Friday, November 7, 2014

50th Day of School

Today was the 50th day of school!
No joke, it's one of my FAVORITE days of the year!!!!  Why????  It's 50's day in my room!  I did the same thing last year.

I started off decorating my room this morning!








My co-teacher and I dressed up!!!


The kids dressed up too but I'll post those pictures later on in the post!

During center rotations, the kids worked on a few 50th day worksheets I purchased from TPT.  They compared the 1950s to today.  That is ALWAYS a blast! Especially when you tell them that TV back then was in black and white and you only had 3 channels!  Their reactions are PRICELESS!!!  During art center, they made a record.  (I'll have to post the record pictures next time.)

After lunch, we did a writing craft inspired by Cara Carroll! 











 I'm putting those up on the bulletin board Monday.  I'll make sure to take pics and post them next time!

Next, we made root beer floats!  The kids enjoyed watching the ice cream float to the top.  Some of them LOVED the root beer floats.  Most just loved the ice cream! :-)


Here are a few pics of the kids before our dance party...




I LOVE my firsties!!!!!  So cute!

Now it's PARTY TIME!  First we did the limbo!


Then we danced our hearts out!








Then we were hula hooping!



I can't even begin to tell you how tired the kids were at the end of the day! I definitely had a few kids who were ready to fall asleep!!!

Next week, the students will do an opinion writing on their favorite thing about the 50th day of school.  They will also write an informative piece on how to make a root beer float! :-)

I don't know about you, but all this 50's fun has me worn out!

Thanks for reading!
Have a great night and a great weekend!!!

Stacey


Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Fire safety, Halloween, and Elections

We have been having a BLAST in our class!

First, I mentioned in my previous post how we were talking about fire safety.  Here are some pictures of our fire fighter writing / craftivity!



Uh oh!  This one lost a foot!!!





One of my teammates had her students add hoses to it!  It was so cute!
I was originally inspired to do this activity from the Pencils, Glue, & Tying Shoes  blog!


One of my favorite bloggers I follow is Reagan Tunstall!  One of her blog posts from 2013 had all of her bulletin boards in it.  I LOVED her Spiders bulletin board and knew I had to do it with my kiddos!  This is my board from last year.

Here are my pics from this year:





Now my students know that will all our writing crafts, we always do our writing first and then the kids did the art part.  We read some books about spiders.  The students recited facts that they remembered / learned.  As they talked, I wrote the facts on the white board.  The students then chose the ones they wanted to write on their papers.  Afterwards, they made their craft and put it all together! :-)

My students and I also made glow in the dark lanterns which I found here.
I will have to post pictures of that next time as I can't find pictures of the finished product.  Let me tell you though, they were ADORABLE!

I love Election Day activities with my students!  I read 3 books to my kids: Grace for President, Duck for President, and My Teacher for President. Throughout the books, I compared it to a real election.  I then announced that we were going to hold our own election!  The kids wanted to know who was on the ballot so I sad, "Grace, Duck, and.....ME!"  You should have seen and heard their reactions!  It was PRICELESS!!!!!  They were very excited!  Before they could vote, they needed to fill out their voter registration cards!

To help my firsties out with their information, I gave each of them a small card with their information on it.  For their photos, I took a picture of each of them, printed it out, and gave it to them to glue on.  They LOVED it.

I had decorated my room for Election Day.  I had some awesome help from my co-teacher, Jonathan! Even though you can't see it, Jonathan taped off the floor just like they do at the real polling places!


Jonathan's very creative wife made our ballot box!




I also had balloons on every student's seat!

After their cards were filled out it was time to line up to vote!
Jonathan was our electoral judge!


He announced that the polls were open and this is what happened in my class:
One at a time, the students went up to Jonathan.  He took their card, and asked to verify some of the information on there. He then stamped their card AND their hand before giving them their ballot.

Students then came over here to cast their vote.






Then they put their ballot in the box and I gave them each a sticker for voting!



















They all had a blast!  Afterwards, Jonathan read out the votes.  We made a graph and the students interpreted the information! 

For those of you wondering, here's how the votes stacked up:
Grace - 0
Duck - 3
Me - 9!   I won! :-)

Afterwards, the students did a writing on why they thought I would make a good President.  I can't wait to read those!

Thank you for reading my post! Make sure you sign up to follow my posts via email!

Until next time!!!
Stacey

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