May's Bulletin Board

We read the pebblego.com (LOVE!) text on killer whales. The students wrote facts about whales and we turned them into cute orcas. When you lift the white belly, each child's writing is revealed.

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Spring Bulletin Board

Our bulletin board for March and April showed off our writing. The students wrote "I can..." statements telling things they can do because they were just ducky!

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Fred Elizabeth

Our "Elf on a Shelf" visited our classroom this year. The AM class picked the first name, Fred, and the PM class picked, Elizabeth, for a middle name. We found Fred Elizabeth in many interesting places and the children wrote about it!

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Classroom Pictures

2013-2014

Here is our library center, complete with an anchor chart on "The 3 Ways to Read a Book."

Here is a goal setting bulletin board.

Art center is always integrated with math and ELA. Towards the end of the year, the students create story elements.

Here are a few centers.

• Restaurant Center
• Seat Work Center
• Write the Room
• Sight Word Stars
• Magnetic Letters
• Journal Center

Listening Center

Word Puzzles and "Games"

Play Doh Centers (students write letters and words in Play Doh) and Whiteboards

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Characters

A simple reminder to draw people with clothes, body parts, & details when illustrating. :)


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Freeze Read

Similar to "Freeze Dance," we played Freeze Read. I play music while the kids walk. When the music stops, they grab the closest partner and read their journals.


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More Anchor Charts

I know I have posted some of these anchor charts before. They are from last year. Rather than drawing all new charts for this year, I put Post Its over the facts. As the children brainstormed ways to be a good illustrator, I would pull off their ideas. Luckily, the Post Its are transparent. Any new ideas were written in.




Charts we haven't discussed yet... www.thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com has great ideas! :)




Here are new Anchor Charts we will be creating this year:
Labels (idea from www.thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com)
Sounding Out (segmentation/turtle talk)
More and Fewer
Zero
Rhyming








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Bunnies

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Question Mark

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Mailbox & Restaurant Centers

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Writing Rubric

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Good Writers...

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Anchor Charts

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Octopals and Crabs

We used our handprints to make these crabs and liven up this wall.

We also used our handprints to make octopi. Then, we named them and wrote about them. The students were very cute and creative when writing their octopus's name, likes, and a describing word.

Now that I have 47 students, I ran out of room on the bulletin board so I hung them from the ceiling, too.

I made the worksheet myself and it only took about two minutes using the LD Traditional Print Lined font, seen here.

I helped each child spell one-on-one, since it was so early in the year.

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Writing Progress

Every trimester, we do a school-wide writing prompt on our best day of school. These samples are from the same student on that same topic. In my class, I require all daily journal writing to be at least four sentences now. We are still working on varying sentence structure. :)
1st trimester student sample:



Her writing 2nd trimester:



Her writing 3rd trimester:


Back and rough draft:


Circle map:


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Best Day of School

Our writing prompt is always the best day of school, here is a list we made of our favorite days. Today, we will complete a circle map and begin our first drafts. Thursday we will create final drafts.


We gave had a lot of fun days!
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Sending a Letter

We have been reviewing the rules for Mailbox Center, since I had to take it away and now I am bringing it back. I wrote about how I use the center here. I started with the www.brainpopjr.com video, "Sending a Letter". Then, we took the online quiz.

We used a flow map to brainstorm and sequence.

Then we used our maps to write 4 sentences.

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