Hey All! I have a few more days of break before I return to work and I am spending some time preparing for Science Night in January. Science Night is a big deal at our school and we spend so much time preparing for it. I thought I would share some ideas and information so you can take a look at this fun event.

I just finished and posted my newest Totally Teeth Printables packet and I am so excited to share it with you. I created this packet to go with my Totally Teeth Student book pictured below.

On Science Night, I hang a giant toothbrush for students and their parent to walk through. The kids LOVE this!

To make sure my students are motivated to attend Science Night, and I am not spending the evening alone, I created this fun Guess Who??? Tooth Edition activity. We practiced doing some toothy smiles and I take each students picture. I crop the picture so only their tooth grin is showing. I open the template in Powerpoint, insert a table and randomly put each toothy grin into a cell. I copy one page for each students and they write their guess of who each smile is below the picture. Here is the catch: Students can only find out if their predictions are right when they come to Science Night. I hang the "key" on the board and the first thing they do when they walk in their room is run to the board to see how many they got right. So fun! The best part, most of them don't even correctly identify their own smile. HA! 

This activity is highly pinned on Pinterest and so many teachers have asked for the template so....I have included it in my Totally Teeth Printables packet :) 

Students display their Totally Teeth Student book on their desk. They share this book with their parents and discuss: Parts of a Tooth, Dental Do's and Don'ts, Tooth Traditions from Around the World and Tips for keeping their teeth healthy. 

On the back bulletin board, we display their Tooth Fairy craftivity and writing prompt. (Also included in the Totally Teeth Printable packet)

They teach their parents all about Dental Health Vocabulary with their toothy Vocab book. 

They share with their parents the activities in our January Math Tubs: Dental Health Measurement, Graphing and Data Analysis, Roll, Add and Color and Build-A-Word Scrabble. They also share our class graphs: How Many Teeth Have You Lost? Have You Had a Cavity? 

  

I would LOVE to share these 2 units with 2 very lucky people. If you would like to win my TWO Dental Health packets simply:

1. Like my Facebook page

2. Follow my TpT store 

3. Leave me a comment below with your email address

and you will be entered to win! Two random people will be chosen on Sunday night! I will announce the winners here on my blog and on Facebook. Good Luck!

Congrats to Jennifer and Mrs. Garcia! I have just sent the two units to you via Dropbox! Enjoy :) Thank to all who participated!

Owl Pellet Fun!

Wow! The finale of our Owl Unit was owl pellet dissection. What an amazing time we had with our owl pellets this morning! Here are a few pictures. 

This is a picture of the kit that I had ready for each group. Each kit contained: tweezers, dissection sticks, gloves, ruler, one pellet, Dissection Form, magnifying glass and diagrams of various animals so students could identify which animal their owl ate.

 Here you can see me little investigators comparing their bones to the diagram.

 I had several mom helpers so there were only 3-4 kids/group.

We had the most amazing time, the kids LOVED it and really saw themselves as little scientists. The pellets were great, most kids had at least 2 skulls in each pellet! I highly recommend obdk.com (and I am not a paid sponsor, I promise).

As promised last week, I have combined all the activities from the 7-day Giveaway Event into one packet and just posted in to TpT. Click here to check it out! It is 50 pages of Owl fun! Whew! 

Activities Included:

-Anticipation Guide for “Owls” by Gail Gibbons

-Owl Vocabulary Book, Game Cards, Word Search and ABC Order 

-10 Page Math Journal

-Pellet Dissection Information and Recording Sheet

-2 Thinking Maps and Writing Pages

-Fact and Opinion Sorting Activity and Anchor Charts

-Guess Whooo??? Owl Craftivity

Stay tuned because in the month of December we will do it all again. I am still undecided on the theme of the next Giveaway Event but check back, I will let you know. 

Whooo Loves A Freebie - Day 7

Thank you for coming back for the last owl freebie! I have had a great time creating and sharing this unit with you! I am looking forward to December so we can do it all again! I was thinking...snowmen or maybe penguins or possibly polar bears...hmmmm. At any rate, be sure you follow my blog and TpT store so you will be notified of the next FREEBIE Extravaganza! 

I mentioned on Day 1 that I ordered owl pellets from obdk.com. I bought one pellet for every three kids and asked parents to come in to help with the pellet dissection. OBDK has very affordable owl pellets, an instructional video for kids to watch before beginning dissection and these awesome FREE diagrams to download. 

I printed the 5 diagrams for each group and the students are going to use the Owl Pellet Dissection Form to: Measure, Predict, Investigate and Share the details of their experiment. (I am also going to provide students with gloves, ruler, magnifying glass, tweezers and craft sticks.) You can grab this dissection form for FREE for the next 24 hours only. Tomorrow all of my owl items will be combined and uploaded to TpT. 

THANK YOU so much for being part of the fun this week. I hope you have gained some valuable tools for your classroom. I will post some pictures on Tuesday night of our dissection fun. Until then, enjoy the rest of your long weekend :) 

Whooo Loves a Freebie - Day 6

Hey All! Happy Saturday!
I am a little later posting my freebie today because this morning we had family pictures. I AM EXHAUSTED! I know they are going to turn out great and we had fun but my goodness now I know why we don't have tons of family pictures, it is a lot of work! As soon as I get our pictures back, I will share :)
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Thank you for coming back for another FREEBIE Owl item! Over the last week we have read more than enough books to be owl experts and I think we are ready to begin writing. I am going to challenge my students to use some of those vocabulary words that we have learned throughout the unit in their writing.

Today I have a Tree Map/Bubble Map/Writing Line Freebie for ya! Before we ever begin writing we spend so much time brainstorming our thinking and I couldn't decide if I wanted to use a tree map or bubble map with this unit so...I made both! At the beginning of the year I use lots of tree maps with my firsties because they can use this tool to translate their writing so easily. I loved using tree maps with my kinders!

 You can get these Writing Pages for FREE for the next 24 hours only! Tomorrow I will put all the items from this week into a packet on TpT. Hope you are having a relaxing and wonderful weekend!

We used out bubble maps to brainstorm facts about owls then used the writing paper to combine all our facts for some non-fiction writing fun! We also used this fun owl writing craftivity to play a little "Guess Whooooo???? Game

Get all these activities in my All About Owls packet on TpT! 

WHOOOO Loves A Freebie? - Day 1

Happy Monday everyone! Whoooo LOVES a FREEBIE?!

In November I have two major units of study that I like to complete with my students: Owls and Pilgrims. Before we get to our "Story of the Pilgrims" Unit I want to spend a little time learning about owls. This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting in a full day professional development class in which we learned about choosing exemplar text. (I hope you sense the sarcasm about PD on a Saturday, I was NOT happy) But, trying to make the best of a crummy situation, I am going to try to apply what I learned yesterday to my classroom. When I think of exemplar text, the author that sticks out most in my mind is Gail Gibbons. Her books have great visuals they are full of factual information and great for guided read-aloud lessons. 

 I decided to start our Owl unit tomorrow with a Anticipation Guide for the book Owls by Gail Gibbons.

I love using Anticipation Guides because the my kiddos become so much more involved in the text trying to listen to hear the answers to determine if their thinking before reading was correct or not. Anticipation Guides are great at activating prior knowledge and building curiosity about new units of study. Maybe it is just my class, but my kids can sometimes get slightly competitive with the amount of answers that they got correct.
  

Because I am so happy it is fall, and because I am loving this new unit I think we should have a little freebie fun! For the next 7 days I will upload one new item/day from our Owl study for FREE - but I will only post it for free for 24 hours. You must stop by daily to grab your free item. At the end of the week, I will put all the items in a packet on TpT. HINT: become a follower of my TpT store you will be notified each day as I post the freebie.

SEE YOU TOMORROW! 

One last note...the finale of this owl unit in my classroom will be to dissect owl pellets at the beginning of next week. I ordered owl pellets from www.obdk.com. I ordered one pellet/three kids and have scheduled several parents to come and help. The pellets were very affordable and arrived very quickly! 

Ants In Our Pants

My word!

I had moments this weekend when I was wondering if Friday was ever going to be here! TGIF friends! Second week of school is over!

I wanted to link up with Doodle Bugs to share 5 moments from the week!

1. Our Harcourt Trophies story this week was Ants. We took this nonfiction topic and ran with it! We read several nonfiction ants books, my favorite being It's An Ants Life: My Story of Life in the Nest by Steve Parker. 

Great book with TONS of information presented in a fun diary format. We gathered lots of facts from this book then created a tree map and also wrote about the life cycle of ants. 

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2. We also read several fictional stories about ants, my favorite being I Saw An Ant on the Railroad Track by Joshua Price. BEST BOOK EVER to help kids understand how to make predictions when reading. The book builds up to a great climax, at that point I close the book and ask students to write a prediction about what they think is going to happen next. 

This year, the vast majority of my class was convinced that the poor little ant was squashed by the train. 

One student had an eye for detail in the pictures and noticed that Switchman Jack had a sandwich placed right next to the train track and she made that prediction that the ant would be saved because "Maybe the ant turned to the food." - LOVE that girl! 

(When I was googling a picture of this book I saw that Joshua Price has written another book called I Saw An Ant in a Parking Lot - I MUST have this book! I ordered it last night and I am so excited for it to arrive - I will let you know if it is as amazing as the first!)
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3. We also read Hey Little Ant by Phillip M. Hoose and made a little craftivity inspired by Peace, Love and Kindergarten.

We wrote a letter to the Ant Bully asking him not to step on the ant and each student gave him a reason to let the ant live. TOO CUTE!

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4. We also created a Venn Diagram comparing ants and people then the kids created their own ant hill by  tearing brown paper and then gluing sand to create the tunnels.

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5. Finally, those of you who follow by blog know that one of my "New School Year's Resolution" is to do a better job teaching grammar this year. Well - what would go better this week than to focus on teaching ANTonyms! We learned all about antonyms and made a fun craftivity - "Our ANTonym Hill". Each child was given a word and they were asked to think of the antonym. They then wrote the word on the first line of their ant and the antonym on the second line of their ant. They turned out super cute and the kids were so excited to learn the "fancy" word for opposite. Click here to dowload the ant body template! 

Well that was our busy week in first grade, I am exhausted. Have a wonderful and relaxing weekend everyone! See you soon :)