Criss-cross APPLESAUCE...It's Johnny's Birthday!!!

Happy  Fall y'all!!!!  I am SUPER excited that my favorite season is upon us...the cooler weather, the beautiful colors, Halloween, Thanksgiving...I could go on forever!!!  Anyhow, this month, we've been learning all about apples.  Our lessons culminated with a big celebration of Johnny Appleseed.  We read many books about Johnny, and even made applesauce in the classroom!!! It smelled A.MAZ.ING all day long!!!  We listed all of the information we found about Johnny Appleseed on our Johnny Appleseed anchor chart:

Each of the students brought in one apple.  We took all of the apples, peeled them and cooked in the crock pot all day to make applesauce.

ALL of the students really enjoyed this finished product:

We invited the PREK 3&4 to come listen to us preform our APPLE poems and songs:

We have also been reading stories written by Kevin Henkes this month.  We are using his stories to learn all about CHARACTER.  We read Chrysanthemum, Webbely Worried and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.  We compared and contrasted the characters, and learned how to create a story map of a story, and also learned how important it is to be kind to one another.  We used the story Chrysanthemum to understand how unkind words can hurt other's feelings.  I made a large, red heart for the class.  Then, as I read the story I had each child in my class take a turn to wrinkle the heart each time somebody made fun of Chrysanthemum's name.  We passed the heart around to each child to see how much the heart had changed.  We then talked about how hurtful words can stay on a persons heart no matter how much you try to smooth it out.  We then promised to "Think and be smart, because it's hard to fix a wrinkled heart" as we placed a band-aid (with our names) on the heart to symbolize this pledge:

Working on our Character learning in our interactive notebooks:

 Our name flowers:

We also started to learn all about NOUNS.  We also completed our first "read the room" activity where the students scoured the classroom looking for nouns.  Once they found a word they wanted to use, they had to place it on the correct Post-it in their notebooks (person, place or thing):

Here are some first day of school photographs...I was just waiting on some photo releases!!!

 "First Grader" hallway bulletin board display:

Here are the links to the Kevin Henkes stories that we read in class:
Chrysanthemum:

Wemberly Worried:

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse:

Can you believe it's almost OCTOBER?!!

Here We Go AGAIN!!!

Hello sweet friends, and welcome back to a new and exciting school year at OLP!!! Can I just say Oh.My.Word. summer FLEW by...but I did take the time to enjoy Evey.Last.Ounce. of it!!! I was lucky enough to spend my first week of summer vacation in the Happiest Place on Earth...Disney World!!!

We were also lucky to visit South Carolina, Wildwood and take part in a bunch of other day trips which made our summer unforgettable...as summer's end drew near, that meant that classroom set up time was quickly approaching...here are a couple of before and after photos of the First Grade classroom...

This wall will display our writing and reading resources for the year...the right side of the finished wall will be set up as soon as we begin our Storytown Reading Series...we will use this bulletin board to serve as our focus wall spot lighting our vocabulary words, spelling words, sound focus, story of the week and genre focus, question of the day, and reading comprehension strategy.

The front wall contains our Calendar Time, Word Wall, Alphabet Chart, Number Chart with ten frames and our "Show What You Know" board.

One of the first activities we did as new first graders, was to read "The Kissing Hand" and talk about our feelings when we started school.  We created a predictable chart of our feelings, and filled in our own names on the chart.

We also created our first day of school self portraits...we will complete this every month to track how much we have grown.

We also worked our our FIRST color/cut/sort/glue projects...we sorted a list of back to school words into alphabetical order...they did such a fabulous job!!!

Can you believe this gift??? This was AMAZING!!! One of my fabulous parents sent this into school this week, and I was totally shocked (I'm not gonna lie, I already used the Advil!!!).  Having amazing parents, makes my job just so much better!!!!   Thank YOU!!!

Again, this year I am blessed to have my sweet daughter come to school with me...I can't believe how quickly she is growing up....I need a PAUSE button...but I am so lucky to be able to have her in the same building as me in order to savor every moment of her sweetness!!!:)

There you have it, school has officially begun, and I am completely In.Love.with my new batch of first graders, and I am really looking forward to what this year has in store for us!!!