Clean That Table Kiddos!

I am at a little Christian school, where I have the privilege of teaching the first and second grade.  Total of 11 kids, crazy, I know!!  Cleaning our table after lunch has always been the worst chore.  "Who's the table washer?  Who are the floor sweepers?"  No-one seems to know.
We try, but we never have done very well at getting our table clean.  I figured, hey, we are the little ones, the 8th graders can handle our crumbs and juice drips...

Until....  I tried boys against girls.  I assigned each a table and said, ok, lets see who can clean it the best.  If anyone's table is not good, they will have to do both tables next time.  They pretty much went bananas on the most dedicated 6-7 year old cleaning frenzy I had ever seen!  They wiped off the chairs, pushed them all in, they did an incredible job!  And, they loved it.

I did have a few kinks to work out though...  First they were soaking towels, and then getting more towels to dry.  Big waste.  To solve it, I spray 6 half sheet towels and hand them out.  They are not allowed any more.  Problem 2 was they were running all around the room.  To fix that one, they will get a 5 min. time out for running.  No hurry just clean!

It's been a week and it really has morphed from being a competition, to just having fun working together.  Some of the boys even like to help the girls out, since there's only 4 girls and 7 boys.  I haven't had a losing team yet.

My New Lesson Plan Book, YAY!

I have tried numerous different planbooks, but I wanted to really go for it, and make my own.  Here is what I came up with.

The Cover Page

The class schedule.   Scroll down to get the schedule for free.  :)

6 Subject weekly lesson plan, room for detailed notes, and events and reminders in the top left banner.  Holidays are included in the banner too.

Pre-dated for this school year, yay, I hate doing all those dates by hand, it takes forever!

Here is the month at a glance calendar, there is a ton of "stickers" you can use for all those dates, inservice, report cards, conferences, birthdays, 1/2 days, meetings, etc...

Attendance pages come in 6 styles, somehow it makes me feel a sense of progress to have the pages different for each marking period.  Also like not having to write all those names by hand, just copy and paste them here, and into the grade book, next part...

I included all the elementary headings, you can copy and paste those in, or for higher grades,      period 1, 2, etc...

The kids:  So excited to have all this info right at my fingertips, no looking through files for the phone numbers, and allergies and all that stuff.

Pages for notes, self explanatory. :)

Year at a glance, always useful.

I'm excited, hope you like it.  It's editable in Power Point, also comes in PDF and is only $6. 

Get it here:   Lesson Plan Book

Free Class schedule:  Schedule

Fraction Circle Practice

My first graders had some great practice with hands on fraction circles today.  Very simple to put together, and everyone gets to have some concrete experience with fractions.

1.  I cut out three circles of the same size but different colors for each student.
2.  Cut one in 1/2, one in 1/4's, and one in 1/3's.
3.  I cut out square cards of a different color and labeled them for each fraction.
4.  Laminate, and bag each set.
5.  Students assemble each circle and have to correctly label it.

Ant Colony Intruder: The Bumble Flower Beetle

I put together a really cool ant colony today for my class.  Awesome!  I found it at the Goodwill for $10 and it was totally worth it.  It has all these different pods connected by tubes.  I filled them with soil, grass, sand, and some moss.  For water I soaked cotton balls, and for food I did apples, and cinnamon toast crunch.

After a lot of looking I finally found a ton of ants under some bricks in my garden.  I must have looked about 6 years old out there with my spoon and tweezers.  I was able to find a few of the larvae, but boy those little guys are quick at hauling them away as soon as you get close.

I added the ants to the colony, the kids thought it was amazing.  About an hour or two later I glance at the main pod and there is this huge furry beetle crawling around in there!  Aghh! How did I miss him?  It was hard to tell if the ants were attacking it, or if they were attacking him.  I looked it up and I'm pretty sure its a bumble flower beetle.  A furry ground beetle that looks like a bee.  They are vegetarian, but I'm sure their jaws could do some damage to my poor little ants.   I am going to try to take him out tomorrow, but it won't be easy to disconnect it without the whole thing tumbling.   By the end of the day I didn't see many ants left in there.  Don't worry, I trucked out to my yard again and abducted some more.

School Bulletin Boards

I'm not much for bulletin boards.  Typically, I do them in the fall, and never get around to changing them.  This year, I was determined to be better about having fun boards that I could realistically get done!  The trick for me was getting them ready in the summer before school starts!  I used poster board, the letter cutters, and laminated what I could so the boards would be ready, and I could just add to them.  The best part is, I can re-use them next year yay!!!

September, Sailing Back to School Board:

The back was ready, all I had to add was the boats and names.  Oh yes, I used velcro to put them up.  Tape never seems to work.

Next is my fall board for October:  Who's hiding in the pumpkin patch?


Sorry about the glare, but as its laminated, its hard to get a good pic.  The kids made the pumpkins, I was planning on those hanging green things to be cute little curls made on a pencil, but they came out a little funny.  For their pictures I brought in a straw hat, a tiny bale of hay from the craft store and some face paint.  My plan was to do little scarecrow noses on them, but some of them had other requests and I just went with it.  One of them has a black widow on his nose!!

December, for Christmas we did "Joy to the World" with a caroling reindeer:



The kids had a ball with the glitter glue, decorating their trees.


January, "Our School is cool"  snow globe, and snowman board


First I had them pose with their coats on, pretending they were standing with a snowman.  Then I gave them the snowman, and little bits of colored paper for them to decorate their snowmen.  I also emptied out my hole punch so they could glue snowflakes on.  I covered them with plastic plates to look like snow globes.  I had a little trouble getting the plates to stay.  Tape and white glue did not work.  Hot glue did though, and they loved their globes!

Animal Habitats Project

We had a great time in our 1st and 2nd grade, learning about animal habitats.

We learned about 9 different biomes using picture cards with information about each habitat on the back.  Desert, Savanna, Prairie, Pond, Shoreline, Tundra, Ocean, Rainforest, and Forest.  Then we talked about how each animal belongs in a certain place.  A polar bear could never live in the desert!  I cut out pictures of animals, (about 3 for each one) and as a class we matched each animal to its correct biome.



Animal Habitats Bundle

We applied what we learned with an in class activity where students had pictures to color, cut out, and glue on to appropriate biomes.


They also completed a diorama project, and simple research page.  I assigned each student a habitat diorama to create out of a shoebox.  They also had to choose an animal from their habitat and complete a research sheet.

Here are the assignment pages:


Get assignment pages free here:  Project Assignment and Animal Research
They did such a great job, I was so proud of them.  One of my students had so much fun on his project, his mother told me he has been working on three more!



This is a tree frog in the rainforest biome.


This is the pond biome featuring a large mouth bass and a turtle.

This project was a seagull for the shoreline biome.  I love the real feathers!

These are a family of cheetahs in the Savanna.

This student brought in real hermit crabs for the shoreline biome.  So awesome!

This is the ocean biome.  Nice pictures and colors.

The tundra.  Lots of info for different plants and animals.

This is the forest biome.  I love the little squirrel in the tree, so cute!

This biome features dolphins in the ocean.

Great job on the rainforest, packed with plants and animals, the parrot is actually flying!  I was impressed with the fluffy clouds too.  Very cool!

Pencils and Crayons...... AHHHHHHH!

Let's start with pencils.  I'm shuddering already.  They stand there.  Sharpening, sharpening, sharpening.  Oops, it broke.  I need to sharpen it again.  I'm loosing my mind with the waste of time.  I once had a student that collected the broken pencils leads in the groove inside their desk like they were pet hamsters.  I've tried so many things, but now in my seventh year I'm happy to say that things are some what better.  I'm not cringing so much.

Step 1:  Very simple.  In your school supply list request that parents buy Ticonderoga pencils.  They do not break nearly as easily.  They are not perfect, but they really are so much better.   (I make a note about how the better quality pencils save so much of our class time.)  Most of the parents comply.

Step 2:  Buy the staples high quality electric pencil sharpener.  It was expensive.  I got it on sale for $42 and it was the best investment ever.  Do not ever let the children touch it,  not ever.  It is "my precious".

At the end of the day my assigned "pencil police" goes around and collects the dull pencils.  I wait until after school because I want the student awareness of my awesome pencil sharpener to be off the radar of the kids.  It takes 1 min. for me to sharpen all the pencils.  During the day the kids can simply trade in dull pencils for sharp ones.  My sanity is in tact.

As a rule, kids have two sharp pencils at their desk, and I have a third pencil available for them in the sharpened pencil box.  It's working.  Yay!

Subject 2:  The crayons
On the first day of school grab your Sharpie.  I have numbers assigned to each kid so I can sort their papers more easily.  The numbers are taped to their desks for easy reference.  In the middle of each crayon write the students number.  When you find the crayons on the floor, you can easily identify whose crayon it is.  I wan't sure at first how useful this admittedly long step would take.  So far, it has paid off.  I found your crayon Jilli. :)

Last note:  I requested the small slider boxes this year instead of the big flip top lid boxes.  They keep only crayons and an eraser with them.  Glue sticks and scissors are collected in a community container.  The slider boxes are dumped slightly less often.  I would say crayons get dumped on the floor about 50% less than they used to, so its worth it.