Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, ya'll! I hope you had a wonderful day full of productivity and calm students! To be totally honest, my day wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be! We took our first marking period sight word test this morning... our students are responsible for reading AND spelling all the sight words. This marking period, it was only 23 words, so it wasn't too bad. The math test I gave this afternoon? That's another story... NEVER AGAIN! Live and learn, eh?

Here's some of the Halloween-ish things we've been doing in my room this week!

With the shift towards more informational texts with the Common Core, I've been trying to get as much of it in their hands as possible. Each week, I'm introducing a new informational text feature using Hello Literacy's Informational Text Features Notebook. It's fantastic. If you don't have it, run and snag it now. It's on sale. I'm not being payed to say this and she doesn't know I'm saying it because it's really just that awesome.

ANYWHO, I got this amazing pumpkins book in my batch of free books from Scholastic at the beginning of the year. Super kid friendly but still filled with loads of awesome information. Our PTO also pays for a subscription for Time For Kids, which has been super awesome. There was an issue about spiders in the November pack that just came yesterday, so I pulled that sucker out for one last "Halloween-ish" thing today.

I know I clearly didn't invent the KWL chart, but I was super impressed with the questions my kiddos have been asking. I love love love using KWL as a previewing/sumarizing strategy! Any I love how excited the kids get when I add my terrible drawings that are supposedly "the best drawings in the world." We were all crazy surprised that pumpkins can be BLUE?! We were also super creeped out to learn that spiders see and hear through the hair on their legs?! Cray cray.

Today after our math test, I had a little extra time, so I dug out Roll A Monster from The Teacher Wife's Oh So Spooky activity pack. It's filled with tons of super stuff.

Tomorrow, we're having a Halloween "party" in our room. Translation? I didn't feel like having a real party so I'm just going to play some Halloween games and give them popcorn at the end of the day. Cross your fingers. I'll let you know how it goes!

In unrelated news, 2 pet pictures... First, our guinea pig is a diva. He flips his food dish and rips off his water bottle if I don't fill them quickly enough... Ha!

Last, my dog hates the doorbell. I decided that trick-or-treat would not be his thing!

Spooktacular Halloween Activities!

Hey all! Long time, no post. Story of my life. AND, this is my 100th post! To celebrate, I'm sharing my newest TpT product!!

There's TONS of fun things in this pack!!

My favorite part of the pack is this super easy LOW-PREP candy corn glyph! The students do all the work (none of that copying thousands of pages on construction paper!!)  He's super cute and bound to create lots of fun for Halloween!!

It's on sale for the rest of the night, and the first one to comment here will get a free copy!  Don't forget to leave your email address :-)

Five For Friday

Wow... it's been forever since I've blogged. It's been even LONGER since I've linked up for a Five For Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching!  Without further ado, here are my five (well, six, because I couldn't choose) random things from the past week or so.

1 - We have the most wonderful guidance counselor in the whole entire world. Seriously, though. If you think your school counselor is the best, you're wrong. Our counselor comes in to do character education lessons throughout the year, and this past week she read the most adorable monster book. The Monster Who Lost His Mean is about a little monster who loses the "m" in his name, so "Onster" goes around trying to do terrible things, but soon learns that it's much easier to do nice things. It's pretty cute, especially with Halloween around the corner! She finished it up by having the kids work on a page that said "_________ will NOT be a mean monster! Instead I will..."

2 - One of our second grade teachers just got a guinea pig for her room and was talking to me about giving her guiea pig a bath. A BATH?! I googled it. Apparently it's a thing. So I gave Jelly Bean a bath... he hated every minute of it, but he was super cute.

3 - Our district sells "Pink Out" shirts every October so we can all wear them to one of the football games. Mine came with a hole in the back. No big deal. The kicker was the fact that there was an arrow pointing to the hole. It's as if some factory worker went "Hey! There's a hole in this! Let's sell it anyways!"

4 - Our lesson yesterday was on finding ways to make 10. The lesson was super simple, so I wanted to think of a fun little extension activity. I had them make 10 all eleven ways and then they glued them onto sentence strips to make silly hats. I gave them very little direction and they glued them on however they wanted. It was fun, and it reinforced all the ways to make ten on ten frames.

5 - It pays to be friends with the high school choir director. She emailed me saying there were a few extra seats on their bus trip to see Matilda on Broadway. Sign me up. It was amazing.

6 - I unofficially decided that every Thursday should be Bow Tie Thursday. My bow tie collection (only real ones, not those silly pre-tied junkers) is growing quite large! You should join me... It's a fun little thing to get you through the end of your week! If you instagram, use the hashtag #bowtiethursday!

Well, that's all folks!

CAUTION! Hard Hats Required!

So. My district adopted EnVision math last year. I'm fairly satisfied with it, for the most part. There's only one thing I really don't like... Lesson 2-10.

I taught it last year, and it was a train wreck. I felt like I had been run over by a bus. The students looked like I was speaking German. When I saw it come up in my planning, I was determined to fix it.

Essentially, the lesson meets standard 1.OA.7, showing the meaning of the equal sign. The essential understanding for the lesson reads "The difference can be written at the beginning or end of a subtraction sentence, as long as the number or expression on each side of the equal sign are the same amount." Seriously? That's algebra. Here's what the student page looks like...

I understand the concept. I realize it is an important concept. I feel like the lesson is just a little too early for first grade. Here's what I came up with... Remember those little colored white boards I found in the Target Dollar Spot? Since I only have a few of them, I haven't yet realized their full potential. Until today, at least.

I spent about 10 minutes reviewing how to make "NORMAL" addition and subtraction problems with the information from a part-part-whole mat. I explained HEAVILY that on our boards, the yellow board was the whole, and that the green boards were the parts.

That's when I blew their minds. I put on my trusty hard hat, since we were "destroying" math problems today. I picked up the difference and the equal sign and moved them to the front of the problem. Then I put them back. Then I put them on the front again. Then I put them back again. Then I put them on the front again. I needed wanted my little firsties to totally understand WHY the problems still worked with the answer at the front.

Here's one of my little guys (all dressed up for picture day) filling in the blanks BY HIMSELF. Last year, when I taught this lesson, there was no independent practice. NONE. Today, I feel like I still blew my kids' minds, but at least they figured out what I was talking about.

I think it REALLY helped for them to see the whole as a different color. Tomorrow, there will be MUCH reviewing, and I think I'll swap the yellow board out for another green one to see if they can still plop those numbers into the right place!!

Does your math series teach this standard in a similar way? How do you teach it without completely losing your first graders??