Learning to Learn in 2015

We're four weeks into our 2015 school year and I'm exhausted! The first two weeks I felt great, but this week I've hit a wall. I'm sure this happens to most teachers, the sheer shock of going back to work after 5 weeks of absolutely nothing. But enough about that, heres a look at a few of the things we've done during our first weeks back!

One of the first things we do is talk about the things that make a good student. A book that I always read at the beginning of the year is 'The Interrupting Chicken' by David Ezra Stein. 

It's a gorgeous picture book about a little red chicken who asks her papa to read her a bedtime story, but she can't help interrupting and spoiling the ending. It's a fantastic story to reinforce the importance of waiting patiently and not interrupting when people are talking. As a response to the book the children coloured in a picture of a chicken and stuck it in their book. Around it they wrote qualities of a good student, e.g. listening, taking turns, sitting quietly, raising their hand etc. 

One of the first things we do when we start a new year is write our holiday recounts. I found this super cute 'Here Come the Sun' summer craftivity pack from The Teacher's Wife and thought it would be the perfect way to present our holiday writing. I photocopied all the different templates onto coloured card and had it all organised for the first day to save rushing around (after seeing the time it took to do the photocopying, I'm very glad I did it in advance!) I love how bright they are, and think they look great strung up across our room.

Last year I discovered the 'Pout Pout Fish' series by Deborah Diesen and fell in love with the hopeful little protagonist. One of the books is called 'Pout Pout Fish Goes to School' which is a beautiful book about the first day of school, and the struggle to find the place where you belong. Unfortunately I don't have the book, so we watched the song version on YouTube by Gordon True, which, I'll embarrassingly admit, made me a bit teary the first time I watched it. 

As a response to the story my little wonders used water colours to paint a portrait of the brave little Pout Pout Fish. I love how each painting is completely individual, I have some very talented little artists in my class this year. 

Oops, I only took one photo :/ 

I'll take more this week and add them so you can see the extreme cuteness.

I got the idea for the next activity from Pinterest, but for the life of me cannot find the original pin...ugh! If you find it please let me know so I can link back to it.

We used a Venn diagram to explore the similarities and differences between ourselves and a new buddy we made in our class. The little wonders decorated each side of the Venn diagram to look like themselves and their buddy. I was loving how they turned out!

Hope you enjoyed reading, happy blogging :)

P.s. room tour is coming!

Christmas catch up!

Before I get stuck into all things 2015, there were a few Christmas activities that we did at the end of the year, that through the hectic rush of finishing up, I didn't manage to post about. Because I love Christmas so much I just couldn't not share them!

The first activity I found on...have a guess...Pinterest! I'm going to be honest and tell you that it was a lot more work than I had anticipated. There were quite a few steps involved, but I was so happy with how they turned out that I think it was definitely worth it.

Being a Catholic school it was important what we continued to talk about the reason behind the celebration. I found the inspiration for this craft on Pinterest as well. It didn't have a template so I made one myself, and also found 'The Legend of the Candy Cane' poem that we stuck at the top. 

I absolutely loved this craft and the little wonders enjoyed making it.

This next one was also inspired by Pinterest...seriously what did teachers do before Pinterest?!

They were super cute and very easy. The kids had a great time decorating them with glitter and pom poms. Some of them also added moustaches to their tree's faces hehe.

By the end of term 4 my kids know the Christmas Story like the back of their hand. To test how well they knew it we played a game of celebrity heads using the characters from the story. There were lots of giggles when I'd write cow or donkey. I was very proud of the questions they came up with. 

This years parent Christmas gift was 100% inspired by Maria Manore at Kinder Craze. I've wanted to do this for years and finally got myself organised early enough to do it. Head over to Kinder Craze and listen to Maria's gorgeous class recite the carol. 

The children each used decoupage to cover an iPad box with Christmas paper, and placed tissue paper inside it along with their CD. This has got to be my favourite Christmas gift ever.

I hope you can take some of these activities and do them with your own class this Christmas. 

Thanks for reading!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

...in my classroom anyway! 

Oh how I wish we had a white Christmas in Australia.

We have been SUPER busy at school list term. With swimming, reports, school athletics carnival and testing, it has been full on! As of last week Christmas officially hit my classroom, and I absolutely love it! We've been doing Christmas writing, Christmas maths, Christmas art, Christmas cooking and Christmas reading. 

I've got heaps to show you, so I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday. Enjoy!

At the start of the week we received a super special delivery all the way from the North Pole! 20 eager faces watched as we unwrapped our parcel and found that it was our elf on the shelf! Needless to say my little wonders we all very excited! Inside the parcel we found our elf, a letter from Santa, a DVD and a candy cane for everyone. He spent the day watching us from his box, making sure everyone was working hard. This year he has been named Mr. Bauble (let's be thankful it wasn't Trevor or Simon as some of them suggested).

The next day we found him on top of our smart board, looking very cheeky indeed!

This has to be one of my ABSOLUTE favourite Christmas keepsakes I've made with any class, and will be one I do every year from now on. The little wonders coloured in and cut out five characters from the Christmas story (courtesy of Kari Bolt). They laminated them and put them onto a clear mobile that I purchased from Zart Art (an art supply company in Australia). I cannot say how happy I am with how they turned out.

I received a beautiful message from the mother of one of my kids, saying how special it was.

How flippin' cute are these guys!! 

These are our 'Snowmen Catching Snowflakes'. My little ones cut out all the parts of the snowman, including his arms, nose and scarf. They then stuck some gorgeous snowflake sequins above his head and drew on a perfect dotted mouth. We did catching snowflake self portraits last year with oil pastel, and I think this is a great version of it. 

There were a few different versions of this art work that I found on Pinterest, but my main inspiration came from We Heart Art.

Can you believe we ran out of snowflakes on the last one! One of my little wonders had to use silver stars instead, he didn't mind :)

One of our writing activities this week was to imagine Santa was stuck in our chimney. I played the song for them on YouTube and then we brainstormed ways we could get him out. 

I found a pin for this writing activity about 2 years ago. I found the brick pattern and Santa's boots on google images and made up the writing temple myself. 

Click here for the free template. 

I use to hate glitter! I would absolutely dread getting it out. Now I don't know what's changed but  I seem to be more and more game to get the glitter out. My little wonders used guided drawing to create these super cute reindeer. They painted them with brown paint and used stippling to create texture in their fur. After they dried they outlined them with black markers, added cheeks, eyes, a mouth and a nose, and put red or gold glitter on their nose depending on wether they had a red or brown nose. As you can see, red was a much more popular choice. 

Mind you we did realise afterward that we'd forgotten the ears! Oh well. 

I hope you've enjoyed my Christmas themed Five for Friday! 

Happy Blogging.

What a Whirlwind!

There is no way we're half way through term 4 already....where has the year gone?!

I've been a very slack blogger lately, with uni assignments, reports and a job interview, I've struggled to find a second! But I've collected quite a few photos over the last month or so of things I want to share with you all, so I thought I'd sit down on this 30°c day and finally do it. 

So let's get stuck in!

For the first 4 weeks of this term we focused on persuasive writing. I started looking last holidays and found so many AMAZING resources on Pinterest. My team also purchased some super cute picture books that help teach persuasive language and techniques. 

We got: 

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Joe Scieszka 

I Wanna New Room by Karen Kaufman Orloff

and Hey, Little Ant by Phillip Hoose

My little wonders loved reading the stories and did a great job of identifying the different ways people persuade and the reasons behind it. Some of my favourite activities we did was for the book 'Hey, Little Ant' came from a pack by Casey Hallett at Mrs Hallett's Happenings called Opinion Writing and Graphic Organisers - Hey Little Ant. If you're teaching persuasive writing to grade 1 or 2, I highly recommend you check this pack out!

The following activity came from  The First Grade Parade. After we read the book I asked the children what they thought the kid should do. I was actually surprised to find that they unanimously agreed that he should NOT squish the ant. As a class we wrote the kid a letter outlining the reasons why he should not kill the ant. They then used these ideas, and some other ones they came up with, to write their own response. They accompanied it with this SUPER CUTE little ant and shoe (click here for the template). I was very impressed with the effort my little ones put into their presentation, they look fantastic! 

This next one is one of my favourite library activities that we've done. Whenever I hear or say the word 'craftivity' I immediately think of Jennifer at First Grade Blue Skies. She has THE BEST craftivity packs in my opinion! We used her Little Red Hen Book Companion pack to create these adorable Little Red Hens. The children had to write why they couldn't help the Little Red Hen, needless to say their reasons were very creative. They were making their own bread, having a sleepover, going on a holiday and practicing their dancing. 

Sooooo I went a little Halloween clipart crazy this year. I went from having nothing, to about 5 sets of clipart, all of which are from...you guessed it...Krista Wallden :) I cut out and laminated some to use as inspiration for our spoooooky halloween stories. Mind you, I had to tell the kids what candy corn was.

During the week leading up to Halloween we read 'Froggy's Halloween'. Having read 'Froggy's First Kiss' on Valentine's Day this year the kids were excited to read about Froggy's next adventure. I got the template for this activity from Rhonda at Classroom Fun. It's no longer available in her TPT store but if you contact her (like I did) she might be able to send it to you!

I got the idea for this next activity from Lindsay at 'For the Love of First Grade'. My little wonders had to write clues about who was hiding under their ghost sheet. We showed them at our assembly and had the crowd guess what who or what was underneath. I was glad to see some of them using the information they had learnt about bats to write some clues. 

Here's a photo of the bat tree chart we made to write our information report about bats(inspiration from Kristin at A Day in First Grade). We then used a template from Jodi's Nonfiction in October pack for our writing. 

Keeping in the spirit of Halloween we created these bright spider web drawings using chalk pastels. We use pastels a lot in our class so the little wonders know how to use them well, aka don't lean your arm on the page, use sparingly and smudge, blend complimentary colours, keep one hand clean for holding the page, and blend with your fingertips. I showed them how to draw the spider webs (this took a few demonstrations) and spiders. They did such a good job, all of their webs turned out great!

I hope you enjoyed having a peek at what we've been upto. We've certainly been enjoying ourselves. Happy blogging everyone :)