Inspiration

After reading some of my cooperating teacher's (from student teaching) blogs (check her out on my inspiration's list: Chalk Talk), I have been re-inspired to take pictures of the things we do in my classroom and upload them. Here are some things that we have done throughout the year that I have taken pictures of... (I will have to start getting better about this!) Oh yeah, they are in no way, shape, or form in any kind of order... :)

In the fall, we made turkeys out of construction paper and wrote about them.

We also wrote what we were thankful for on a "feather" made out of construction paper, then I fashioned this humongous turkey and laminated it for us to use for the bulletin board.

We studied rocks and did a complete investigation with rocks we brought from home. In this photo, we are comparing the mass of our rocks to snap cubes.

We also learned about solids, liquids, and gases. We made "Oobleck" and wrote in our science journals about what we thought it was: a solid or a liquid.

At the end of October, we dressed up as literacy characters. The 1st grade team dressed up as the Three Little Pigs!

We talked about pumpkins and how they grow. We even carved a pumpkin (my first time...) and dug out its guts! Then I took the seeds home, baked them, and brought them back to school for the class to taste them. We wrote about if we liked them or not.

We also do math tubs to further our math skills. This math tub works with place value. The students pull two numbers out of a baggie, place one in the tens place and the other number in the ones place, then use base 10 blocks to make the number.

We did a study about plants and how they grow and we worked in groups to find the roots in small plants.

Another math tub (I told you these weren't in order!). The student rolls the dice to get two numbers, then adds them together.

Literacy Stations. We have an ABC/Word Study station. This student is putting cards in ABC order.

Buddy reading literacy station. Two students work together to read a book. They can echo-read, read together, take turns, and even find word wall and rhyming words.

Handwriting. We work a LOT on handwriting to make our writing look even better!

So there's the beginning of my mini-collection of my first year of teaching. Hopefully I will get better about taking pictures of the things we actually make and create! (And I'm not sure why this is underlined...)