Double Vision for New Year

Happy New Year!  Don't you love the new year - almost like a blank slate, ready for you to make your mark?  Do you love turning the page on your calendar to a new year, all of those 365 days waiting to be filled with special memories we'll celebrate in the coming months.

As much as this is the time to look forward, it's also a time to look back and reflect on the year that's just closed.  As educators, we know the value of reflection.  We ask this of ourselves and our students daily, considering what worked and ways to tweak the lesson or activity.  We ask students to reflect on their own understanding and growth after a lesson or unit of study.  

At New Years, we challenge you to have "double vision," looking both ahead and back!

In our classrooms, we often do journal writing called "High/Low," in which kids write the best and worst things about a topic or event.  This lends itself well to reflecting on 2016, too!  Ask your students to list five "highs" and "lows" for the past year.  Here is one example.

Side note:  We have been working on keyboarding, so we had our kids type these. Yeah, we might need another lesson on how to get rid of the red wiggly lines and the use of spellcheck, so I apologize!

As we jump into January, it's a perfect time to outline goals for 2017.  Our students set goals for both home and school.  We've shared our New Year's Goal Writing Activity as a free resource on our Teachers Pay Teachers store.  

How can this resource help?  It's a great starting point for a discussion about what New Years is all about.  This conversation is so easy to initiate because most kids are happy to share what they did to celebrate New Year's Eve.  Let them share - talk about their family traditions.  Then introduce other ways to celebrate and other traditions using these picture books:

Next, we work with the word "resolution" and talk about resolving or promising to do something.  We use the goal-setting graphic organizer in our free resource, and then students write their goals for home and for school on this cute tag.

These make a fun bulletin board, or save for your students' time capsules!


As you reflect on 2016, can you find a few of those magical moments in your classroom (or life in general) from 2016 - those moments that took your breath away?  What are your celebrations of success for the past year?  Do you have goals for the new year?  We'd love to hear from you - leave us a comment below and share!

Pump(kin)ed for a Fun Fall!

Are you pumped for fall?  We LOVE fall - with its crisp mornings, the way a handful of leaves smell, pulling out jackets and boots, nights around the fire pit, and the way our students have settled into the routine of school....and, all things PUMPKIN - pumpkin rolls, pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin carving, pumpkin activities!

Here are three ideas and/or new resources that are perfect for engaging your learners in fun fall activities!

First up, how fun are these cool witchy finger pointers from Target!??  Any kid will be excited to find text evidence or even just follow along with these!  We used these during fluency reads to get kids to self-monitor slowing down for punctuation marks.  Our kids generally work with a partner for daily fluency reading, so it was easy for the reader to tap his or her finger on the punctuation mark while the partner give a soft witchy cackle!  By the end of the fluency session, we were all cracking up!

Next up is a year-long writing program with these monthly writing prompts!  You and I both know that scheduling time for writing is so important.  Writing is sadly often the "one thing" we tend to let go when things get busy.  Scheduling a short session for writing each day will help your young writers grow and develop and blossom!  Daily writing gives your kids a chance to build the stamina to write for longer periods of time, and it exposes them to many different types of prompts and types of writing.  

Daily writing is also is the premier way to assess whether they can apply the skills you are working on in English.  Want to know if they understand possessives?  Have them highlight places in their writing where they've used some.  Do you need to double check that they have indeed mastered subject and predicate?  Have students color code their writing to show subjects and predicates - or do this with verb tenses, or common and proper nouns...you'll find that daily writing lends itself to so many impromptu assessment opportunities.  And the best part (IMHO) is that these are authentic assessments rather than another worksheet.  After all, the bottom line is that we want them to be able to apply these skills in their writing, right?

This resource gives you daily writing from August (ok, admittedly it's well past that now, isn't it?) through May!  Be sure to look at the fun prompts for October!

The last resource to share today is our newly revised Halloween Costume Graphing Activity!  This is one of our favorite Halloween activities!  I'm not sure if your students are allowed to dress up, but ours do and they LOVE planning what to wear and seeing all of the different costumes.  Use this with your kids to practice  collecting data and making a graph.  Students also write their own story problems for others to solve based upon their graphs.  Your students will love this, too!  {We've updated it to provide detailed objectives, teacher and student directions, and we even included some options just in case your students don't come to school in costume.}

 

Please leave us a quick comment to let us know what your favorite FALL activity or resource is!!

Speaking of great resources - here is a little LINKY we're part of with some great teacher-authors having a SPOOKY SALE on Oct. 18th only!  Buzz on over to our friend Whitney's blog at First Grade Roundup to check out all of the bargains!



Happy fall, y'all!

Linky Party and Labor Day Sale!

Happy Labor Day weekend!  We are celebrating this day and all of those who labor each and every day with the mission of making a difference in the lives of so many students!


YOU are the reason for this sale!

YOU, teachers, spend countless hours preparing a warm and inviting classroom for your students.

YOU go to sleep at night thinking about that one student, and wake up in the morning still searching for ways to reach him or her.

YOU are the teacher who seeks first to understand - be curious instead of furious - when a student doesn't behave appropriately.

YOU are that teacher who reads that extra chapter when the students beg and plead because you also want to keep going.

YOU are the teacher who spends much of her/his own money for supplies and learning resources.

YOU walk into school each day with a smile on your face, hope and love in your heart, and the goal in your heart to reach those kids who need you the most, to make learning fun and memorable, personal and pertinent.

We salute you, and offer you a chance to visit our store and those of our Linky Partners to save 20% for this ONE DAY SALE.

Please accept our thanks for all that you do -  and our wishes for a fabulous new school year!

Visit our friend Shelly at Appletastic Learning to see other links, too!