On to Second Grade!! And labels FREEBIE!

Hello my blogging friends!

Unfortunately, I am no longer going to be the fabulous first grade, although the name will stay the same :) I got a job in a wonderful school in my dream district teaching second grade and I could not be more excited!

Today was the second day of school and my little guys have been angels so far! (I know, I know...how long will this last?) I have a few freebies to share with you!

Since I am in a new school and a new classroom, I needed to make all new labels (obviously). So I have some to share with you!

I made some new book labels! There are not that many, but when I make more, I will update it. You can get them on googledocs here!

I also have a wonderful guided reading library, so I made A-Z labels for those book bins too! You can get them here!

 

I also use a team point system. So here are labels for up to 5 teams and captains :)

I also use class journals! My kiddos LOVED these last year. I have 10 journals that I put in my writing center that any child can write in at any writer's workshop/work on writing time (when they have free choice writing!!). These are topic journals. For example, there is a princess journal and a superhero journal. So if a student decided to write in the princess journal, it would be a story about a princess! At the end of the year, you have a really cool journal with princess stories from all your students!! Here are the labels I tape to the front of the journals :)

Lastly, I have labels for three jars in my room. One is for my estimation jar. This is SO much fun for the kiddos. Eventually, all the kids get to take the jar home and fill it with something from their houses! I also have labels for compliments and concerns jars. I REALLY build thes up at the beginning of the year. I read all the compliments in the jar out loud at the end of the week to make my kiddos feel good! I also put compliments in there if I see them doing something special! The concerns jar is private, and only I read the comments in there. Sometimes the kids don't feel comfortable with me "knowing" who left the concern, and then we can discuss it as a class. The kids really like the system! Here are the labels!

 So that's all for now! Since I am now a second grade teacher :), I will be posting about all the awesome things I am doing in second grade! I will post about all of the wonderful character/team building activities we did this week soon!

Happy Hump Day!
Sarah

Eating the Alphabet and Zack's Alligator (and activities to go with them!)

I have been MIA for a while because I am on SUMMER BREAK! I have been for a few weeks now and I cannot seem to drag myself away from the pool!

But now it's back to business! I am looking for a new teaching position for next year and am starting to send out resumes, resumes, resumes! Anywho, I will be doing a lot of tutoring over the summer, and I wanted to share some of the activities I will be doing with my kiddos! I am working with kids PreK-4th grade so it will be pretty widespread!

For my little to-be kindergartner, I planned a little mini-unit with Lois Ehlert's Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z.

I got the idea from these cute little fruit erasers that I found in Target's Dollar Spot Section! I swear I could spend hundreds of dollars there (and many times I'm close!). I decided that it would be fun to introduce the little guy to graphing in a really hands-on way.

I gave him a handful of the fruit and we sorted them by type of fruit. After we sorted them, we placed each type of fruit on the graph above. We discussed what we had the most/least of, and how we used the numbers on the side of the graph to decide that. Then, we removed our fruit from the graph and actually colored it.

Next, we used our graph as a reference to answer some questions about our data. Since my PreK friends generally need help with using scissors and glue, this next page is a cut and paste activity. The edge of the page is a picture of each fruit that we used in our graph, that my kiddo had to cut out in the little square. Once he decided his answer, he had to glue the fruit on the square next to the question.

You can grab a copy of this little graphing activity here!

I also know that for this little guy to be really ready for kindergarten, we need to work on his letter recognition and letter sounds!

So we did a little newspaper scavenger hunt for fruits and vegetables! I glued this paper to a big 12 x 18 piece of construction paper.

We searched the local grocery store ads for fruits and vegetables, decided their initial sounds, and glued them in the correct letter space. He loved it! You can get a copy of this little activity here.

After working with my little preschool buddy, I am also tutoring one of past students (it's weird to say that I have those now!) who is going to be a second grader!

For her, I made a little mini-unit for Zack's Alligator by Shirley Mozelle! This will be available on my TPT store sometime this week :)

After reading the story together, we completed an integrated science, writing, and math experiment. Once again I hit up Target's Dollar Spot and got a few of those little growing animals! However, when I showed it to her, I didn't tell her what was going to happen to it! I just told her to measure it each day and see what happened! She's so excited!

Here is an example of one of the response pages we did together. The most exciting activity in this TPT pack is a measurement, estimation, and graphing activity using a grow animal. This is a paper your students would fill out before they "water" their animal (As Zack would say!).

Hopefully I will have this pack finished by the end of this week! I hope everyone is enjoying summer vacation as much as I am :)

Happy Wednesday!

Sarah