Highlights of the Last 2 Days!

2 Days into January!  We have been working our fingers to the bone and thanks to my blog friends I have enjoyed some fun lessons!  Here's the highlights.

We kicked off the year with Robot Morning Work while eating waffles of course.  {The cool part is they almost forgot to eat because they were so excited about the silly robots!}  {{yes we have breakfast in the classroom every.single.day...sigh...}}

Breakfast and Morning Work

 Then we had a class meeting and I asked them to finish the sentence "First Graders..."  It was the perfect way to remind them of all our class expectations.  The best part is that they came up with it all themselves.  Now they know- I know- they know...the rules...ya know?

Since we spent time talking about the New Year, I had each of them each write a goal for the new year on a whiteboard, then we edited those goals and they made a self portrait for a cute New Year's Bulletin Board.  I saw this a few places over vacation, but Cara from The First Grade Parade was referenced more than once, so I believe the original idea was hers! {Here}

Their goals were so cute!

I will stop leaving my room a mess

I will be nice to my brother

I will clean my room forever

I will work on going to bed earlier

Next, we traveled down to the Southern Ocean to learn about Polar Animals in Antarctica.  After reading this book, we filled out a reading response to show what we learned. There's lots of reading responses for any type of book.  This came out of my Winter Reading Response pack.    {Here}

This reading response is called Book Banner.  I like using it for non-fiction

We are winding up our Ocean unit and this week we focus on the open ocean and highlight the shark!  Here's a peek at my Science Center.

The activity for shark week is to make a shark rubbing of the different types of sharks.  I just cut the shapes out of sandpaper and label them.  The students do a crayon rub.  

I think I made 7 total sandpaper sharks.  I tried to pick sharks with distinct looking bodies.

Here's a student making her rubbings from today

 This next activity is something I do for every new science theme.   I place laminated pictures of whatever we are studying...insects, penguins, ocean animals, etc.  on each table in my room.  Then I place 5 markers on each table.

ocean animals

when the kids returned from specials today, this is what they walked in and saw.

I put on music for one minute as they walk around the room and look at all the tables without touching or talking about what they see.

Then the music stops and they can go to any table and write a question or a comment about any of the pictures. 

She wrote why is the seahorse spiky?

They can move from table to table and their conversations are so great!  I just love listening to what they say.  They all try to answer each other's questions.

I also did a couple lessons from Kim Adsit's Snowman Unit {HERE}

My class was in a very literal mood when we made this!

We measured ourselves against this snowman wearing our spirit wear!  Then we used post its with our names to graph our results.  

 What favorite lessons are you doing this week?  I would love to hear all about it!