Five for Friday

Here we are again! Another Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching and another week closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Time is flying by this year. I know I sure have been busy with starting a TPT store and starting this blog. I have also been working on implementing my AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) training into my curriculum. This has meant a lot of video and audio recordings of my teaching and my students learning. So for #1...

AMSTI Math

 Roll and Record
Working on one to one correspondence, subtilizing, writing numbers, counting, composing numbers and more!!

Pattern Block Scarecrows

 Build It - number recognition, counting, composing numbers, ten frames

I have loved using the Terc Investigations math series along with my AMSTI training. It is all about being hands on and the kids taking ownership of their learning. We have learned a lot of different math games and the kiddos don't even realize how much learning is going on. 

AMSTI Science

Weather Unit: Thermometers & Temperature

Math and Science have always been my favorite subjects! So being able to get AMSTI science kits this year has been a dream come true. I was amazed at the learning that went on in my class during our weather kit. The work my kiddos did with thermometers blew my mind! Using talk moves during my lessons has made a huge difference. I was astounded to watch them work together sharing ideas until they figured out what a thermometer was and what it did. 

 My Last Post About Mamma Mia (at least for a year)!

WE WON!!! We took home first place in our food category and we were part of a three way tie for overall Mamma Mia Spirit!

 The theme for the entire night was Rificolona - a Paper Lantern Festival in Florence Italy where farmers and peasants sold their goods.

 Under the Tuscan Moon
Our team took that theme and ran with it! We decorated our booth as a booth at a 17th Century farmer's market and dressed the part! We cook Tuscan Pasta and Chickpea Soup and made Caprese salad bites (displayed on a head of lettuce).

Luckily we live in south Alabama where there are a lot of farming families! One of our teammates found the wagon, butter churn, and even an old scale (not in the picture) in her in-laws barn! 

 iCurio + Discovery Education = Learning in the Digital Renaissance

I know I have mentioned Discovery Education here before and shared with you how absolutely fabulous a resource it has been for me. If you don't know about DE check it out here! It has an array of wonderful multimedia resources and lessons.

Another great resource has been iCurio. This is another subscription site that our county has purchased for us. It is amazing. It is a resource where you can gather multimedia rich content aligned to both state and common core standards. From their website:

• Over 330,000 digital resources for all K-12 curriculum areas aligned with state and Common Core standards.
• Supports the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.
• Flexible, dynamic content can easily be targeted to differentiate instruction for all students.
• Address learning outcomes for every class, every lesson, every student.
• Improve student engagement with videos, text, learning games, images, simulations, and more.

As a Kindergarten teacher and being new to this site, I use it to plan my lessons. There are links to amazing resources for everything. You can even save pages you find and share them with your grade level, school, or district. This week I found an entire unit on Pilgrims. We started with a Pilgrim scheme sheet (they love learning "5th grade" words), made a list of things we would pack if we moved to a new home, sorted those items into what the pilgrims could have brought on the Mayflower, and wrote about what it would have been like on the Mayflower. We are also going to create an ONLINE venn diagram comparing pilgrim children and children today. Next week we will focus on the first Thanksgiving. 

Click on Picture to visit ReadWriteThink.org to create your own online venn!

 On a personal note:

I LOVE Christmas. Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love everything about Christmas!!!!! I love the wonderful church services reminding us of the Reason for The Season. I love the time spent with my family and friends. I love buying presents, especially for my two beautiful nieces. And I am absolutely giddy just thinking about decorating my home and classroom. I have a tradition, the day after Thanksgiving or that weekend, Christmas music plays, hot chocolate is drank, and the house is trimmed out in red and green!  I cannot wait for our class elf to arrive when we get back from Thanksgiving Break. I say all of this so you know I am not a scrooge when I say: Christmas in October and November has gone too far! What is going on????  In October,  I was looking for Halloween decorations but I couldn't find them for all the Christmas decorations. I lost most of my Thanksgiving decorations in a horrible attic accident (pic below) and could not find replacements because Christmas had invaded all of the shelves. I just think each holiday should be given the appropriate attention and not be used as a marketing tool. Each holiday has a special meaning to someone and should not be overlooked just to make a few extra dollars. 

Exiting soap box now! 

What have you been up to this week? Any great Thanksgiving or multimedia lessons to share?

Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching and share!

Five for Friday

I am really making an effort this week to set a blogging schedule. I have found that linky parties help a lot with this! So, I am doing my second linky party for the week. I hope this will help me boost my posts!

 The best thing about this Friday is EARLY DISMISSAL!!! The kids got out 12:00 and the teachers stayed and got to work in their rooms. For me that means inputting grades for report cards and getting ready for Peer to Peer coaching we will do on Monday. 

This morning we had our Open House Math Breakfast. The parents are invited to come eat a biscuit with the kids and then we show them how to play our math games we have been learning.

 Counting Jar

 Roll and Record on the Promethean Board

Build It 

 My kiddos LOVE LOVE LOVE this. They were so excited to have their parents come to schools with them and even more excited to TEACH them what we have been learning. I really love this day. It gives the kiddos ownership of their learning, it makes them feel great, and the parents see how much they have learned in just 9 weeks. I am so appreciative of all the parents that came out this morning to support their children!

I love this picture!!! By the end of the Open House the kids had brought their parents and their library books to the carpet to read. They were reading them together and my heart melted. Maybe it wasn't math but WOW! What a powerful time for the children and the parents.

 Our Class Tree

 Our Class Tree Hall Display

In September we adopted a tree right outside our classroom window. We got a chance to explore around the tree to see what was under it. We measured how big the circumference of the trunk. And we drew pictures of what it looked like in summer (it is still 90+ degrees here). We are anxiously waiting to see what will happen to our tree when it starts to get cold. We think the leaves might change and maybe even fall off. 

Back at the beginning of the month we did a unit on Farms. I have posted pictures on my classroom page of the Directed art cow pictures we did but I wanted to share them again. Today all the parents were so excited by the pictures, a few even said they wanted to frame them! Made this teacher proud. I found my directed art instructions from Deep Space Sparkle and then tweaked it just a bit. We used crayons to draw the cow and color spots and the utter. We also used crayon the draw a sun (optional). Then we painted the sky with a blue color wash. Then we figured out how to use all "the extra blue paint" to make green grass. I must say that all the cows turned out FABULOUS!

 And on a personal note...

 Today the hubby and I are headed to north Alabama to visit family and attend a COSTUME WEDDING! Yes, you read that right a costume wedding. It is for my husband's BFF and should be very interesting. I am very excited to be able to dress up and finally get my husband to participate.

Well, that is my 5 for Friday! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

AMSTI

This summer I was very fortunate to receive training in AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) for Math and Science. It has only been two weeks but I am really loving how my kiddos are soaking up all the hands on math and science goodness! Even my most challenging students are more attentive during math and science.

For math we are using Terc Investigations math series. This series is not AMSTI but does embody AMSTI's teaching methods. Both are hands on and student centered. The past two weeks we have been exploring our math manipulatives and learning how to compare attributes. We have also introduced our Daily Data (DD). For DD we use a counting jar, pan balances, and many different graphs. Right now we are doing a graph a week. I am focusing on teaching procedures for the different types of graphs and how we can interpret the data.

Single Loop Venn Graph

"Have You Ever Built a Sandcastle?"

This was our first graph. Each student wrote their name on a sticky note and then chose their answer. Using Math Talk Moves, we had a very involved discussion about how we could determine how many people have built a sandcastle and how many have not. We counted the sticky notes and then to double check we created a live graph and counted the actual students. A lot of great conversation and counting!

 Pan Balance

"Do you like to play inside or outside?"

I had 20 bears in the basket (1 for each student on roll). Students came up and placed a bear on either the "outside" or "inside" pan. As we began discussing how to "interpret the data" (yes, I use this vocabulary with them) one child realized there was still a bear in the basket. So along with the great discussion on how we could determine which choice received the most "votes", we also had a great discussion on why we had a left over bear. 

Double Loop Venn

"Do You Have Any Siblings?"

This is our graph for next week. We will use sticky notes again. I will introduce the graph and show them how to post if they have a sister, a brother, or both. I will not mention what to do if they are an only child. I want to see how they think and try to figure out where to put their sticky note. 

(I have parents give me this information on my Kindergarten Questionnaire.)

I am so pumped about AMSTI science this year!!! AMSTI science is a two year training. This summer I learned how to implement two of the four AMSTI units. 

Our first unit is weather. We have spent the past two weeks learning how to be a scientist. We have talked about our 5 Senses and how we can use them to investigate and collect data. Over the next 6 weeks or so, we will be studying weather, how to read a thermometer, how to gauge wind speed, how to identify the  different types of clouds and contrails. We will create a weather calendar to record temperature, cloud cover, and precipitation. We will also be collecting data for G.L.O.B.E.. "GLOBE's vision is of worldwide community of students, teachers, scientists and citizens working together to better understand, sustain and improve Earth's environment at local, regional and global scales." Our class will be imputing types of clouds, amount of cloud coverage, and amount of contrails we see in our sky. We will also adopt a class tree for our Trees unit that will begin in January. 

 Our First Anchor Chart for Science!

I told them we were going to get to be all kinds of scientist this year! I asked them what they thought a scientist was? What do scientist do? These are the ideas they came up with. Thank you to The First Grade Parade for the supper cute anchor chart! I laminated the poster and then used dry erase markers to write the responses so I can reuse the poster every year!