LDC Days 3 & 4

Last week I started my LDC module.  Things are starting to run a little smoother with it.  We were able to complete 4 days last week, we had a assembly for a fundraiser that as during our Science/Social Studies block so now my module has been pushed back a day.

For Day 3, we began our talk on what citizenship mean.  All day, I would remind my students of the choices that they were making.  My students were learning about how their choices can affect others.  We also talked about rules/laws that we have in our communities.  Many of the laws/rules were ones that we are to follow at school.  It is amazing how they have difficulties following some of our rules but they can tell you every rule that they are suppose to be following!

Our Journal Entries from Day 3!

Day 4: This was the day that we talked about being responsible and about consequences.  We talked about what we can do at school to be responsible.  We discussed that we you do your chores or homework, you are responsible.  Consequences was a little harder to talk about.  I had my students talk with a buddy on the carpet about a time that they didn't follow a rule/listen at home and what happened.  We also tried to talk about when they were rewarded for something that they did, most of them talked about a time when they told on a sibling, when they were not doing the right thing.  Oh well, at least we tried!

Journal Entries From Day 4! My students are getting better at their journal writing.

This week should be an exciting week.  Hopefully we will finish learning about citizenship and how we can be better citizens in our communities.  We should also be the proud parents of butterflies in the next week!  Some of our caterpillars were starting to go into their chrysalis on Friday, hopefully the rest did so over the weekend!  They have been so excited watching our tiny caterpillars double and triple in size everyday!

Amber

The Start of Our LDC Project

I don't know where all the time has gone.  Today was our 21st day of school, it definitely doesn't seem like we've been back to school for this long.  A couple of week ago, I had to attend LDC (Literacy Design Collaborative) training for three day.  I have 2 more days of training in October.  During this training, my group of first grade teachers had to create an LDC module.  We decided to do ours on citizenship, our focus is on having them see how they can improve their community by being good citizens.   I am the only one that has to do this LDC before our October meeting, my principal is making us.  Today was day number 2, our module will last for 15 days, 10 days of instruction and 5 days of writing a report.  I know what you are thinking, a report for a first graders?!?  For my students, a report is going to be a couple of sentences and an illustration that focuses on our focus of the module.  If you would like to find out more about LDC here is their website: http://www.literacydesigncollaborative.org/

Each day, my students will be writing in their Citizenship Journal.  We have a word of the day that we will define as a class, then each student will write a sentence using the word of the day, and then they will be able to color a picture to match their sentence.  At the end of each day, we will also be writing about what we learned.

Day 1:  Our word of the day was sharing.  My students did an amazing job with their journal writing for the day.  I had my students highlight the word share in their sentence and they were even sharing their highlighters with others at their table that did not have one!  That was a proud moment, they were using our word of the day.  We also talked about communities.  The idea for today was to have them list the different communities that they were apart of.  This was very difficult, it took a lot of prompting on my part to get them to create our list.  This is something that I will change for next year, I would like for my students to focus on the traits of citizenship first and build in the different communities towards the end of our module.

Day 2: Our word for the day was honesty.  We talked about this a lot today!  Today it seemed like all my students wanted to do was tattle on each other, we had lots of opportunities to talk about honesty.  We also focused on the rules that we have in a couple of our communities: neighborhoods, school, and home.  We completed a circle map of neighborhood rules together.  My students were given a post-it note to write a rule that we have for school and a rule that we have at home.  They did a great job on this activity!

Our Circle Maps from today.  My favorite rule, Home: Don't break anything!

Tomorrow starts day 3, can't wait to share what happens next.

Amber

TGIF!

I don't know about you but this week was exhausting and very crazy!  For only have 4 days of school this week, I spent more time at school than I do for a normal 5-day week.  Today, I was at school for 11 hours, the sad thing is I have a ton of things to get done this weekend.

I should have known that this week was going to be rough from the minute I stepped into my room Tuesday morning.  During the long weekend, I have a visitor that decided to spend some time in my awesome room.  My visitor was a small snake!  Yes, I said snake, this was the fourth snake in my hallway during the last week.  Fortunately, my "what stuck" exit ticket poster fell off the wall and the snake was stuck to the tape!  I don't like snakes & didn't feel comfortable in my room all day, everything on the floor would freak me out.

My students have also lost/broke 3 of my hall passes this week.  Last year, I created a really cute hall pass system that are made from clothespins.  I made the switch to clothespins because I no longer have a bathroom in my room and wanted something that wouldn't end up in a toilet.  My students are suppose to clip them to their shirt when they leave and hang them back up when they get back.  I don't know how many times over the past year they have been left in the bathroom.  For some strange reason, my students think that they need to take them off to wash their hands.  I am currently looking for a new system to use and hopefully start next week.

Super cute and easy to make.  If you haven't figured it out yet, I have a major obsession with teal & hot pink!

The best past of the week was when my DonorsChoose project was funded yesterday!  I was amazed as to the amount of people that supported my project and how quickly it was funded.  This project was for stability ball chairs.  I decided to try and get these for my classroom when the class across the hall got them last year.  Some of my students were in her room one day and they were actually doing their work quietly and were focused!  These are the students who need constant redirection and encouragement to get anything done.  To see what my project looked like, here is the link. http://www.donorschoose.org/project/sit-and-bounce/1003063/.  This is an amazing project and can't wait to see what it will do with my very active group of first graders.  They are constantly moving around and can't sit still!  I guess it was a good thing that I did this project.

Time to finish sewing two pillows for my reading center!  I can't wait to show you what I've been working on.

Amber

My Author's Chair

I've been super busy the past two weeks getting ready for school.  Last Monday was our first day of school.  I've been teaching for 9 1/2 years and every year the first week of school does not get any easier.  Just when I think I have everything ready to go, something new happens and throws me for a loop.  This year, we had to start our Reading 3-D testing on the first day of school!  We only have 3 weeks to complete Dibels & TRC on all of our students.  I am also losing 3 days of testing due to a training that I must complete for my school.  This means that I have 6 days to finish my testing!  I can say that I survived the first week of school and it turned out to be a pretty good week!  

The past week, I've been working on my Author's Chair.  A co-worker gave me this chair during our mandatory work week, she has had it for a couple of years and it has been taking up space in her room.  She saw the chairs I've made for my reading center and thought that I could fix it up.  

This is the before picture.  This chair needs a lot of love!

After I finished painting!  But I'm still not done!

Now this is what I call an author's chair!  What first grader (or anyone) wouldn't want to sit on this?!?

Now you are probably wondering how I made something so amazing.  My first step was to paint the chair.  I got my paint from Home Depot.  They sell paint samples for less than $3 for a 7 oz can.  I had more than enough paint for this chair.  Wait til you see what I used my leftover paint on!  Since I used wall paint and was not sure how it would hold up on my chair, I decided to seal it with a sealer.  The sealer gave my chair a nice glossy finish.  Next, I had to sew my pillow/cushion.  It is amazing how many things I can create just by using a simple base stitch.  After I stuffed my pillow, I attached a teal boa, they have tons of colors at Hobby Lobby.  I sewed the boa around the edges of my pillow.  The boa was too long for my pillow, so I had to cut it to size.  I'm glad that I waited until after I finished sewing it on.  The end of the boa started shedding like crazy!  I super glued the cut end to make it stop.  This was a fairly simple project to do, it was just time consuming because I had to wait for the paint to dry, and having to apply multiple coats didn't help.  

I love my author's chair and cannot wait to share it with my class tomorrow!  

Amber