Dinosaurs and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Pie!

To finish up our weekly story The Big Circle, we made these cute little dinos. Aren't they mean looking? :) :) If any Reading Street teachers (or anyone doing a dino unit!) would like a copy of the pattern for these, let me know and I'll post it. 

We also read a funny Thanksgiving story There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Pie. The kids LOVED this one! We identified the rhyming words in this story since that's a skill we need some extra practice with. Of course, the chart is the one thing I forgot to take a pic of! I'm finishing up a literary companion for this fun book on Teachers Pay Teachers and hopefully it will be up this weekend. The patterns for these "old" ladies will be included in it.

Dino Facts

In reading this week, we read a story called "The Big Circle". It was about a herd of triceratops protecting their baby from a T-Rex. My kids, especially my little boys, really enjoyed this story and loved learning about dinosaurs. I checked out some nonfiction books from our library and put them in the buddy reading center for the week. We read about T-Rex, Triceratops, and Long Neck dinosaurs, which we learned were also called Ultrasaurus. Here are the dinosaurs we made and displayed the facts we learned on.






We have one more story about dinosaurs in the next unit of our reading series called Mr. Bones and it's a biography about Barnum Brown who was a paleontologist. I would love to do some neat projects or activities about paleontologists and more dinosaur activities. Any ideas??

Dinosaur Patterns Freebie, Counting Turkeys, and Ed and Edie!

I have finally uploaded the dinosaurs patterns! Sorry it took a little while! Click the pic to get them. I've uploaded them onto my teachers pay teachers store, but they're free. I've found it's easier to download from TPT instead of Scribd. 

I found this gem of a book today in our classroom library. So wish I would have discovered it last week. It would have been oh so helpful!

If you haven't yet gotten to the Big Circle in Reading Street, be sure and pick this book up! My kids loved it and it would have been wonderful to use at a poetry center during this story. I may even extend our dino study into this week so we can use it :)

Need a quick activity? A handprint turkey is always a hit! We made these while we counted by 5's and 10's.

And lastly, one of our phonics skills this week is ending -ed, so I created Ed and Edie. I made the married couple "ai" and "ay" via the fabulous Abby's blog last year and it helped my kids understand that sound so much better! 

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Literature Circles

I know. It's the middle of June and most of y'all are either out of school by now or finishing up. The last thing on your mind is probably school right now, but I was going through pictures on my computer and I realized I had never shared with y'all how I finally incorporated literature circles in my classroom. I've been wanting to do this forever and while it might be a bit harder to tackle in 1st grade, I do think it is doable. It worked wonderfully in my 5th grade classroom though, so maybe you'll walk away with some ideas and some freebies! :)

I did my first literature circle when we were finishing up our novel study on Tuck Everlasting. We divided into 3 groups of 6-7 each. The groups were randomly selected. I had started to let them group themselves, but I wanted to mix it up a little and have them work with people they aren't best friends.  After dividing up, I passed out these little buttons and assigned everyone a job. 

These little buttons were super easy to make! I found the clear buttons here and then created each job circle, printed, cut, and popped them in. The hardest part was sizing the circles to make them fit, but I've already done that for you! You can grab a free copy of the inserts in my TpT Shop here. 

I was worried that the kids wouldn't want to wear them or they would think they were babyish, but they LOVED them! I was actually surprised at how big a hit they were. 

Once everyone got assigned a job, it was time to get down to business. You can find the job description sheets here.

These literature circles helped aid discussion really well in my classroom and the kids LOVED it! I will definitely be doing this a lot more next year! :)

Happy Veteran's Day!

Aren't these precious? I used Deanna Jump's Veteran's Day unit to create these TLC style soldiers and then I found this adorable chart on Cara's First Grade Parade blog, which should be renamed The Fabulous First Grade Parade, in my opinion. Isn't that just the best site?? Love it! 

Our reading story this week is about dinosaurs (The Big Circle) so we are learning lots about these interesting animals. Here's our schema chart that we started today. I'll share pics after we chart our new learning too :)