Math Organization

Today I am home sick with strep throat. I thought I would show how I organize my Math games. I loooove teaching Math. (First Grade Math anyway). Here is a picture of the top of the wonderful math shelves that my husband made for me a couple of years ago. It is 8 feet long!

Anyway, I have been trying to adapt the Daily 5 reading to math. So, above the shelves is a display listing 5 areas of math activities. Under those are the names of some of our activities for each section. On the top shelf I have 5 file crates. They are the skinny ones you can find when all the school supplies come to the stores in the summer. The areas we use are: Partner Games, Working with Numbers, Fluency, Math Writing and Math by Myself.
In the crates I keep the activities and games for each section that the children choose from. I don't put a game or activity in the crate until the children have learned how to play it and we have practiced it a couple of times.
I will post a picture of the math materials another day.

Ladybug Excitement!

Today my kids got to experience ladybugs up close. I had them in containers on their desks when they came back from Music. They were thrilled! Kids always love animals.
After they looked at them (and let them crawl on their arms), they worked in groups. They have worked in groups of 2-4 before, but today I gave them each a specific job. The reader read a ladybug book to the group. The "cutter" cut out the labels for the ladybug lifecycle. The "gluer" glued the labels down as the group decided how to design their poster and the "writer" wrote the important information on the poster. Here are some pictures I took as they worked.

Apparently I didn't take a picture of the final posters so I will add that later. The children then created a Ladybug chart "Ladybugs are...do...have".

Last, the children wrote at least 5 sentences about what they learned about ladybugs today.

Ladybugs

Today is Sunday. I ordered ladybugs to have in class and they arrived in the mail yesterday- 300 of them! I looked on Amazon to order them since that is where I ordered the Ladybug set last year that also came with a container for them. For only $2.99 I could order 300 ladybugs. I thought that sounded good, so that's what I did. We have 5 acres of wooded land so I was thinking I could let them go here once we are done at school.
The package said that if you don't plan to let them out right away to put them in the refrigerator. I did that overnight and today I got out 10 small plastic Glad containers to put them in along with some leaves and grass from the yard.
Oh boy! About halfway through, they perked up. They had been very calm coming out of the refrigerator. I had about 5 containers closed and then I had ladybugs climbing on the counter, on my hands and a few even flew off. I think I finally caught them all. I did end up going ahead and letting many of them go in the yard. 300 ladybugs is a lot!
Anyway, yesterday I typed up a book for my class to use this week. We have been studying nonfiction text features so I included a Table of Contents, page numbers, bold words, diagram, labels and a Glossary. I also made 2 student worksheets and cards to make class/group charts. I posted this on Teachers Pay Teachers in case anyone else finds it useful.
Ladybug Book and Activities. I'll post pictures of the activities we do this week.

New Blog

                                          New Blog!

This is the very first post for my very first blog. I have really enjoyed reading a lot of teacher blogs over the past several months and thought I would start my own. It has been an experience just setting it up. 

A little about me: I am 41 and this is my 15th year of teaching. My first 6 years I had a 1st and 2nd grade class at a private Montessori school. I loved it, but the benefits weren't great. Since then, I have taught 1st grade except for one year when I taught 2nd. 

I am happily married to my best friend, Kenny. We have two children, Jake (22) and Becca (20). Jake has been out on his own since last summer and Becca is getting married this July. 

I have been dealing with chronic illness for the past several years, but thankfully I am much better and able to do more now than just teach all day and come home and collapse. I finally got the diagnosis of chronic Lyme Disease last summer and have been undergoing treatment ever since. I feel soooo much better than this time last year. Recently, we discovered that my mother and daughter also have chronic Lyme Disease and we are awaiting Jake's test results on May 11th. We are trying to figure out how we all contracted this and I hope to get a family blog started documenting our journey with Lyme Disease and recovery to try to help others in a similar situation. 

Even though I have to think about Lyme Disease and health issues everyday, I will put that information on the other blog. I want a place to just focus on education. I will put a post on here when we get the Lyme blog up and running in case anyone else is dealing with Lyme Disease. I would love to hear from another teacher dealing with Lyme. 

So, one of the reasons I want to get involved in this world of teacher blogs is to "meet" other teachers, get ideas from them and share my ideas. I think teachers are some of the most creative people in the world. For the past several summers (6, I think) I have been a trainer for the math and science program in the counties near my home. I have really loved getting to know teachers from other cities and the different activities that they do each year. I try to keep things interesting for my students. I think that if I am bored, they are bored. I love hands-on activities and projects. 

For this first post, I will just tell you about the project my students just finished yesterday. 

Each student chose an animal they wanted to research. I was surprised by some of their choices, and several were just plain adorable. One of the toughest boys in my class (can be a real trouble maker) chose to research Hamsters:) That just struck me as cute. One child chose Goldfish because he was so intrigued by our new classroom pet. Three of the girls (I only have 6) chose Wolves.Anyway, it took about 6 weeks for each child to research their animal and create a book. There were 8 pages and each page asked for something different about their animal. Before I let them write in the book, they had to write a rough draft and Conference with me. For Homework, the children had to choose some way to show their animal: poster, diorama, clay sculpture, etc. Yesterday, we invited families to come listen to the children tell about their animal and show their projects. It went really well. I will definitely do this project again. They were so proud of themselves- especially when the assistant principal came in and listened to each child tell her about their research. 

Ok, so that's the end of post 1. I plan to get organized and get going on this. Tomorrow I may try to post a picture. (I did figure out how to put up the one of my husband and me on the side:)