Fire Prevention Ideas

It's time to start planning for Fire Safety Awareness.  There are so many wonderful books to read to the class however a rare one to find is my favorite by Felicia Bond, Poinsettia and the Firefighters.  I checked on Amazon and it is only available to purchase as a used book.  The kids love the story most of them can identify with the character Poinsettia.  

I added the poem Ten Little Firefighters to my Poetry Basket this year.  As always I made a homework sheet for the children to share with their families.  I believe I found the poem on Pinterest, however I did not have anything marked down in my notebook from last year.    

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My main resource for the week are these videos I found by the Ocoee Fire Department on Youtube.  I have them on my teaching site CK Primary.    They are super cute with puppets and firefighters.  My class loves them.  I also used a free Fire Safety Pack by The Clever Classroom as a follow up.  I do not use all the pages.  I pick and choose which ones  that are the most important to me based on the time we have together that week.   

Finally, I found some free apps that I am looking forward to checking out.  They all can be downloaded on the Apple App Store.  

 

US Symbols

At the end of the school year our Social Studies Unit was US Symbols and Monuments.  My class was very excited to learn about our country.  I found a great set of books to get the kids excited about reading about our country.  My class loved the books.  They are just right for first grade reading.  One of the books we focused on was The Statue of Liberty.  Afterwards I had the students do a direct drawing of the Statue of Liberty that I found on Pinterest.  We had a wonderful discussion about buildings we would find in the city.  I like the picture on the right somehow the US Bank has a cross on the top.  It is so cute that my students have no understanding of the division of religion and state.  

 And now for my favorite picture....I told the students to draw buildings of places they like to go.....the little red building is HOOTERS.  How many cute little Catholic boys know about Hooters? 

Thank You Notes

I am sure most of you are familiar with the Flat Stanley project. It is a fun activity I have my first graders do toward the end of the school year.  We send out our Stanleys and wait patiently for our family members and friends to send them back.  While we are waiting we read a variety of Flat Stanley chapter books.  

After all the Flat Stanleys are returned it is time to write to our family members and friends a thank you note.  Thanking them them for all their efforts in writing back about Stanleys' adventures. 

I think is a good chance to teach the importance of writing a thank you note as well as teaching how to write a letter.  

Christmas Card Exchange 2015

This is by far one of our favorite projects during the holiday season.  It is a Christmas Card Exchange.  Once again I worked with the site Projects by Jen and was put in a group of thirty other schools.  

The theme this year was SNOW!  I couldn't resist finding a card with my favorite animal...penguins.  I love the Santa hats on them.  (Yes of course I found the idea on Pinterest.)  We marked on a chart of the United States where all are cards were going and mailed them by Dec. 1.  The Christmas cards started coming in.  It was so much fun.  

I did something new this year.  I used the smartboard and typed in the address of the school on google maps and then we could see what the school looked like.  

Then I clicked on the star and saved the spot on the map and zoomed out on google earth so we could see if the school was in the city or small town.  This was what we were learning about in Social Studies.  

Then we zoom out further to see where in the United States the school was.

You can see some of the other starred places we went to see and we compare them to were we live.  I used this opportunity to reinforce vocabulary from our Social Studies text book for example: Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Canada, Mexico and North America. This was a great way to make the information in the textbook relevant to real life.  

The kids favorite part was zooming way out to see the planet Earth.

Next year my goal is going to be to Skype with another classroom. This is something we have not done yet.  I think it will be fun to try. 

We displayed all our cards in the hallway for the school to share in the fun.  

President Day Art/Writing Project

Dear Teachers, 

Please excuse my tardiness with my blog posts I have been sick lately and I am doing a lot of resting.

I do have a cute Presidential Project to share with you.  We did read a couple of books:

 I like to read this book first so that we can talk about what a president does and how a president gets elected.

Then we read about some real presidents:

 In the afternoon we read about the present president:

I put a little twist on my traditional president’s day project.  I added a torn paper American Flag behind a coin.  

Stop by Mrs. Ricca's Blog she had a great freebie book and some other idea's to share about president's day today.  

Martin Luther King Jr.

This year for Martin Luther King Day I found a couple neat ideas on Pinterest.  I looked all over but I could not find what was on the inside of the project so I had to come up with my own idea.

  I came up with a four-part lesson for the day.  We started the day reading,

 The Story of Martin Luther King Jr, 

afterwards the children made portraits of Dr. King.

Then we read, Happy Birthday Dr. King and we discussed our dreams for the future.  What do we dream we will grow up to be?  It was the topic for show and tell this week, so the children had something in the backpacks to share.  We took pictures of the children and then they wrote sentences.

Next, we read Martin’s Book of Words.  We discussed the words that were important to Dr. King.  The children wrote a couple of words and added them to their portraits.

Finally our friends from the other class came to our room and we read the book, The Crayon Box that Talked.  I brought in a box of Crayola crayons and we talked about how all the crayons were the same and all the crayons are different.

Each child picked a crayon and colored it for a bulletin board in the hallway. 

 Idea from Pinterest 

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