We survived the first week back after a long break! And I can honestly say that we started out great and then everything that could go wrong did. But we made the best of it and trudged through all of the craziness.
We began the week celebrating New Year’s! We made these adorable New Year’s crowns from Jennifer Drake.
We have been focusing a lot on addition and now it is time to slowly introduce subtraction. What better way to do that then counting backwards from 10 and shouting Happy New Year! We then timed ourselves at how fast we could put our number cards in order from 10 to 0. They would then shout Happy New Year and I would stop the timer. They had so much fun with this. I think we must have done it 20 times. This is from Deanna Jump and DeeDee Wills’ unit.
During Daily 5 we were really diving into spelling words with blends and unscrambling sentences. These are both a favorite choice from our Daily 5 buckets and came from Caitlin Clabby.
We also made these adorable little snowmen. It was a completely last minute idea so there is literally nothing fancy about this. Maybe if I get time I will make a template and post it as a freebie. All we did was have the students trace as many circles as they could on a white sheet of paper and cut out the circles.
Then they drew a snowman face on one and wrote the number I gave them. Then on the remaining circles they showed different ways to make that number. They were so simple and so cute. I did absolutely no prep and the kids did the entire thing by themselves. Easy craft ever!
We have also been working on How To Writing from Deanna and DeeDee’s Unit and they are getting so good at writing! One proud teacher here!
Then the craziness hit! The weather quickly dropped to 4 degrees but with the windchill it was -8! Seriously!!! This is the south and it should never be this cold. Every county had a 2 hour cold weather delay except for us. So we bundled up and trudged to school. Then that’s what the disaster struck. I walked into my classroom and realized that I was not warming up. I checked the thermostat and my room was 62 degrees!!!!! Not freezing but still very cold. Our heat in the entire school broke and they did not know when it would be back up again. So we kept the kids bundled up and started our day. We were working in hats, mittens, and jackets all day. It made for a very interesting day.
In the afternoon, our first grade buddy’s classroom was still dropping and was in the 50s! We quickly invited them in to spend the afternoon with us. We had a blast working with the first graders! Needless to say, with 34 kids in one classroom at the last minute, I did not get any pictures but we played some fun games and made a cute snowman craft together! We left the school not knowing if we would have heat the next day. When we arrived on Friday we were so happy to hear that the heat was restored at 5AM, just in time for us!
By Friday, I was exhausted and completely dropped the ball on making a giant snowman for an activity I wanted to do for writing. So what else was I to do but have the kids create it for me. I partnered my kids up and gave them a sheet of paper and they each made a different part of the snowman. I think it turned out better than any snowman I could have made. Absolutely in love!
Then we wrote together how to build a snowman. Turned out ten times better than I had planned.
We ended our week with a fun game from Cara Carroll. The students would throw a “snowball” onto a snowman and make that number on the ten frame. They would then write how many more they need to make 10. Great review and they had a ton of fun!
Now let’s take a look at next week. I will be out of the classroom BAS testing in the hallway (please let the heat stay on!!!!) all week and there will be a sub in my room so I tried to make the lesson plans and activities as simple as I could. Come take a look!
Now head on over To DeeDee’s blog and see what everyone else is up to this week! And pray that our heat stays on!!! They told us it was on temporary! Yikes!
~*~Julie~*~
