Mitten Writing Freebie

Hey ya'll! I have had quite a few emails asking me for this mitten writing page! It's a quick and easy writing prompt I give my kids when we had too many snow days and not enough time to start a new writing one week. I've provided some pictures of examples from the past. We read The Mitten by Jann Brett, then brainstormed things/animals that too big to fit in a normal mitten, illustrate a detailed picture and finish the sentence. This could also be put into a writing center! Hope you enjoy! Click on the last picture to get the free download. =)

Flashback through the year

Thank you all for your kind words on my most recent post! It's so nice to know that so many of you cared enough to leave a sweet comment for me! =)  I'm officially on summer break and enjoying a nice weekend of camping in the country with one of my best friends and her family in middle Tennessee!

Today, I wanted to share some pictures of anchor charts I have made the past school year that actually turned out pretty cute! Most of them I got from other blogs and I will try my best to give credit where it's due!!! =) Don't ya'll just LOVE pinterest?!

I had a sub that day... she did a pretty good job with her illustrations! =) This chart was inspired by this cute one found here!

I tried to draw my best! This chart was inspired by Kindergarten Kindergarten!

How we introduced addition equations! =)

This is what we did at the end of the school year for retelling a story! This was another chart idea from Life in 1st Grade!

We created this venn diagram to compare and contrast what it was like in Kindergarten and what it will be like in 1st grade!

This chart REALLY helped my kinders understand how to find the main idea of a story!!!! Thanks to one of my FAVORITES: Life in First Grade!

This was a great chart to introduce details for a main idea! The kids did an awesome job!

We used the examples found HERE to come up with details for our Main Idea after reading some non-fiction texts!

I didn't have time to make this as cute as the others! =)

We did this several days in a row with different books! The kids really started to get the hang of it! =)

Here's a cute one we came up with when we were learning about digraphs! =)

The kids loved this one! =) Idea from HERE!

Our school librarian gave us this idea!

Loved these two No David chart idea from Cara Carroll! It really helped my kids with making inferences!

This was a graph we made for the beginning of the year for our opinion writing on what was their favorite book and why.

This one was from Cara Carroll! I was so proud of this one I didn't throw it away! 

Catching up

Hey all! I remembered to take a few pictures before I left school on Friday and wanted to share a few things we have been up to! If you recall from one of my earlier posts, I used Deanna's Jump's idea of reading "Where the Wild Things Are" and having the kids write about what they do when they feel wild. Then they made their own wild thing and they turned out too precious!!! I don't want to take them down! =)

 Here are a few close-ups!

We have to have our standards posted with any work we put up...

Last week we did a lot of Earth Day activities, so my other display in the hall is the writing responses they did after discussing ways we can take care of the Earth!  ALL of this was pinterest inspired, not my original idea... except instead of using green paint, the kids traced and cut out their own hand prints, then glued them in the middle of the blue circle. Then I had them "recycle" the left over green paper by cutting it up into smaller pieces and glue it on to make the other pieces of land on the Earth. They turned out cool!

 The standards posted! My awesome K team likes to tease me b/c I have to make EVERYTHING cute. haha =)

The adorable anchor chart idea I got from pinterest!

Not as cute... but I wanted the kids to understand the different between natural resources and man-made materials. 

Some close-ups of their writings!

Random picture! I found the cutest ocean stickers in the scrapbooking section at Hobby Lobby and used them to make this lil goody! (I made one for my Pinterest exchange pal too!)

A few more random things... 2 weeks ago, we were learning about seeds and I placed 4 ziplock baggies around the room on Monday. I wrote on them (as you can see) so we wouldn't forget which is which! We put a lima bean seed in the bags...

and tape 2 to the window, labeled:

1. In sun, no water

2. In sun, with water

and 2 in the closet, labeled:

3. No sun, with water

4, No sun, no water

Then we made predictions of what will happen with each seed then I wrote our predictions on the bags. 

On Friday we sat out in the grassy area you see pictured above and planted grass seed in the cups below. (I put their picture & name on a popsicle stick so they can keep an eye on their own seeds!)

 

Last week for reading, we read Old MacDonald had a Woodshop (from the Scott Foresman reading series) and discussed Character.  

The first day we really practice preview and predicting the story and introducing the vocab in the story. 

The 2nd day we reviewed the skill by using Goldilocks and the Three Bears from earlier this year and made this character web that I found from Fran!

The next day, we re-read the story and completed a character map on Old MacDonald in the story.

Then the last day I gave each child a paper where they drew their favorite character from the story and had to describe them by telling me what animal it was and what tool they were using in the story. 

(I forgot to take pictures, I'll try to remember to take some tomorrow!)

 Friday we went on a field trip to the farm all day, so we didn't have any plans for reading!

One last thing I wanted to ask was how do you manage indoor recess with your class? thankfully, we haven't had to do this too many times this year... but I foudn that Like using a pocket chart so the kids can take turns at the "favorite centers". (housekeeping and computers were always getting picked first!) So now I have it so they can take turns- I just rotate it like we would any other station rotation. i am actually editing it a bit this week... I'm taking out the names and putting thier pictures in it's place, and wnat to edit some of the recess stations! =) I'll try to remember to post them when I finish! =)

Hope you all have a wonderful week! We have 22 and a 1/2 days left!!! 

TN Teacher Blogger Meet-up

***Side note! I spent all this time putting the links in my powerpoint before uploading it to here and now the links won't work! So sorry friends! If you are interested in seeing all the TN blogs... you can find the links here:

Source: thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com via Jessica on Pinterest