You know your a teacher if.....

You know your a teacher if...

You just spent most of your supply money at Walmart this week... While your husband was at Scout camp I went shopping to get stocked up for supplies I'll need this year at school. My cart was seriously loaded with just stuff for school! Yikes!

You know your a teacher if....

While at Walmart shopping for school supplies you are digging through the boxes of notebooks and folders to get enough of the color you need. I needed/wanted to get 25 red notebooks and 25 blue folders. Then someone walks by and says, "What grade do you teach?" yup!

You know your a teacher if...

You go crazy for good deals on school stuff. While at Walmart I found these little packs of 6 mini highlighters for 97 cents. So I bought 25 of them, well I paid for 25 but only made it home with 24?

Then when I got home, I sorted them by color and put the colors together in the packs. I mean who gives a table of 1st graders a pack of multi colored high lighters? I'd never hear the end of it.. "Mrs. Shaffer I want the pink but so and so took it first.. I want the blue but he does too..." Get my point? So If I have a pack of 6 yellow and hand it out to a table of kiddos there's nothing to argue about, they all get a yellow!

You know your a teacher if..

You 2 year old is sorting by color, counting 6 mini highlighters for you and building with the containers. Ya, K was pretty entertained with helping sort, count, and then stack the highlighter containers. Poor girl has to live with an OCD 1st grade teacher as her mom.

Birthday Freebie

This summer I have found some great teacher blogs and recently found this blog: http://peacelovelearning.blogspot.com/

She has a great birthday freebie for all those teachers out there.

Play dough fun

Just found some great recipes for play dough. Going to try this one out with my little K today: Koolaid Playdough

I think she'll love it!

Last days of school 2011

Animal Books

Last summer I attended the first grade CORE academy and one of the ideas taught their was to help students practice writing informational text. They would also be learning about animals and their habitats. It was also a great way to keep a writing portfolio for each student. Each Friday the students wrote their animal report and put it in their file. This past week, they wrote the final report and I used the binding machine to put each of the books together. They were so excited and it was awesome for them to see the progress they each have made this year. Really! I had some students on their first report that barely wrote one sentence and by the last report they were writing 10 sentences that were written much more neatly and using capitals and punctuation marks.

Reviewing Fact Families

This past week we have been reviewing fact families. Each student had to choose 2 fact families and make their "ice cream cones" that represented each fact family.

First Grade Field Trip May 2011

Enjoying lunch.

The dads joined in and had a game of red rover with some of the students.

All lined up and ready to walk back to school. It was quite the line with 4 classes of first graders and parent helpers.

When we got back to school each first grade student enjoyed a creamy.

This year the 1st grade team of teachers decided to have our field trip at the local park. We thought with the high cost of fuel and hard economic times it was best to just walk to the park and let the kids play, eat lunch, and play some more. The kids seemed to really have a great time! They loved being able to play with all of their friends from the other classes. It was also wonderful to have so many parents come. We had a lot of moms and dads come. THANKS to all who came! And, thanks to the weather for cooperating! Most of all THANKS to the FIRST graders for being happy and choosing to have fun at the park, even if it wasn't Dinosaur park! :)