We are near the end...

We have almost made it to the end of this first grade year- it cannot come soon enough!! We are trying to have fun in first grade for the last couple of days. This afternoon we did a cute little art project that they loved and it helped me get rid of a few things.

I keep those big wooden blocks for rainy days (they love building big towers and letting them crash down...loud but fun). I have tons of them and some are so big I don't have any place to store them so they have been in the trunk of my car for a while (don't ask my husband how long...he could go on forever!!) So I finally got them out of the car today and decided to make a cute little momento out of them.

On each block I wrote "First grade is the building block to my education!" Then I put each students name and the date. When they came back in the room they were so excited to color on these pieces of wood. Hey, whatever works!! Anyway here are a few of them. I can't wait to do this again next year and maybe put a little more thought into it and use paint or something!

Anyway, I hope everyone out there in blog teaching world is a having a calm end of the year. It is almost over! Yay for summer!!

Have you tried WebQuests?

We go to the computer lab and play every once and a while (play meaning pbskids.org or starfall.com). Our media specialist designed a lesson with Google Earth that the kids loved so I am attempting something new this week. I have yet to ask my firsties to do a WebQuest, even though I know there are some fabulous ones out there! We just finished studying plants and we have some guppies in the room so naturally we should be learning about them. So I created a webquest...this should be interesting. I got some inspiration from this webquest. Which is cute and fun, but half the links didn't work...so I re-worked it and made a new "Fish WebQuest Journal".

You can visit my "Fishing for Knowledge" webquest by clicking here. All the links and documents are located at the webquest site. If anyone else tries I would love to know how it works out? I am cautiously optimistic about this idea!!

Subtraction Word Problems

We are working on 2 digit addition and subtraction without regrouping and I thought this would be a good time to throw in some word problems. They never want to read the problems so I tried to make it fun for them. We made a cute book with our end result.

Each student got their own word problem and it was about them. They had to solve the problem and illustrate it.They loved hearing the different problems.

The other teachers on my floor loved it and I emailed them a copy. I thought you might like one too. All the students have to do is fill in their names and there is one for the teacher/example. Click here to get it!

Hope your class enjoys too :)

-- Laura

Parts of a Plant

We planted seeds a couple weeks ago and have yet to see a stem (much less a root)!! The show must still go on without a bloom though...so this week we worked on parts of a plant. My kids love to do hands on crafty things and lets face it--so do I. We didn't use glitter yesterday but I sure thought about it :)

We made a collage of parts of a flower using fabric, pipe cleaner, and yarn. It was fun, engaging, and turned out really cute! Next year I will go get some cute scrapbook paper for the flower but I had fabric scraps in a drawer and didn't have to do much to get them prepared. I made labels for the parts but the kids did pretty much everything else.

That is about all I have for now...will be posting a super fun subtraction word problem activity tomorrow (if I can get it together-it is Friday!)