I'm really feeling the end of the year craziness this week. I'm sure all of you can relate! We only have 3 weeks of school left and you can feel it in the air! There is an extra dose of crazy going on in Room 100 but we are trying our best to get as much academic material (and fun) squeezed in with as minimal chaos possible! :) Nothing that some non-stop management strategies can't fix!
We wrapped up our fairy tale unit with some character traits, fairy godmother wishes, and opinion writing...
Here, we used character traits to describe Jack and the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. My kiddos struggled with this a bit, but we caught on after lots of practice and were soon able to provide evidence from the text! Goldilocks really helped a lot with this skill but, of course, I forgot to snap pictures!
We read-aloud The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and used these favorites to practice writing our opinion pieces. This was just the start of our opinion writing unit, but I was so impressed with my kids and their opinions, reasons, and conclusions! What a fun, motivating way to get kids excited about writing their opinion! We've made a really time consuming pig/wolf craft in the past and this year I was in search of something relatively quick and simple that would go along with our opinion writing. I found it! This perfect little craftivity came from Julie on TpT! Click on the picture below to check out this cute project!
Of course we had to make our yearly fairy godmother writing display...
My personal favorite...hey, at least she clarified that everything EXCEPT for the people should be made out of candy...
The next thing I wanted to share is one of those "spur of the moment, pop into your head, last minute, best lesson ever" ideas. Doesn't that always happen? The best lessons are always the ones that just pop into your head and you improvise on the spot? I, of course, made all my lesson plans for Monday not realizing that I was missing a 30 minute chunk of time that we usually have library. When I got to work that morning, it was a "think on your feet" kind of moment. We have been working on mastering the skill of possessive nouns in 1st grade and it has proven to be quite the tricky skill. We introduced it the week before by doing whole-group mini lessons on the Promethean board.
We also made a class anchor chart and each got to write something that belonged to us (using our possessive knowledge, of course). We stuck our sticky notes on the big anchor chart and, in the moment, it seemed to click!
But, alas, a couple short days later and the words "possessive nouns" prompted confused looks and hands flying in the air. So, with an extra 30 minutes on our hands, I tried to come up with something that might just make it STICK.
*LIGHT BULB MOMENT*
I ripped some big butcher paper up and covered all the tables. I printed off various pictures from throughout the school year. I modeled walking around the room with a marker, stopping, looking at the picture, and writing down a sentence that described something in the picture that belonged to someone. I gave some sentence starters for my little learners who needed some extra assistance:
I like _____________.
I see _______________.
We emphasized using APOSTROPHE 'S' and circling the possessive noun and OH. EM. GEE.....they got it! I LOVED seeing it click for all of them and, even better, the activity naturally provided opportunities to compliment their friends and use kind words in their writing. Love it!
And that's all for now, folks! We've got lots of crazy happenings going on this week with Field Day, Memorial Day concert, Memorial Day Concert practice, Mother's Day gifts, the list goes on and on. Here's hoping I still have hair left at the end of this week!
