Happy 100 Day.... Finally!

I was starting to wonder if we'd ever make it to 100 days this year with all of the snow we've had!  Our 100th day was supposed to be Feb. 12 but snow days have pushed it back so that we finally reached it 6 days later!  And this morning, we woke up to a few more inches of snow overnight that had iced over because, although my little town is pretty good about plowing, our whole state is in a salt shortage!  So we did end up with a 90 minute delay, but that's ok... we made it!

It is super cool to bundle those 100 straws, isn't it?  Firsties LOVE that!

In my school, our half day kindergartens really do up 100 Day.  All the parents come in and they have this huge party in the cafeteria with banners and balloons and cupcakes.. it's a Big. Thing. And when I say Big Thing, I mean the kind of wonderful thing that we so rarely get to stop and do; the kind of thing those kids will remember forever.  They LOVE it.
And then they come to first grade and they expect another big party. We don't quite roll like that, but we do find ways to make the day extra special!
First... I ordered this amazing 100 Day shirt (with super sparkly silver tally marks!) from tea and coffee on TpT, whose store is just full of adorable hard goods. They carry adult sizes only in the store but were SUPER accomodating when I asked about having a kiddie size made for my own sweet lil first grader. I don't teach in the district where we live, so we're not in the same school, but we ended up having the same 100th day!

LOVING our 100 day shirts!  Got so many compliments!

When my kiddies came in with the delay, it was already 10:15, almost snack time! Their first job was to write 100 words. Most of them jumped right in. For those who seemed to find the task a little more daunting, there was the dangling carrot... it was their ticket to our special 100 Day snack!  This great activity came from the amazing freebie My Favorite 100 Day Activities by Carrie's Creations on TpT.  It's just one of many awesome 100 Day activities in her free pack!

Love how they started with "owls" - we are the Wise Owls - and then pill bugs and bess beetles that we are studying in science!

Awesome words!  Not just word wall words, lots of our word study words and other great ideas!

This year, I have no food allergies.  NONE.  I shouldn't say that too loudly, or I know I'll get a new kiddie with a bunch... which isn't all that unlikely since I had one student move over Christmas break and another one moving this Thursday.  I'm sure I'm up for the next new firstie!  Anyway, with my current lack of allergies, we lived it up with a 100 Day trail mix!

My kiddies got to pick 10 each of Cheerios, Kix, popcorn, Scrabble Cheeze Its, chocolate chips, Swedish fish, goldfish crackers, white chocolate chips, candy hearts, and pretzel sticks.  Yummy!

After snack, I did something I feel like I rarely get to do but wish I could do more often: I gave the kids control over what they wanted to do. They got a 100 Day Choice Board that listed all of their choices, put it on a clipboard, and off they went to activities set up all around the room.  They just had to color in each box as they finished an activity. I didn't tell them where to go or for how long.  Our school doesn't really utilize centers in first grade, so I never really know how this will go, but it was awesome!

I made the choice board super quickly in Power Point last night.  I was going to add in the activities and print it this morning, but with the delay, I didn't have time to do that once I set up the activities, so I just handwrote them. And the kids totally balked at my unprofessionalism and refused to do it.  Hehe, just kidding.  My kiddies were over the moon with the choice board! Since we had already done "I can write 100 words" and had our "100 yummy things snack", they got to color in two boxes right away.  Click here for a blank copy.
So here were some of their choice board choices:

Estimating how many things were in each bucket

What's Missing?  LOVE this game - Jennifer White from First Grade Blue Skies did a wonderful recent blog post on Exploring Numbers to 120, which included this fantastic freebie.  The kids play in pairs and one covers up 10 spots on the 120 board and then the other has to "guess" what numbers they are by looking at the board and noticing their positions.  They record the numbers on the recording sheet included, then take off the markers to check.  She used adorable little erasers from Target, which I actually tried to buy yesterday but they didn't have any.  I used counter bears instead!

Coloring 100th Day bookmarks was a popular choice.  I laminated them during lunchtime.

The bookmarks were also from Carrie's Creations My Favorite 100 Day Activities

Working on some 100 piece puzzles = instant teamwork!

Making Words out of "hundred days" is a freebie from Primary Reading Party

I love this Making Words activity because her freebie includes a couple of different options for the cutouts ("hundred", "hundred days", or "one hundred") and she includes separate spaces for 2, 3, 4, and 5+ letter words.  Love her layout!  It was great for my kids.

Also from Carrie's 100 Day pack!

"When I am 100 years old, I will... find a gigantic house and make new clothes and make BIG meals and meatballs with sauce."  So darn cute!  She told me, "When I'm 100 I'll be a grownup!"  Wonder how old she thinks I am...? :)

Next we shared the 100 Day Collections that they had brought in for homework and then sorted them with the help of this cute sorting mat, again from Carrie's pack (Can you tell I loved it?  Go download it now!)

Of course, some collections just didn't fit as neatly onto one little sheet.  No worries!  If a student's collection didn't fit, I just had them cut up the boxes, spread them out, and sort!

We finished our day with Cait Jacob from Sliding into First's 100 Day Chart mystery picture activity. It includes color coded number cards to hide around the room, then the kiddies take a 100 chart and color the numbers in as they find them to reveal a secret 100 Day message!  They LOVED it!

I used to have a HUGE, comfy chair here.  Then the state said no more upholstered furniture.
Now I have a very sad, ripped little chair.  Boo.  But it does the job until I find something better!

Finally, I am very happy to report after my earlier post about our 100 Acts of Kindness project, that the kids did a beautiful job completing over 100 acts of kindness before Feb. 14, as challenged!  Here is our bulletin board:

So pretty!  I hope you have... or had... a wonderful 100th day!

Come on, SPRING!

It's still snowing here in New Jersey.  I like snow.  The occasional snow day is glorious.  But snow days that  are so heavy and icy and wet that the kids can't play outside and that cancel spring break days to make up school means enough already!  KnowwhatImean?  I'm excited that we got to have our valentine party on Valentine's Day (albeit with a snow delay), and I don't really mind that our days off for Presidents' Day have been cancelled because we need to get back into some routine, and eventually we will reach the 100th day of school (which will be, as of now, the 18th - was supposed to be the 12th!).
But in the meantime, one thing that has made me really happy is working on SPRING writing paper.  I've been able to wrap myself in clipart of sun, flowers, bunnies, and all things happy and springy! My seasonal papers are my best sellers, and I actually had another teacher ask if spring would be coming out soon (which was a crazy feeling - whoa!  Someone is looking forward to my next product! :D  Happy dance!), so here it is... Now we just need some sun to go with it! 

Here are some sample pages - you can click on the TpT preview to see them all!

Happy spring.... almost!

FLASH FREEBIE - THIS WEEKEND ONLY!

I love my kiddies at school but am also always so happy to spend weekends with my own girls. 

Enjoy this weekend with your family and send your own kiddos some lunchtime love on Monday with this flash freebie.  There are 24 printed notes and 24 blank ones to write your own love notes! Click on this link or the product cover below to download Lunchtime Love Notes - Puppies!

Oops. I Assumed.

You know what that means, guys.  Lol.  It's not good.
Last year, I downloaded this FANTASTIC "100 Acts of Kindness" freebie created by Jennifer Dougherty:

I can't say enough about how much I love it - how it ties the 100th day and Valentine's Day together.  It is so simple, too - a page of 5 hearts that each student fills out with acts of kindness that they have completed.  If you have 20 or more students, you end up with 100 Acts of Kindness!  And it's FREE!  And it makes an amazing bulletin board!!!

See?  So cute!  My class' acts of kindness last year.

So... you're thinking... this sounds ideal... what's your problem, Lindsey?  

Well.

I gave this project as a homework assignment the week before Valentine's Day.  I asked the kids to record their acts of kindness and decorate their hearts "to make them as beautiful as your kind acts".  I didn't ask them to do any other homework that week. (Bonus... no papers to mark all week!  And think of the trees you are saving!)

Sounds great, huh?  And it IS!!!  Except.  That I assumed.  BOTH TIMES I HAVE DONE IT.

Last year, I assumed that when I sent it home with directions, the kids would do 5 acts of kindness and write about them. That week.  Except that instead, when they came in, a bunch of them said things they had done "one time"... like... hmm, let me think of some nice things I have done, ever.  "I fed my baby sister with a bottle."  I thought your sister was four? "She is." Confused look. "But I did that when she was born!"

Hmm, that wasn't really the idea; the idea was to spread some kindness during the week of the homework assignment.    So I learned from last year, and this year, I added the specific direction that acts need to be done during this week and recorded.  Much better!

Except.  I assumed again.

I sent this project home on Tuesday after a snow day on Monday and then we had another snow day Wednesday, so in my happy, cheery heart, I was thinking, "Oh!  How great!  The kids have an extra full day to do kind acts and then make their hearts! And they even have a few more days to make them extra lovely!"

And then today, my first ones came in.

And some said:

"I did my homework."

"I wrote books on my book log."

"I listened."

And others said:

"I was nice."

"I was helpful."

"I behaved."

So this time I assumed the kids would know what I meant by kind acts (since we have been working on kindness all year).  

But they didn't.  

Which actually led to a very good class meeting today about the difference between an act of kindness and a  responsibility of a first grader.  We ended up defining acts of kindness together, as: Something you don't have to do.  You do it just to be nice.  We also talked about writing specific acts, such as how you were nice or what you did that was helpful.  And I emailed parents to explain the assignment better and I sent home new hearts to all of the kids so anyone who needed or wanted to rethink their acts of kindness could do so.  And I extended the assignment until Monday.

I have to admit that, at first, I was disappointed that the kids didn't know that homework is not really an act of kindness (or who knows, maybe they just really do it to make me happy lol).  But in the end, we all learned from this teachable moment, myself included. Don't assume.

Maybe I'll do this project right next year... :)

Some other "sweet" things I'm using this February:

SMARTboard glittery hearts attendance!

February Owl Calendar Cards & Headers

Lunchtime Love Notes (for my own kids!) - Sweet Tweets

That Darn Groundhog...

So for yesterday's Superbowl here in New Jersey, the weather was a balmy 46 degrees, warmer than in either Seattle or Denver.  I'm not gonna lie, I pretty much watched just to see if my numbers in the pool would win (they didn't). But it was fun anyhow. Kind of like watching Sharknado on turf in its "so bad I can't look away"ness. And then this morning, we woke up to.... what is THAT?!?  Another foot of SNOW? 

The view out my front door right now.  Pretty... but my shoveling hubby might disagree!

 That's right, a snow day... no exclamation points there, because this is our third one this year, which means this time we lose a day of Spring Break, bummer. So the groundhog was correct.  Maybe this is all his fault!  Lol.  I'm not actually upset, though.  My family has the odd situation of dealing with three different school district schedules, since my kids go to school where we live and Handsome Hubs and I each teach in different districts and never the thrain (yeah, totally made that up) shall meet and have the same week of Spring Break. So it's harder for other people to lose Spring Break days than it is for me.
So anyway... back to the Groundhog and his prediction.  We always start our nonfiction reading unit at the beginning of February and I love starting it off with some fiction/nonfiction discussion about Groundhog's Day, because some of it is real and some is legend.  Before reading, we view these free online videos:
Starfall - Groundhog's Day Mighty Books - Groundhog Day and Possum Night and I usually find the New York Times slideshow of actual Groundhog's Day pictures.
We discuss why we might categorize these as fiction or nonfiction or elements of both. Then we do the same with Groundhog's Day tests, such as Groundhog Gets a Say by Pamela Curtis Swallow.

Sometimes, if we are lucky, there is a good Scholastic News that goes with Groundhog's Day, too!  
Speaking of Scholastic... Have you ever saved a book order that you didn't use and wondered what you could do with it?  Here's an idea for the beginning of your nonfiction unit - Give each student a book order and have them cut it up and sort the books into fiction/nonfiction!

A few tips I have learned to make this easier for you, since it takes some time for the kids to cut and sort and you may not want this project to go on all day:
1. I use regular construction paper (9 x 12) and have the kids fold it down the middle so they have equal space to glue fiction and nonfiction.
2. When I hand out the book orders, I always tell the kids to open it and cut it down the middle with scissors so they have separate pages to look at and cut from. I have learned by experience (lol) that if you leave the pages together, the kids will invariably cut through all of them when they cut their first few books out.
3. There is often a nonfiction section or page in a book order.  If you have any students who are having trouble finding nonfiction, you can scaffold by helping them find that jackpot nonfiction section.
4. Some books like Magic Tree House or Fly Guy can be a mix of fiction and nonfiction, like the Groundhog's Day books and videos we used. Allow that to open discussion.  When the kids ask, "Where do I put this one?" I turn the question back to them and ask what they think.  Sometimes they will leave it out since it doesn't clearly fit either side, sometimes they put it on the fold in the middle.  Either way, they are thinking about it!

Where in the World is Mrs. Brooks?

Whoa... I have been out of the blogging zone for a long time!  I didn't exactly make a New Year's resolution to get better at it because I knew that things were about to get crazy in January, so I am making a February resolution.  There's so much I've been wanting to share with neat things going on in our classroom (including the live "organisms" currently spending time in our room for science!).  I've taken plenty of pictures  and have lots of stories.  I also had a really dumb A-HA moment. I'll get to that too.

But for right now, I feel like a HUGE weight has been lifted from my shoulders because I just got done with report cards and helping my 6th grade daughter with her science fair project (that story will come!) and my first grade daughter with a school project and my family is all involved in a musical right now, plus a million other things that have kept me from blogging (I'm looking at YOU, COOKIE BOOTHS!).  I know that you all have the same time constraints and manage to do it all... I don't know how! But it'll be fun to share all that stuff with you as well!

I also want to share with you some wonderful ideas and products that I have been using from other teachers because I have gotten a wealth of amazing and adorable and incredibly helpful things from others recently.  Can I tell you how constantly amazed I am by the fact that no matter how much pressure is put on us to be competitive, teachers are instead just naturally wonderful and all want each other to succeed?  Sigh.  Of happiness.  You guys rock.  All of you.

Alright, right now, we are having a very fancy celebratory dinner at Taco Bell (lol) for Handsome Hubby and Tootsie Roll (my older daughter)'s lead roles in Shrek the Musical!  See you SOON!

Curly Jones and I playing Tic Tac Taco Bell while they get our order ready.
Always a good way to pass the time!