Great Free Reading Website to Share!

Hi everyone!  Today is the last day of my giveaway. I will be emailing the winner soon! Yay! Good luck to you all!!

I wanted to share a couple random things today. Here's the agenda:

Snowman Change Unknown Word Problems
Surveys and Graphing
A new awesome reading website!

Snowman Change Unknown Word Problems
Have you seen these adorable snowmen on Pinterest?

Source: lh6.ggpht.com via Erin on Pinterest

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I used this idea for the snowmen but we wrote change unknown problems instead. They turned out so cute! It was also great practice solving missing part equations.

Surveys and Graphing

We have been working on collecting data and organizing our data into graphs. We have also been analyzing that data by writing comparative sentences ( _ more than or _ less than) and making conclusions as to why certain categories were picked most. I begin this unit with these surveys I got from Lakeshore. I love them!

Don't worry... I helped those sweeties who were graphing from the top!

Now, we have been making our own tally charts and graphs. They love getting up and asking others their questions! On the tally chart below, everyone had the question, "what is your favorite pet?". Then they got to pick their choices from a page of pets, cut them out and glue them onto their tally chart.


Awesome Reading site

And, last but not least I was shown this website yesterday. I have been looking for more decodable passages that I could print so students could read and highlight the phonics skill we are working on. This website has all that and more!!

Ok, that's all for today. Have a great weekend!!!

Erin

I am Unique! Back to School Unit

Hi everyone! This is a long post but hopefully worth it! Especially the last activity...
I know most of you have your ideas already for back to school but I wanted to share some of the ideas in my "I am Unique" Back to School unit. There are great activities that involve using Art in the classroom in order to promote uniqueness and individuality among your students. The directons for the activities below are included as well as some others!

 The first lesson is based on an all time favorite read aloud that celebrates uniqueness: Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. I added a twist to the standard name sorting by letter and syllables by including an activity that adds more active engagement. The students sort and graph their names but with their bodies! It's called a Human Bar Graph! Much more engaging and concrete for our young students. I included the category labels for the Human Bar Graph that you would hang on a wall or a board so your students know where to stand in columns for the human graph. Just laminate, cut and use!

 After the Human Bar Graph, students make a class name necklace with everyone's names on triangles. They cut out the triangles, punch a hole and string the names. The master is included in the unit.  I wish I had a pic of the finished product. I'll snap one this year!

Another lesson in this pack is inspired by the book It's Okay to be Different. The students brainstorm ways in which they are unique and create a class anchor chart to record their thinking. Each student then chooses a way they are different or unique and creates a page of a class book.

The best part of the class book is the Fingerprint Mystery activity to be completed at home. It's a great way for students to see just how unique they are!

I also share a great idea on creating a Bulletin Board inspired by the book The Colors of Us. I love this book; it really celebrates all types of skin colors. The students have a blast mixing paint to find their skin color and making their face on the paper plate.

I also included everything you would need to make these cute All About Me people. They are great for an open house! Each shirt is a "page" of the book.

  Now to the best part of the whole pack! This is my favorite all time back to school activity! Share Kandinsky's Squares with Concentric Circles with your students and then make an artwork glyph! Put all the glyphs together to make a class masterpiece you can keep up all year!

 Not only will this be beautiful, it will really emphasize the goal of this unit: celebrating uniqueness and differences among students. Each student will get a square and the rings of color will represent information about the student. I included everything you would need to complete this activity... pages to print or project to make this manageable for kinder or first grade and a key so when others look at your class artwork they will understand what each color represents.
Here's an example of one of the pages you would use during the painting of the glyphs to keep students on track.

By the end, everyone will have a completely different square with stunning, colorful rings to be put together into the class masterpiece!
If you liked some of these ideas and would like more ideas and the resources to these lessons, click here to head to my TPT store to see all that's included!

Poetry and Pop Art

Yesterday, I posted about writing sensory poems using paintings to inspire descriptive language. I used Starry Night as our focus.


Today, I want to share another painting I use to evoke sensory language from my first graders. I use 4 Ice Cream Cones by Wayne Thiebaud. We write the poetry first using the same template ( I see..., I hear..., I smell..., I taste..., I feel...)



See an example below from a student's poetry book:
After the class writes their poems, the  next day I have them draw their favorite food with pencil.
I have them outline the food with black marker but they cannot color in the picture. After school,
I make four copies of their favorite food outline.
The following day, I talk about pop art with the students. I show some other Wayne Thiebaud works as well as some Andy Warhol. We find that color, especially bright colors, is an important element of Pop Art. The students then color in their favorite food outlines with 4 different colors and glue onto black construction paper. They turn out awesome! But we aren't done with this great piece yet!

On the third day, the students use a multiflow map to write an opinion piece about their favorite food. This is so hard for my little ones. They want to write, "I like it because it tastes good." We have to do a lot of thinking about the reasons they could like the food. Is it the color, the size, the shape? Is there anything that makes the food unique? If they like the taste, what specifically? For example, if their favorite food is pizza, they need to specify if it's the cheese, sauce or crust that is "tasty". After the fill out the multi flow map, they rewrite their opinion piece on writing paper. Here are some pictures!

I put the rest up on the bulletin board but here is an amazing piece of writing I had to share. This student is one of my most talented writers ever and I am so blessed to have her in my class! <3

I hope you enjoyed this lesson! Let me know what you think and whether or not you'd try this in your class!

Erin

Arts Integration and Van Gogh!

         I teach at a school that focuses heavily on Arts Integration so I will be devoting a lot of my posts to this subject. I think it is so powerful to teach with the whole body engaged. I will share how I use Music, Drama, Dance and Visual Arts in a first grade classroom. I hope I can inspire someone without training to try some of the strategies!They work!
         In February, I work on Poetry throughout the month and use paintings along with Visual Thinking Strategies ( basically observation skills) to develop descriptive writing using sensory images. We use Starry Night by Van Gogh for our first senses poem. We brainstorm phrases using our senses and the students write as descriptively as they can using a template with I see..., I hear..., I taste... I smell..., and I feel.

Here's an example of a Starry Night senses poem I typed up for the student and put in her poetry book for the end of the year: See how she used a metaphor for the stars! :)








After we write the poem, we create our own Starry Night scenes using a crayon resist method with watercolor. We also create a city scene in the foreground.

Tomorrow, I'm going to post the next painting we use for a senses poem and then show you how we make a pop art piece depicting our favorite food. After we create our artwork we write an opinion piece using a multi-flow map for organization.

  If this interests you at all, consider following me! :)

Erin