a try-- your students will go nuts for these recordings (especially if your spouse helps you record some books-- I felt like a celebrity when Andrew's students listened to mine!). It's easy to keep your listening centers up to date with the books you really want them to listen to, not just the ones that are on sale for 99 cents!

Drop a line in the comments section if you have questions, and we'll do our best to help you troubleshoot any issues you might run into. Happy recording!

~Mrs. First Grade

Cori is an eleventh grade English teacher who works with economically and socially disadvantaged students. She is pursuing her masters in English education and enjoys spending her rare moments of free time with the two men in her life-- her husband, Andrew, and their adorable dog, Charlie.

Daily 5 - check!

SO. I did it. I let them go. We ran Daily 5 in its entirety today... Overall, I couldn't be happier for our first go!

Here's what went down. I did NOT run reading groups today. I wanted to be available to assist with transitions and with Listen To Reading (since we have had very little practice with that).  I decided to call each stop a "Round," so my kids know what they need to do for "Round 1" or "Round 2" etc... Now, let me explain a little. When I say they KNOW what they need to do, what I mean is the schedule would say something like this...

Green Group
Round 1 - Meet with Mr. V
Round 2 - Daily 5 Choice
Round 3 - Daily 5 Choice
Round 4 - Meet with Aide
Round 5 - Daily 5 Choice

Today, like I said, I did NOT meet with them. I have an extra card that says "Daily 5 Choice" that I put in front of each "Meet with Mr. V" card. I highly recommend this. It was SO nice to be able to worry about where they were going, and not about the kids at my table. I will run groups tomorrow, so the kids will just get one less choice. They've got a checklist to make sure they hit all 5 choices on a regular basis, but they know they won't get all 5 every day.

I was SO impressed with their choices. Of course they were excited about the CD player and RAZ Kids on the computer, but I had kids that wanted to go to Work On Writing FIRST, and that made my heart smile... They're also getting VERY good at choosing partners for Read To Someone. I went around the room and asked the kids where they were going for each round. "Billy, where ya going? Read To Someone? Who are you going to read with? Ok cool!" type of thing... They were picking people they knew they would be quiet with, and they were picking people well above or below their own reading level. It's great to see my higher kids be such wonderful teachers for my lower readers... Here's 2 of my little angels who read quietly the entire time and didn't bother a soul. Ignore the dirty guinea pig cage.

I also LOVED this scribble story. My kids know that I'm tired of reading scribble stories that have been turned into roller coasters or mountains. This little guy took his scribble and turned it into a monster! It took him a bit of time to decide what it was going to be, so he didn't quite get to finish writing. They all have "Work On Writing" folders that they keep in their desk, so next time they can finish old writing.

Are you venturing into Daily 5 land? Have you set your kids free yet? OMG, it's wonderful... Love how it holds the kids (and myself) accountable for so many aspects of literacy, AND that it was WAY less prep than traditional centers!!

Daily 5 - Work on Writing

Heyo! I finally remembered to take some pictures today, so I wanted to share a little more about my journey into the land of the Daily 5!

My kids are independent on Read To Self. It took many hours of model/practice/repeat, but we got there. I only took them as high as 20 minutes because my reading groups are never longer than that. Today, I told each reading group where I wanted them to go. Since I have 4 groups, I had one with me, one with my aide, one at Read To Self, and one group trying their first attempt at an all-out Word Work extravaganza. I've been gradually introducing each activity at my Word Work center. Right now, I'm keeping it simple with: magnetic letters, letter tiles, wiki stix, and letter stamps. They knew to choose one and keep it the whole time. With the exception of 2 little cherubs who were at the back of the room spelling their names with magnetic letters, everyone handled this remarkable well for their first attempt.

This afternoon, I tried 20 minutes of Work on Writing. I've been slowly introducing various activities they can do during this time. I use Lori Rosenberg's I Can Write A...Writing Menu, which I highly recommend if you're setting up a writing center! It's filled with gazillions of options for your kiddos to write. Right now, I've only introduced: letter, postcard, how-to, list, sticker story, and scribble story, which is a huge hit. However... If I read one more scribble story where they turn the scribble into a roller coaster or a mountain, I'll scream.

Anywho, here's what my Work on Writing station has shaped up to be. I got the cart from Big Lots on sale for $25 well spent. Basically, I made a drawer for each option they can choose. They know they can choose ONE of these during each Work On Writing, then they must journal. Some chose to only journal, which made my heart smile.

I decided that the top drawer was going to be their spot to turn in finished writing. There's also a mailbox (which I forgot to take a picture of) that they can mail letters and postcards to friends in the room. In order to turn in work, the students must highlight their name on their paper, mostly because some of the worksheets don't have spaces for names, so they always forget to squeeze it in.

Here's a peek at my writing focus board. The posters about what they can write all came in the writing menu pack. I also plopped up a few of my "I Can" Statements for things we're focusing on in writer's workshop.

I also put our anchor chart that we created about things to write about. The pencil about what do writers write came from The Teacher Wife.

Tomorrow, we're going to start discussing Listen To Reading behaviors by listening to the story from our anthology as a group... we'll see how that goes!! Cross your fingers.

Jeans Day (and a pencil sharpener!)

Ah. Am I the only one who falls asleep a little better knowing that tomorrow is going to be a JEANS DAY?! It's really kind of sad, but it is such a nice treat at the end of the week.

Anywho, sorry for no posts recently! Have been super busy at school with all the beginning of the year assessments and such. Yesterday was DIBELS DAY! I can't stand don't mind administering the DIBELS tests at all. Luckily, the beginning of the year tests for first grade aren't too bad.

We did a super fun craftivity that I hung up in the hall and forgot to take a picture of. DOH. Will take a picture tomorrow. If I remember. Probably not.

I'm still plugging away with Daily 5. I just started deviating from the suggested routine, but not really. I am using my whole group language arts time before reading groups to squeeze in our read to self practice, and tomorrow we will introduce choosing just right books with the "I PICK" method. The only thing I'm changing as of now is the pace at which writing is introduced. I am lucky enough to have a solid half-hour in my schedule that is being devoted to writing, and I'm using that time to begin squeezing in the Work On Writing component of Daily 5. Today we brainstormed a list of topics to write about, and I turned it into a poster.

*Sidenote* The chart paper I used to make the poster was wider than the lamination film. Rather than chop my paper in half, one of our amazing aides suggested running the poster through twice. The first time, have one side of the poster hang off the edge, the second time have the other side of the poster hang off the edge. When it's all said and done you can't even tell that it went through twice. GENIUS.

Tomorrow we will brainstorm a list of types of writing, and I will start to model one or two each day, then give them a chance to do it on their own. My hope is to have them ready to roll for 20 minutes of Read To Self (we did 14 today! I'm so freaking proud of how excited they are by this!!) so that I can start to run reading groups with an "Almost Daily 5" until the rest of the components are in place. They'll theoretically meet with me, meet with my aide, Work on Writing, and Read To Self, until the rest of the components are in place and I can start to let them choose. Right now they're doing lots of seat work (and they're being real troopers about it) but since I really hate am not a huge fan of seat work, I'm struggling to come up with meaningful activities for them to do while I run reading groups.

In other news, we had our digital projectors mounted from our ceilings last year. We do not have smart boards, but the projectors are angled at the whiteboard. We use EnVision math, which comes with an awesome online component that includes the entire student book, which can therefore be projected onto the whiteboard, which means the students can come up and write their answers right onto the board. Since it's a cross between a whiteboard and a smartboard, I refer to it as the "Dumb Board." Only in my head, though, but it still makes me chuckle. Look at how darling they are filling in the answers on the board!!

In other news, it's not too late to enter my Classroom Friendly Supplies pencil sharpener giveaway!!
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Week One Wrap-Up

Well, I survived week one of dog training school! I'm finally on the up-swing of this cold bug that hit its low-point on the first day of school. Seriously folks, it was miserable. Each day has gotten better, and I'm really starting to fall in love with my batch of firsties!

Today, I wanted to run guided reading groups, since I haven't gotten a chance to hear them read on their own yet. As a warm up, we used these super awesome whiteboards (that clearly aren't white, I just don't know what else to call them) to play "mystery word." Silly little game that's not a game at all but they love it. We use Reading Street, so our first phonics skill is the short a sound. I told the kids that I was thinking of a short a word, but I could only give them clues as to what letters to use. I told them the letter sounds, and they wrote the letters. I have this bunch of kiddos wrapped around my little finger. I told them it was super awesome, so it WAS super awesome. The "color-boards," I'll call them, are from the Target Dollar spot. They weren't actually a dollar, I think they were actually closer to $3, which is a boldface lie, target DOLLAR spot, but I digress. I bought enough for each kid in my reading group to use one. They're fun colors and they make me happy. Well worth $3. I plan on using them to teach close reading strategies later on this year. 

We also used the decodable readers that come with the reading series. The "stories," if you can actually call them stories, are filled with that week's phonics skill so we LOVE digging out our highlighters and being "word detectives" to find all the words that match the skill. As you can see, at the start of the year, that's 99.9% of all the words in the whole book. They loved it because, again, I told them it was "super awesome." Plus, highlighters are like candy. So are band aids, but I digress. 

Daily 5 has been WONDERFUL thus far. I'm sticking to the schedule in the back of the book, so today we did day 4, and talked about how to choose a spot to read. Since those little firsties are eating out of my hand, I told them we were going to try reading to ourselves for SEVEN minutes today, which resulted in many cheers and smiles. I told them they did SO well that Monday we might even try NINE minutes!! (Insert more cheers and smiles.) I'm loving it. So so much. It makes so much sense for the way I instruct my kids anyways, I can't believe I haven't been doing it all along. Do you Daily 5? Any tips?

If you started back this week, too, I hope it went well!!

Day 2... Check!

Hello! Today was MUCH better than yesterday. It may or may not have had something to do with the magical pharmaceutical cocktail I pounded before school and then again at lunch. Praise the lord for sudafed.

Anywho, I tried to take a few pics of some things we've done over the last 2 days, but am still stuck with my dreadful reliable iPhone 4 with a dreadful meh camera.

First day of school is always a whirlwind. I started off by giving my firsties a tour of the school that included a trip to the cafeteria with our lunch numbers so we could practice putting those pesky numbers into the keypad then walking to our lunch table. Don't ask my how 2 of my kids managed to lose their lunch numbers between the entrance to the kitchen and the checkout computer. When we got back, I read one of my favorite first day of school books, Wemberly Worried. Love her. She cracks me up. What I love most about this book is that while some of her worries are things that students might actually worry about, the majority are silly worries, which always lightens the mood of my students. We spend so much time talking about our own silly worries that they practically forget that they're supposed to be worried about school. After reading the book, I gave my kiddos some time to write about what makes THEM worry, and we made this adorable (and super easy) Wemberly craft. The writing prompt and the craft are both from this awesome FREE Wemberly pack that was made by one of my favorite PA bloggers, Wendy, from Read With Me ABC.

We also started this awesome first week of school book. Each day they write a new page for the book about what they did that day. Love love love it. It's part of this back to school pack, that's also filled with TONS of other awesome activities that I can't wait to use! Great TpT find...

Today, I started introducing Daily 5 to my kids. I'm going to try my best to follow the suggested pacing guide in the back of the book, so today we talked about reading the words and reading the pictures, as well as expected behaviors during Read to Self. Right now, it sort of feels a little like dog training, but I think we'll get there! Overall, I was impressed at how well they responded to it, and can't wait to practice again tomorrow!

Today, I also used David Goes To School to introduce our school rules, the "4 B's..." (Be respectful, be responsible, be honest, be safe.) I LOVE LOVE LOVE David Shannon books, especially the David series. My kiddos were laughing SO hard, and it was very easy to create this list of "No David" behaviors and "Yes David" behaviors. Loved the conversations we had. I wrapped it all up with this fun little David craft, that's also FREE on TpT here. Another wonderful find!!

Have you done anything fun to start the year? I'm always looking for new ideas!

Monday Made It - Rain Sticks!

Ok, so I realize I'm a day late, but it would have been hard to post this at the beach! (Don't get too excited or jealous. We were there for a day and a half and it rained pretty much the whole time.)  I'm linking up with Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics for a Monday Made It linky! Since I'm going to start Daily 5 in my classroom this year, I've been looking for a calm and quiet transition signal. I used a timer last year that would beep when it was time to rotate. It served its purpose, but I hated it for a few reasons... First, my students would pay too much attention to it and would immediately start to rotate once it went off, whether or not I was done with my guided reading group. Second, it was really loud and I wasn't always at the table to turn it off when it started beeping. 

So, in comes the rain stick. Hoping that it will be slightly less distracting, and will only allow the students to rotate when I want them to rotate. It was VERY easy to make and cost practically nothing.

Here's what you'll need:

-PVC pipe: I found some pieces 1 1/4 in. thick, and about 3 feet long

-End caps: Make sure they're the same size, and that they're NOT screw on caps

-Nails: I used #16 x 1-1/4" with a FLAT head

-Rice (about a cup or 2, totally up to you)

-Duct tape (preferably a super fun pattern)

-Drill: I used a 1/16 drill bit, the smallest I had

-Gorilla glue

-Hammer

In theory, this is very simple. Drill holes into the pipe in a spiral pattern down the tube. I started out about a half inch apart, but it REALLY doesn't matter. As you can see, the holes got much closer together at certain points. There will be tiny pieces of PVC all over the floor when you're done. They're not sharp, but you might want to have the vacuum ready. Once you're done pounding nails into the little holes, wrap that sucker with your favorite duct tape. I opted for some chevron tape that I found at Target and/or Michael's. Can't remember. Put a tiny bit of gorilla glue inside the rim of one of the caps, and twist it on tightly. I let the glue dry for awhile before I put the rice in. Add the rice, glue the other cap, and BOOM! You're good to go!

Also, if you don't follow me on instagram yet, you should :-)

Anyone else out there going to the PA blogger meet-up tomorrow??