Awesome Adjectives and Anchor Charts

We all know how much I love self portrait activities. I love how each of my kids draw themselves to reflect their personality. So when I saw this adorable "Awesome Adjectives" activity from First Grade Lyon's Den via Pinterest, I knew we had to recreate it in our classroom. Aren't they cute?

This week we're learning about Barnum Brown, aka Mr. Bones. This story is all about the discovery of the first t-rex. We made a brace map to help organize our facts. This was the first brace map I've ever created with this class and I was a little worried about how well they would catch on to the whole " could, had, and are" thing, but they really did a good job with it.

We also discussed what questions we would like to ask Barnum Brown if he were alive today. They loved this!

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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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.

Thankful Pilgrim Hats and Dinosaurs!

Today, we made lists about what we were thankful for. Then, we made pilgrim hats to display our thankful lists and thus our new door was created!

We also finished up our schema chart about dinosaurs. 

Tomorrow, we're doing a sequencing activity with one of our favorite Thanksgiving stories There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Pie. This was our skill this week and some of my kids are still having a difficult time with this. I'll share pics tomorrow! :)

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 :)

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??