My first blog entry! Happy New Year!!!

Well, I'm not sure what has made me decide to create a blog for the things I do in my classroom.  I think it was all the wonderful blogs I have been looking at over Christmas Break.  My break is now about to be over and it is time to think about what I am going to do with all my little classroom monkeys when I get back to school.  For those of you reading this, I don't have any pictures to go along with my ideas (my memory card reader is in my classroom and I don't feel like leaving the house to go get it!), but I hope you find the ideas I have been tossing around helpful.

Our first grade team has decided to review procedures the first week back.  Our first week is a short week, so that means we will not be doing a unit out of our basal reader.  I have tried to overplan for the first week, but I have decided to do lots of fun New Year's themed activities.  There are some really great things that you can download for free right now on TPT. 

Like this math game from Froggie Went A Teachin that you can get here.

Here is a curriculum unit from Learning Foundations that you can get here.

Or here is a set of writing templates for writing your New Year's resolutions...you can get it here.

There are several more, I would suggest going to http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/ and doing a search for "happy new year" or "ring in the new year" and look through all the wonderfull resources they have available.

For morning work we will be alpabetizing a list of New Year words, doing a words in words activity using the words New Year, and writing sentences for a set of New year pictures (that I have yet to make).  For whole group reading we will be discussing how we celebrated the New Year, what is a resolution and what kinds of resolutions kids can make.  We will be writing and editing our New Year resolutions and making a cute little craft using circles and triangles to create our face wearing a party hat.  We will also have a chance to write and share about our favorite Christmas gift.  For math we will be graphing where we were when the New Year started using a pictograph, what we were doing when the New Year started using a bar graph and creating different patterns using New Year party hats and recording our patterns on paper and sharing our findings with the class.

Some other random ideas I have had (but I don't know how I will use them yet) are:  timelines, stages of life (human), time, New Year around the world, repurposing (making old things new)...if you have any good ideas you would like to share, please comment here.  I would love to hear from you!