Summer! I love summer!

Ahh! Summer! I love summer! I love being able to stay up late and watch movies. I also love sleeping in when I can. Although this summer sleeping in usually means I'm up by 7:30 at the latest. Lots of times, I'm up with my hubby at 5:30am, as he gets ready for work. I am finding I can get so much done when I get up earlier.

I'm back from my Vegas trip and it was fun! I met lots of interesting people and spent way too much money on more stuff for my classroom. I met some of my favourite bloggers and I must say two of them really stood out! Their sessions were fabulous and they were so funny! I did get to meet Todd Parr and he did not disappoint! He is so sweet! I chatted with him and he even gave me an autographed poster! I was so thrilled to meet him!
Here is the picture of me and my best friend and Todd Parr.

I did so much shopping for my classroom! Here is a picture of the "pile". It was super fun! I am a shopaholic at heart! 

This is me and my bestie waiting for the show to start

This was the show we saw. It was so fun! Everyone was singing all the 80's hits! It was a blast! 

There was a photo booth at the conference and they took my picture. There were props you could choose from and different signs. It was lots of silly fun!

Target!! We took a cab to the closest Target store and it was great! Made me miss the Target stores here in Canada. I wish they were still open, but the American version of Target is so much better! 

All in all it was a very fun few days! 

I learned lots, made some new friends and shopped!! 

School's out for summer!

School in our area is finally out for the summer holiday break! YAY! I have so many things to do this summer. First, I am off to Las Vegas for the "I teach 1st!" conference! My best friend (who also teaches grade one) and I, plan on shopping and hitting a show while we are there! Plus we are both super excited to attend a Blogger meet up, so we can meet and greet with some of our very favourite First grade bloggers! Some of these ladies are ROCK STARS in our eyes and we can't wait to meet them! Plus we will meet Todd Parr! He is a wonderful children's book author and artist. I really want him to autograph one of my books and hopefully I can get a picture too!
Before I go and enjoy my holiday, I wanted to share something simple that "saved" my end of the year! Most teachers know that June is crazy for kids attention and behaviour. Well, I brought in a "friend" to help me out! Her name is "Clucky" and she is one FUNKY Chicken!
As soon as I introduced her to the children, they were in love with her and listened to her whenever she had something to say. She's quite sassy, but very fun! She always started her day by having the children do "The Funky Chicken Boogie" (her very favourite song!) Then she would say rather loudly, "Guess what?!" and the children would respond, "Chicken Butt!" And she would dance around! Then we would all laugh and then Clucky would "teach" the lesson and she kept those kids attention!! The kids even invited her to come to our school sports day. Kids would hold her little wing and run the various races. "Clucky" would cheer for them at other events. "Clucky" is by far the most fun way I have kept the kids attention right to the end of the school year! The children loved her and would ask to sit and read to her or ask to play at centre time with her. "Clucky"is probably the best puppet I have purchased! The kids know she is a puppet, but that's the beauty of teaching grade one, that line between fantasy and reality is still a bit blurry and they love to play along!

3 Pigs and stuff!

We have been learning about the different versions of The Three Little Pigs. My students LOVE this story! I also made some story props so they can act out the story. Let me tell you when they acted it out, it was HILARIOUS!!

We made piggy pies from a follow the directions picture recipe by Deanna Jump. So fun! The kids loved it and ate it up!

Long abscence...sorry!!

Hello, Friends!
I have not been posting in a really long time! Basically due to the fact that my life suddenly got SUPER busy and I felt I didn't have 2 seconds to breathe! I had a bit of a health scare and had to take some time off from my work in the classroom. I am so happy to be back in the classroom again to finish off the school year with my kids! I do have a lot of photos to post and I hope to get to that as soon as report cards are all finished! the end of the school year is fast approaching and there is a mountain of things to do! Plus I am already thinking about how I want to change things up a bit for next year! I have furniture rearranging plans in my head and ideas swirling around about how I want to change things up for next year! It is hard to keep myself focused and almost impossible to keep the kids focused! Everyone has play outside in the sunshine on the brain! I have a brand new deck in my backyard and I really want to be laying on my deck with a cold drink in my hand and blank paper to write down all the ideas!
So check back and you will se more pictures of our fabulous and VERY busy year!

We celebrated...and it's not what you think!

Kindness rules in Groovy Grade One! 

We celebrated with Dairy Queen cake! Yum! 

We have been working really hard at helping others and being kind. 

Each time we were kind and helpful, a small plastic heart was added to our classroom kindness jar. I knew there were 200 hearts in the jar, because I bought them from the dollar store! 

Who knew that the kids would actually manage to perform 200 kind acts! 

Hooray!! 

I am so proud of them! 

So as part of our celebration I brought them a Dairy Queen cake! They were so excited!

Penguins! January was so busy!

Penguins are one of my favourite birds. 

I even had a penguin themed wedding! 

So when January arrives, it is only natural that we study penguins! 

We also are lucky to have REAL penguins at our zoo! So studying penguins becomes more real because we can really visit them! We went to zoo school and shared our learning with the zoo teachers and they shared all that they know too! It was a great day! 

Just look at all our penguin projects! 

We are in ZOO school!

One of us was chosen to be a penguin! 

Real penguins at our zoo

A real penguin swimming! They are so close to us, you could almost reach out and touch them! (but I think the zoo keepers would not be happy if we did!)

We love PENGUINS!

Our Penguin math projects! 

These little penguins have adding machine roll paper inside them, we wrote the numbers zero to 100! Then we rolled them up and tucked them safely inside our penguins.

We painted penguins and then measured them with unifix blocks

Our TACKY penguins! 

 

We dressed little paper people to look like us! We dressed the little people for the chilly winter weather. They all turned out so cute! It was hard to choose just 3 for the blog!

I'm finally back!

We have been so busy since the end of October! We have had a student teacher in our class! We have been helping her to learn how to be a teacher. She is wonderful and we have been having a lot of fun with her!
We did some fun projects and we even had a Mad Hatter's Tea Party! We are all going to miss her when she goes back to the University. We hope she will come back and visit with us later on in the year. Here are some photos of all the fun projects we have been doing over the month of November and the beginning of December!

Puppy Pallooza! Feeding our puppies sight words and reading to them.

More reading to our puppies! 

Puppy Paintings!

We are SUPER readers! 

Super Reader! 

Winter art project to go with the Poem about colourful snow! 

Colourful Snow poem to practise our sight words! 

Puppy poem!

                                                                      Puppy art!

Mad Hatter's Tea Party! This was the wrap up of our Alice in Wonderland study! 

We went to the live play at the High school and then we read a simple adapted story and then we watched the Disney cartoon version of the movie! 

So fun! 

Here is the party food! It was funny to watch the children take a bite of the cookie and pretend to GROW and then drink the tea and pretend to shrink! It was so funny! 

The children sequenced the characters appearance in the story, around the bottom of their MAD hats!

It was a FUN, fun Friday afternoon event!