Favorite iPad Apps: Bluster

Another one of my favorite iPad apps, Bluster!  This app is FREE, and it has three different levels of difficulty, which is fantastic because I have a huge range of ability in my class this year.  But word to the wise: turn the volume down, because otherwise you will have the computerized sound of thundering clouds and rain roaring through your classroom.  

California Science & Social Studies Units

I discovered these free science and social studies units last year, and they are great.  Published by the California Education and the Environment Initiative, each unit is centered within the context of the environment. They're aligned to the California State Standards for science and social studies, so you could use these instead of your textbook series at different points in the year for many of the standards. (I don't know about you, but I am not in love with my science textbook or my social studies textbook.)  And, the best part is that they've recently released Common Core Correlation Guides for each unit, making it totally easy to include the Common Core standards in your lesson plans.

The website to download these units is www.californiaeei.org

The website will ask you to register your email, etc. to get the password for downloading everything (at least you needed to do this last year), but the password is teacheei if you don't want to go through all that. 

Writing About Bats

This was a bulletin board I did in October, when we read informational text about bats and then wrote sentences about them.

(I wanted these bats to be happy, fun bats, however some of my boys simply had to draw bloody fangs on their bats.  What can you do?)

Irregular Plural Nouns

We've been doing some review work on irregular plural nouns. When I covered this earlier, a few of my kids were still a liittttlle shaky on the whole concept of nouns (compared to verbs and adjectives), so I decided to touch on it again. This is a writing activity we did last month in our writing journals:

This was enough for the majority of the class to "get it," especially after writing sentences that used irregular plural nouns.  But to let my stragglers catch up to the pack, I did this activity:

I had a list of 28 nouns one for each student, with several nouns for each of the following singular-to-plural rules: 

~add -s, 

~add -es, 

~change y to i and add -es, 

~change f to v and add -es, and 

~keep the plural noun the same as the singular. 

I then drew name sticks to assign students to a word, and they had to draw and label the singular noun on one side of the page, and draw and label the plural noun on the other half of the page, using the appropriate rule.  

The best part of this activity came the following morning during reading centers, when the kids had to sort each other's labeled drawings according to the rule they used to make the noun plural.  They recognized each other's work, and loved using their own work to do the sort. I guess there are situations where my beautifully crafted and laminated flash cards aren't the best way for kids to learn!  (While my ego took a slight blow, I realized that it's a lot less work for me if the kids make their own sorting cards for grammar and spelling conventions.)

To really drive the concept of irregular plural nouns home, I assigned this app in one of my iPad centers. In this free app, the kids are given a sentence that uses an irregular plural noun, except they have to decide what form of the noun should be used. For example, "The boy saw three ______ in the forest."  Then the students have to drag either the word deer or the word deers into the blank. 

Paul Klee Art Projects

Paintings inspired by Paul Klee's Castle & Sun

 Oil Pastel Drawings inspired by Paul Klee's Senecio

First Grade Lent Retreat

Whew!  I got through my first First Grade Retreat!  I learned recently that each class has to have some type of spiritual retreat during the year (we are a Catholic school!), and first grade has their retreat in April.  (Since this is my first year at this school, there have been a lot of firsts for me lately!). We don't actually leave campus for the retreat, the majority of our activities are in the Hall (the auditorium), but we're out of the classroom all morning, which I guess makes it a "retreat" as opposed to just an extended religion lesson.

Our retreat was centered around pretzels, and how they represent prayer and penance (which I actually didn't know before).  First, I talked to the kids about the history of the pretzel, and that they were made centuries ago during Lent.  Back in the fourth century, the Romans abstained from milk, butter, and eggs (among other things) during Lent, so they would make pretzels using only flour and water.  The pretzels represented their fasting and penance.  The shape of the pretzel is of arms crossed in prayer, to remind us that Lent is a time of prayer.  The word pretzel even comes from a Latin word meaning "little arms."  I broke things down in more detail for the kids, but that's the gist of it. 

After learning about how pretzels can remind us of what's important during Lent, the kids actually made their own soft pretzels!  Wetzel's Pretzels was so generous to donate the dough mix for us, so that was one less thing to prepare beforehand. 

The kiddos each rolled and twisted their own pretzel, and as they finished, parents would put their pretzel on parchment paper, write their name on the parchment paper with a sharpie, and pop them in the oven!  Most of the kids did a pretty good job!  Here are a few of the better-looking ones.

Although I have one student who is allergic to white flour, and had to use a special dough from Trader Joe's. Which would be no big deal, except he couldn't use flour to help him roll his dough, and the whole thing turned into a blobby mess in his hands!  The poor little guy started crying, and then I wanted to cry for him!  Trust me when I say, rolling dough without flour is nearly IMPOSSIBLE.  I tried to help him, and just made a bigger mess!  Well let me tell you, I don't think I've prayed harder all year than I did in that moment, asking God to PLEASE help me turn that sticky mess into a pretzel for my sweetheart of a student, so he wouldn't be the only kid without one. Sure enough, God came through for me, because after wetting my hands to try and get the dough to slide off my hands, I was able to make this:

The extra water made it a little runny, but it's the only thing that saved me! (Other than a little help from The Man Upstairs!)  And that little guy's beaming smile when he saw it just made my week. "It's a perfect pretzel!!!!!" he exclaimed.  (If you say so! Whew!!)

After averting that crisis (I feel like at least 20% of my day is spent averting a crisis), we went back to the classroom to listen to our principal read a story about Jesus and the Passion.  It's a really sweet story about how all the garden animals try to comfort Jesus during the Crucifixion.  It's hard explaining the Passion to little kids without freaking them out, and this book does a really nice job of telling the story in an honest way, without being scary.

By the time the story was finished, the pretzels were all out of the oven!

And that was our First Grade Retreat!  The kids all sat in the Hall eating their pretzels together, and let me tell you, they were delicious!  The parents were so on top of it, they even had mustard and nacho cheese in little dipping cups at each child's place. 

    

I'm just glad it all went off without a hitch!  The kids had a great time, they were engaged, they seemed to really "get it," and the parents who came to volunteer were happy with how it all turned out. Success story!

Favorite Things ~ Erin Condren Planners

I want to start sharing all of my favorite finds with you, readers, and here is a biggie: Erin Condren Life Planners and Notebooks.  And because I just got an email from her about a big sale, I decided this was perfect to start with! 

       

I love everything Erin Condren!  I have the Life Planner (which I use for my personal life schedule), as well as the notebook with calendar insert, which I use to keep track of school events and deadlines, along with blogging ideas, lesson plan units I want to write, and miscellaneous teacher ideas I want to keep track of. True, they're a little pricey, but if you join her email-mailing list, you can just wait for one if her awesome promos (like right now!). I just got the above email this afternoon.  If I didn't already have the one (okay, two!) I'd be taking advantage of this new promo tonight!  Full disclosure: if you like to write a lot for each day, (like a lot), you might find this format a little limiting. (That's why I have a whole other notebook for my teaching schedule and notes, separate from my personal Life Planner.)  But the covers are soooo beautiful, it's easy to get past. I mean, it even looks pretty sitting on my night table next to my Sprite Zero!

Okay, I can't wait to share more of my favorite things!  Until next time!

I love the Phonto iPad app!

One of my new favorite iPad apps is a (free!) photo-editing app called Phonto.  It lets you write text over photos, in a bunch of different colors and fonts.  This app will also let you put a background color behind the words (like I did in white), and rotate the words (like I did on the second photo, along the left-hand side).  I had some fun practicing Phonto's options by writing labels all over some pictures of my classroom.  

I'm still looking for a good photo collage app though... I've tried a few but haven't liked any of them that much so far.  I just downloaded Pic Collage, but I'm not in love with it.  It's difficult to zoom/resize the images once you put them in the squares.  But don't worry, followers!  You'll be the first to hear when I find the one that works for me!