Native American Week in First Grade, Sharesafe TV, and so much more!

This week we learned all about Native Americans! It is one of my favorite weeks to teach! You can see what we did last year here. There are some links for a video and an idea to help create an ambiance to your learning! I used the resources from my Native American Learning Pow-Wow resource! It is packed with cultural learning resources for your classroom! 

Click on the pic above to take you to my store to check it out! 

Sorting cards for Native American Life. 

Writing our Native American Names. 

Making Native American Baby Papoose's and using symmetry in our art!

The students had a blast learning about Native American culture. We made our vests, too! Sorry for the lack of pictures-- sometimes we just get too engrossed in our learning that I forget! We also read our story Baby Rattlesnake. See the link above for my blog post on that. The kids really got into the story and learned a little bit more on being responsible. 

Next week we will be starting long vowels with silent e! Eek! Such a difficult skill! I try to incorporate song as much as I can into my lesson so that my kiddos can sing to remember. I learn something easier if there is a catchy phrase or tune!  Before I start telling you about the videos, I NEED to share with you a great site to share videos with your kids! It's called sharesafe.tv (for some reason, the link isn't working for me. Just google sharesafe tv). 

(Please don't laugh at all the windows open!! I have at least 5 open at all times!!! Zoinks!)

These silent e videos are NOT shared via Sharesafe TV but it would be a good way to practice linking them!!

Here is a little freebie for you, too, to help you practice long a! I am a HUGE football fan although my team this year is not doing so well. 

Click on me to download your freebie!! 

Hope you all have a great week! 

Join Me for a Learning Pow Wow and some FREEBIES!

It's FRIDAY! Can I am get an amen? I am so pooped. My feet still hurt and I am sitting down-- that's how tired I am! It was a good fun week, but just tired. Looking forward to the weekend. 

This week we learned about Native Americans! It was such a great week of learning. I started off the week with a video of a Native American story-teller:

He tells the children the story of how rabbit got his tail. The kids were enraptured with the tale and had a gasp at the end when they heard the ending. Now as to the truth of the story, I do not know but it was a great hook to get them ready for our learning this week. 

Now I have said this before-- I am NOT a basal teacher. I only teach from it because I am required to but do most of my lessons from trade books. I decided this week to choose a book that many of you probably have never heard of:

Click to to take you to Amazon.com to purchase!

This is one of those off-the-beaten path books that is just a great book! It is about a baby rattlesnake who really wants his rattle but is not quite ready for it yet. There is a lesson to be learned in the story and all week, the students and I worked on key idea and details. We tabbed the pages where it showed he wasn't ready and they loved the onamonapias in this book! Towards the end of the week, we did the Fan Pick Kagan structure to help with their comprehension of the book and they really had to think deeper beyond the text and they did such a fab job!

If you'd like to grab the set for FREE click on the pic below to grab it. (I printed them on colored card stock and made 5 sets for my groups.)

We also worked out of my Native American Learning Pow-Wow pack

Working on the Native American Life sort.

Row, Row, Row with Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives.

Indian Baby Papoose.

I didn't get a chance to take pictures of all the center because I was busy working with them on vocabulary. They were just loving learning about Native Americans--one girl told me that she asked her mom for a dream catcher for her birthday! LOL!

On Friday, I had my homeroom class again and I decided to do have Learning Pow-Wow with them so I made a campfire:

And we all sat around it.

Some of my kiddos are not with me during walk-to so we all watched the story-teller. We made these headbands-- I remember making these when I was a kid! 

Kids can be so silly sometimes! Overall it was a great-- but a tiring week! 

Next week, we will be learning all about Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. I will be making this cute craftivity based off the book along with a few other things that I will be posting soon (after lesson plans, taking care of children, and being a domestic goddess and wife! LOL!)! 

I am leaving you with a little gift of THANKS! Please click on the cover page of the craftivity to download this cute FREEBIE!

Enjoy your weekend!

Lots of love to you! 

It's All About the Turkey!

Happy Veteran's Day! Hope you all took some time to thank a veteran today! If you haven't had the chance, head over to my bloggy sister and fellow Chalkie, Deb Thomas' blog, Fabulously First and read her on-point post on Veteran's Day. Click her button to take you there! 

In other news, last week we were all about the Turkey! Yep, we learned all we could about turkeys and works out of my packet:

The kids had such a great time learning about turkeys and learned some new facts they didn't know-- like they didn't know that wild turkeys were different than the ones we eat! We also worked on the skill re-telling and made my "Featherful Fact Writing" craftivity turkey from my packet. Look how cute they came out! We read

and did a retelling of the events of the story on the feathers.

They did such a good job! SO proud of them! 

We also worked on re-telling using ordinal words: First, Next, Then, Last and wrote on my teacher desk to re-tell our guided reader. YES! Wrote on my desk. They gave me a double take when I said this but they were ready to work! 

It's another great way to interact with text with no paper product and you can still see their thinking! Love it and they always ask now to write on my desk when we read to jot down notes or connections. 

I also started one of my two family projects. My Thankful Hearts. I posted about them on our collaborative blog. You can read about them by clicking here. I only had a few pictures at the time but will post more here this week. :-) The other project I sent home is our Disguise the Turkey Project! I always get such a kick out of this project (I think the original idea is from Second Story Window-- Thank you for the inspiration! And really, there are just so many out there! Again, I am not entirely sure on the original idea but I saw it here first and many other places! Again, if you are the original idea creator, please let me know so I can give you proper credit for this amazing idea!) On Friday, we read

A hilarious book if you get a chance to read it to your sweeties!

Then I told them all about the Disguise a Turkey project. Here are some examples from last year!

My son, Gabriel, told me that he wants to do Iron Man Turkey! How fun is that? If you'd like to do this project, here is a copy of the letter I used in my class so you can see the wording. I am leaving you with a copy of a blank template as well as the blank turkey template we used to disguise our turkeys. 

Click to grab this "insert your own text PPT file". 

Click to download from teachers.net

Just a really fun idea and the kids (hope the parents do, too) love it! 

I also uploaded my newest Native American packet!

Click on the picture to take you to my store to check it out! 

I am putting it on sale along with my Turkey Pack! 

Have a great week!