The Brothers Are Back!

Yes! You've heard us right! The brothers are back in action. Linus the Minus and Gus the Plus are our favorite math brothers. They have worked wonders with helping our students remember and understand  the symbols for addition and subtraction!

Hope you enjoy our newest Anchor Charts! 

Gingerbread Math Freebie!

Gingerbread Math day is on Friday (which is also a half day of school... WOOHOO!) We have already received quite a few donations and plan to pick up a few last minute things tomorrow afternoon. Please feel free to grab our freebie pack for Gingerbread Math! Hope your class has a great time participating!

Gingerbread Math Pack

Who knew math could be so much fun?!?! Not to mention, DELICIOUS!

Classroom Tour

                Just a little tour of Melissa's Classroom! Can you tell there's a slight BEE obsession??

Brittany's classroom tour is coming up next!

Bee-a-reader board- This board is where students hang their A.R necklaces and earn beads for every 100 minutes they read each week! 

Computer Area- All the classrooms at our school have 5 computers. They are ancient and make a whole lot of noise. You may also see my pinterest creation... using scrapbook paper on your filing cabinet is so easy and way more appealing!

Our BEE-utiful writing area was made using yard sticks and clothes pins! So easy and a great way to display student work. Beside it you can find our word wall (it was the first day of school when this pic was taken, now it's FULL of words). 

On the board we post our I CAN statements (Thanks Diana Jump). Also you can see our CAFE board and our Daily 5. Now that board has Essential Questions too.  You can also see part of our classroom library. All of our books are leveled using Guided Reading letters. The tops red baskets are "free choice."

A little view of our seating area. We do a lot of KAGAN so we use group seating. 

The rest of our library. We use laundry baskets as book boats too! As you can see in the pics below, they get really comfy in the library!

Our HUGE rover. It's a Smartboard on wheels. Yay for being portable and boo for being bulky!

In our shelving area you can find our "Bee Promises" which are the five whole brain teaching rules.  You can also find our Fasttmath hives. Students get to move up to hives when they master addition facts. Don't miss our writers wall is hiding in the right corner.

Thanks for visiting my (Melissa's) classroom! One place I forgot to capture was my desk area. Sorry about that! It's not much to see anyway.
These pics were taken at the beginning of the school year. Now you can find many anchor charts and BEE-utiful student work hung all over the walls. In fact, I don't think you will find much wall space left!!! 

Ugly Sweater Staff Party

Being two of the four "Cheer Committee" members at our school means we have to put on most of the events. Each year our school usually puts together a potluck to celebrate the holidays, but we decided to spice things up a bit and add a few twists! We are doing an UGLY sweater party with a white elephant gift exchange. This should make for some great pics for the end of year video and some big laughs!

What does your school do to celebrate the holidays??? 

Stocking Day

Stocking day was OH-SO-MUCH-FUN!!

We spent our morning talking about the traditions of stockings. (Sidenote: be prepared for MANY different stories) We enjoyed learning the different "stories" about how the stocking tradition came to be. We also read some wonderful Christmas books today and did a lot of think-pair-share (LOVE ME SOME KAGAN) to discuss different Christmas traditions around the world and within our classroom. 

In the early afternoon we discussed LIST WRITING. We haven't really touched on this type of writing yet this year, so we had fun developing lists of "what we hope to find in our stocking on Christmas Day." We added popsicle sticks to the top and bottom of our list to make it look more like a scroll. So many of our little artists added "art supplies" to their lists *adorable* and way better than a play station, which doesn't fit in a stocking ANYWAY! Still, many of them managed to squeeze it onto their list... sigh. 

We finished off our fun-filled day with some stocking decorating. The only table clothes available were from the luau we had last year so they were very "florida festive." Everyone had a blast decorating their stocking. We hung them all up next to their lists and they now serve as a fabulous little decoration in our classrooms. 

Check it out: 

Tomorrow is Snowman day and we have lots of great writing activities and crafts to go along with this chill theme! Brittany is going to a CCSS meeting all day so Melissa is taking on snowman day alone... no fun! Hope the sub is ready for a warm Florida day filled with snow!

Christmas Theme Schedule

This is our schedule for the last two weeks before winter break:

Each day we will do a read aloud or five and some sort of learning activity to go with our holiday-theme-of-the-day. Tomorrow is STOCKING DAY! We will be decorating stockings to hang in our classroom. We will be reading, "Merry Christmas Stinky Face" for no particular reason other than THEY LOVE THAT BOOK! Also, we will be learning how to create a list. Student's will make a list of what they hope to find in their stocking on Christmas morning. We also hope to incorporate patterns in our stocking craft to tie in a little bit of math.  Our first "themed" day of December is filled with lots of other learning activities that we borrowed stole from other AMAZING bloggers! 

We have so many festive things going on in our rooms this week! Can't wait to share the fun with all of you! 

Narrative Writing

Our county requires we teach Narrative Writing first this year. This is sad news because we've always taught expository first and we both agree that our writing program "Write Reflections" has a MUCH better expository outline than narrative. In fact, we are not fans of the Narrative writing template at all. The boxes are really small and we all know that first graders do not write all that small, especially in the first few months of the school year. Not to mention we love teaching writing techniques for story writing like similes, onomatopoeia's, vivid verbs, idioms, and show not tell. We have found that they aren't as capable this early in the year and we were able to get much better narrative stories second semester. We kinda just through up our hands and said, "Oh, well!" We don't have much of choice so we thought we should at least create a new B-M-E outline. We created the document below as a planning sheet/outline for students to brainstorm the beginning-middle-end of the their story before they write. It has helped tremendously! Now if we could just convince our county to give us a little more freedom when it comes to writing instruction!

BMME outline

We encourage students to try and create a problem and solution for their story in their outline. We explain not EVERY story has a problem and solution but most do! This is something we brainstorm as a class before each and every writing topic! Feel free to use!