Favorites in Space and Currently

So, I promised some more of my favorite activities from our Space unit and I know I am late but I am here to deliver. I have been kind of MIA lately... kind of feeling the end of the year blues. It is only a month and half away until the end of the year and I am feeling blah...the feeling where I don't wanna go to work tomorrow and I am so unmotivated, and really am not in a "chipper" mood. Anybody else here yet? I absolutely HATE feeling this way! Not only do I hate feeling this way but I am sure my kids hate it and it is so not fair to them! This week we have Friday off, Thursday a full day field trip, and Wednesday I have a PD day, so saying it is a short week is an understatement! Having only 2 real days to plan for makes me even more un-motivated to do some planning... we will be flying by the seat of our first grade pants (also, hoping for excellent weather for a long recess!) Anyway, sorry for the short rant! Here are some things I love this week: We made a fun foldable about the planets in our Solar System (including our little dwarf planet, Pluto...just can't let go). I got the foldable idea from A Teacher's Treasure and it is awesome. Thinking we will do it again sometime before the end of the year. It is called a secret door foldable. (Click the link for a tutorial to make one.) It looks simple enough...from the outside. Here is the cover:

Then you open it and see:

Here is a side view:

If you push together the outside pieces and pull apart the inner flaps like this:

Then you see a secret door with a whole another set of info:

My kids were so excited about this. We read this Gail Gibbons book: We made charts of info we read about on each page. Then cut and paste the facts about the planets into the book. You can get your copy of the facts here! Here are some more pictures of their hard work:

My last love in the space unit we have done were from Mrs. Tabb's freebie Space Unit (found here). We are studying adjectives too. So, first we made our aliens. Then we paired with partners and compared (using adjectives while writing).

Last, but not least, I am linking up with Farley's Currently.

Hope you have a fab week (I know I am going to make mine great...even with parent/teacher conferences)!

New TPT Store and Upcoming Giveaway!!!

I finally did it! I created a unit! Yes!! It took a while (I am a bit of a perfectionist!) So I have listed my unit on TPT. This is a BIG step for me and I am so excited!
I created a unit in anticipation of an upcoming field trip I am going to take with my firsties to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. We are going to see "Treasured Stories" by Eric Carle. It is a play with puppets, dancing, and art that depicts 3 of Eric Carle's "treasured stories" ("Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?", "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", and "Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me"). Check it out on the TPAC website for more info.
I have made a unit to go along with this play. My unit includes:

It is a 55 page unit and filled with math and literacy activities like:
- A glyph activity with graphing
- Sequencing activities
- Text-to-text and text-to-self activities
- Long I sorting
- Compound word creation
- Science connections with the ladybug life cycle
- Vocabulary word cards
- Fraction activity
- 12 math problem solving prompts
- Haiku and acrostic poetry prompts

I can't wait to complete this with my kiddos and hope you feel the same! If you want to check out this product at my store click here!

I am also excited when I open my blogger dashboard and see I am up to 85 followers! Woohoo! When I reach 100 followers I will be doing a giveaway of my new unit!

Thanks for all your support! In other news...
This week we studied polar bears and penguins. My kids LOVE learning about animals and finding out a fact that is little known. For example, did you know a male polar bear is called a boar and a female is a sow? [I didn't!] So I borrowed an idea from Courtney at Swimming into Second to make polar bears for my students to post their non-fiction writing. They loved it. I made another template for penguins so they could choose if they wanted to write about penguins or polar bears. I had a good mix!

They had so much fun making them and learned a lot about penguins and polar bears! Now, time to do some planning for the upcoming week! Have a great rest of the day!!

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!!

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!)