The kiddos learned, laughed, and made memories.

I learned, laughed, and made memories.

Fortunately I documented many things that we did during our “AR” Pirate Week, and I’m sharing them with you today!

The whole inspiration for this week was the “ar” digraph, or r-controlled vowel.  I’d seen some other teachers post about pirates when teaching this r-controlled vowel.  Well… I ran with it!

We did all things pirate in reading.  We used treasure (plastic gold coins) to review addition and subtraction concepts.  We learned about the ocean and shells during science.  We reviewed maps during social studies (pirate themed, of course)!

Here’s a look at the start of our week.  I like to vary the use of my can/have/are charts.  Sometimes I use one to get a picture of what students have learned mid-way through the week, or at the end of the week.  For our pirate week I decided to use it as an assessment of their background knowledge.  As you can see, some of those things are not necessarily true – but it’s what the kiddos thought at the start of our unit.

Throughout the week we read several fiction and non-fiction books about pirates.  This helped to clear up a lot of misconceptions.  Here’s a list of my top 10 pirate books:

To introduce the ar digraph I can’t think of anything better than a Harry Kindergarten song!  This one is AWESOME!

We also created a hands-on ar words anchor chart together after the kiddos had been introduced to the ar digraph.

I
love getting the kiddos involved in creating the anchor chart beyond
them stating their ideas and recording it myself.  Plus, they get so tickled
to use sticky notes!  Each student wrote at least one ar word on a sticky note to add to our anchor chart.

After some practice with “ar” words, the kiddos went on an “AR” Word
Hunt.  I made these cute little signs pretty quickly one afternoon using
the school’s die-cut machine.  The kiddos went around and recorded
words that either did or did not have the ar digraph.

We did another “AR” Word Hunt, but this time the words were spread
throughout the Kindergarten hallway.  Such a small change in scenery can
be a game changer for engagement!  The kiddos loved searching for words
with their pirate hats and eye patches!  The hats, recording sheets,
and ar cards came from another teacher’s product [here].

You can grab your own eye patches for super cheap by clicking the following link, Pack Of 24 Felt Eye Patches – Pirate Eyepatches – Party Favors – Costume .

We ventured into using QR codes with the iPads this week during Daily 5.  During Listen to Reading the kiddos watched a read aloud of “How I Became a Pirate” by Melinda Long.

I can now say that I love using QR codes in the classroom, and so do the kiddos!  You can grab your own copy of the QR code (links to SafeShare) by clicking [here].

During science we focused on oceans (landforms, animals, etc.).  We started off with some hands-on exploration of seashells.

Shhhh…. Don’t tell anyone, but I gave my kiddos the full science block of our first day studying oceans to just explore the seashells with a hand lens and their senses.  I knew the majority of my kiddos didn’t have any experience with seashells, and I wanted to give them the opportunity to form some background to attach new learning to.

The next few days we spent discussing how seashells are made and sorting them.  I let my kiddos decide how they want to sort them (in small groups).  As long as the group can explain how they sorted them, I’m a happy camper!

The group on the top chose to sort their shells by size (small, medium, large).  The group on the bottom sorted their shells by shape.

This little guy was listening for the ocean.  So cute!

To wrap up our fun pirate-themed week, we made a yummy snack!  We made blue jell-o together to resemble ocean water.  Then, we dropped a Swedish fish candy in.

The kiddos loved getting to help make our snack to end the week.  I loved secretly building in review of math skills we learned during the year. 

I secretly made these super-cute orange boats to go on top of the jell-o.

I added them to the jell-o cups while the kiddos were at specials.  They were beyond excited to see and eat their finished product in the afternoon.

Happy Friday, y’all!

First off, today through Wednesday is STAAR testing (our state accountability exam).  During this lovely period of time K-2 gets to pretend that we don’t exist – I kid, I kid.  Well, sort of.  We really do have to nix the outdoor recess, stay super quiet in the halls, have grouped specials… the list goes on.  Needless to say the kiddos start to get a bit antsy after being cooped up so long.  (Hence the zoo reference part 1)

Luckily we will be visiting the Dallas Zoo for our Spring field trip next week so we are learning all things zoo animals leading up to it!  This is helping to keep us a little more motivated to learn.  (Hence the zoo reference part 2 – see, I kept my word!)

For today’s Monday Motivation post I want to share a new resource that I created to accompany our zoo unit.  I love this pack for the ease of bridging literacy, science, and social studies!

The plan is to focus on one animal per day during the literacy block and then again during the science block (double whammy!).  As we complete each page of our journal I am collecting them so that we can compile them later on.  I chose to print the writing page and labeling (science) page for each animal front and back to keep it simple.

Today we started off learning about elephants with a fantastic story called “Elephant’s Story” by Harriet Blackford.  Can I just say that the kiddos were enthralled listening as the elephant grew up.  This is such a great book for introducing just enough factual information, while following an engaging story line.

After we finished “Elephant’s Story” we created a class Can/Have/Are chart.  I love how much the kiddos had already picked up on from just our first exposure to elephants.

I think Can/Have/Are charts are so awesome for getting a ton of information into one space AND are super helpful for struggling writers because they can easily pull pieces from them to write sentences if needed.

You can also see two of the other books we used throughout today (one for a quick Read Aloud filler, the other for our non-fiction science lesson).

After verbalizing our knowledge about elephants, it was time to write!  I am just so proud of how far my little writers have come this year.

I love how matter-of-factly this friend let’s her reader know that elephants do not eat peanuts, LOL!

Here’s a look at a friend hard at work labeling the parts of an elephant.

If your class is visiting the zoo this Spring, I hope this will inspire you to get your kiddos brains soaking up knowledge about the animals that they will be seeing at the zoo!  Click the picture below to snag your freebie by downloading the product preview!

Last month I shared about Sparkle (a fun, easy, and FREE spelling game).  You can check out how to play Sparkle in your own classroom [here].

This month, I think that you oughta know about a fantastic writing resource called DoodleLoops!

Before, I start… I want to say that I was not asked by the creator of DoodleLoops to write about them, but I feel so strongly about this writing resource that I felt you NEEDED to know about it!

So, what in the heck are DoodleLoops?

I’ll tell ya, but first let me give some background on why I feel they are so fantastic!

At my old school we adopted a curriculum called Writing Alive.  Now, I’m not going to share much of my opinion (good or bad) on the program, but I’m starting here so that you can see some examples of writing that we did this year.

Basically, the curriculum starts the year heavy on learning the parts of a sentence.  Great!  My kiddos became so strong at identifying subjects, verbs, objects, and phrases.  I honestly can’t remember learning those specifics in first grade!

Now this is no reflection on the curriculum as a whole, but in my eyes it was very teacher driven.  I get the importance of modeling, but I wanted to see what my kiddos could write about without me giving them an example first.  I mean, what would my first graders do if I just gave them a prompt or question to write about???

Coincidently I was struggling with finding activities for my kiddos to work on during reading centers (Daily 5), especially for work on writing.  I had my curriculum for writing lessons, but no resources for work on writing.

So, I started digging through some of the “inheritance” that the teacher before me had left.  That’s when I found a copy of DoodleLoops!

The idea behind DoodleLoops is that there are pictures (many times unfinished) with a simple question that gets kiddos started on writing.  Here’s some examples of work with DoodleLoops during Daily 5. (It’s ok to laugh; I find the banana example to be quite humorous!)

To make things easy on myself, I started making packets of these for my students with anywhere from 5-10 in them and extra lined space on the back of each.  This way my kiddos got the CHOICE of which they would do each day!  I would collect them periodically to take a look at what my little ones were writing about during work on writing.

I love these because the writing prompts are SO simple and easy to read.  I also love these because the prompts are so fun for the kids to write about.  My kids would literally beg for more copies of DoodleLoops!  I really feel like my students started to love writing more when I added these into our work on writing center.

Side note – I can’t stand the question “How much?” or “How long?”  I didn’t want to turn my first graders into sentence counters!  I would always answer back with “How long do you think it should be?” or “As long as it takes to tell your reader enough to understand…”  Something along those lines.  I was shocked that my first graders were already asking this question.  I’m happy to say that I broke most of them of that habit pretty quickly!

Now, I’m not saying that you need to go buy DoodleLoops, but I highly recommend checking out some of the products.  I will absolutely be using these in my classroom again in the coming year.  You can download a free sample [here] or visit the DoodleLoops TPT store [here].

Hopefully this will be a resource you may enjoy in your class, or will at least give you some ideas for writing time in your class.

You can hop over to any of the other great blogs below to see some more resources, ideas, and tips that you oughta know about!