School Fun!

School is going well but very tiring so I am sorry for the lack of blog posts. I promise I will get better. This group is going to be a challenge but I know that the Lord has placed these 19 friends in my room for a reason and I am excited to see His plan. 

Here is our week in review:

We studied short 'o' and the plural 's' so we made a chart of our examples. They decided to write some in the middle if it was plural and short o!

We are finishing up our chapter on subtraction in Go-Math. As we were learning, we added our facts to our Subtraction anchor chart that will go up on the wall next week.

Next week we will finish our farm unit with horses, but this week we studied sheep and ended the week making these cute little friends with cotton balls and Tunstall's Teachings template.

We did a fun writing for our "All-Star Work produced by" board. Here was the prompt:

"If I was a (farm animal) I would..."

Here are some examples of students who did their All-Star best!

 I stocked up at Wal-Mart on these fun crates(didn't even take the sticker off ha). They were a $1!!! I use them to hold my students Production folders(folder work). When they finish their work they place their folder in here, which makes for quick and easy checking for me!

On Friday we practiced addition and subtraction with our marker boards. They LOVE using the marker boards instead of paper and pencil. We use the dice to roll and the cubes to count. We started with subtraction and then ended Math time with reviewing addition.

Hope you all have a great Monday tomorrow!
~Miss Anderson

Happy Hearts

So I was thinking that my heart has been moved in many different ways today. It was a great day at school, one of my students who had a B-A-D day yesterday, came in today and acted like a completely different child, she was an ALL-STAR. My stress level dropped a few points and I was soo proud : ). Happy Heart

Yesterday we were discussing 9/11 in my class because I had an American flag on the calendar and my students really had an interest in it, so today we took a few minutes to discuss the events of that day. Some of my students even watched some of the specials on TV about that day the night before. I showed some of my pictures that I took in '07 of the construction.

and then my uncle's pics of the finished reflection pool and Freedom tower this past February.

                                  

My students kept asking questions and why? and when? and so we talked through it and even discussed why it could be called the Freedom tower (land of the FREE). One little girl came up with "The bad guys must have done that awful thing because they don't like God and the USA" 

So we discussed how God told us to love everyone and to do good things, so that could be true. 

I finished by reading this book I found at the book fair last year. It was written by a 1st grade class in MO. I told them of my experience with this day and all of our hearts were sad for the people involved but happy that we could honor them with this day. 

I got home and had a great surprise in my inbox. An email from my K.I.M friends in the PHILIPPINES! Tears poured as I watched this video and missed all my precious students and friends from Cuatro, but my heart was also glad because I knew that they knew that God loved them and even though I couldn't be with them I knew God was with them as they were celebrating being in their NEWly re-done classrooms. I'm still so blessed by this experience in the PI and at my school I try to teach my kids about how to show God's love everyday like these friends showed me!

~Rachel 

Back to Business

Well, I have made it through the first two weeks of school and to say that I was tired was an understatement. EXHAUSTED, would be a better word; however, the long weekend has been just what I needed to rest up and get back into the swing of things. I have lots of pictures and stories to tell so I will apologize for the long post.

Funny saying in the first weeks:

"Miss A, how do you spell 'pecause'?"  Do you mean because? 

"Nope, pecause, like I want to be a doctor pecause"

Ready for Open House!

 Whole Brain Teaching Rules!

 Whole Brain Teaching Methods

 Gifts for the Firsties!

 The boats have the students' names on them. There are also red strings all coming from AL to London, Uganda, & the Philippines! Places people in my family traveled to this summer.

New behavior chart, taken from Cara and tweaked a little for my kiddos. 

 Last year I was given this extra desk, however, it was covered in SpongeBob stickers. Now I'm not a huge fan of the underwater gang, so it got a fresh coat of paint this year!

 New book organization

         

Our favorite first grader!

      
         Eric Carle tissue paper characters

 School is Cool

chilling with our shades on

  Started back this week with Sam, Come Back. We're learning

short 'a' and final 'ck.'

~Miss Anderson