President's Day!

We celebrated President's Day in the 1st grade this past week. I was inspired by Cara Carroll's Pint-Sized Presidential Fun! Packet. We first talked about who leaders were and what we knew about them?
This prompted them to come up with some great ideas and questions...
like: How does one person lead an entire country? 

Then we read If I were President by 


Then we made this cute project to follow-up our connection with the book.


Picture from Cara Carroll's Packet

Here are the kids at work!





Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the end product! 


Enjoy!


How are families different?

In kindergarten we are talking about how families are different. I found this idea from Chalk Talk. A greatblog for fabulous ideas! I added a little extra to the activity in order to differentiate which I will include as a freebie at the end of the post. April from Chalk Talk stated that the original idea came from Shari Sloane. Visit Shari's Site!

First we started off by talking about our families. Then we read this book:

The book talks about all different types of families, one mom, one dad, two moms, two dads, even adoption. The children really enjoyed it and were asking questions about all the different families that were presented.
We then made our own house glyph.

Then the children made their own houses using this key.



We then sorted ourselves into groups with similar families.


I love how this student noticed some of the other student's working on making a
number sentence with their work, and they did their own! Super Proud!
I added an individual Analyze Your Data Sheet for children to do independently after they finished.
This is for the higher group.


Find this activity in my teachers pay teachers! FREE!





Groundhog Day Fun!

We discussed Groundhog's Day with Kindergarten on Friday. I used a few freebies that I have collected over time. First we did a schema chart to discuss what we know about groundhogs.

Then we read about groundhogs with this FREEBIE from Growing Kinders Blog.


After we read we went back to our seats to work with our partner to see what they thought, will the ground hog see his shadow? Make sure to explain to the children that they are writing what their partner thinks, not what the think. This is great for getting the children to start conversations and engage in the learning. Here is a little freebie of this sheet I created to work with partnerships.


We then applied what we learned and I gave the children a choice to write or draw what they learned about groundhogs. This freebie is from Eberhart's Explorers Blog.

Lastly we made a special project to go showcase our writing. The groundhog printables can be found at First Grade Blue Skies Blog.


I gave each child a checklist to self-monitor.
And unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the end product. We finished at the end of the day so they took them home and we were in a rush! But here is the model they followed.


Enjoy!













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