I am playing catch-up on my visual plans.  I am actually posting two weeks worth of visual plans.  Last week, we were out of school for the whole week because of an ice storm.  {Yay for snow days!  Boo for ice!}   We will start with this week's plans. My students this year are still having a bit of a hard time with main ideas and details, and this is a concept they HAVE to master!  So, we are trying Abby's Main Idea and Details unit .  It looks really great, so I am super excited about it! We will also be incorporating activities from my unit that supplements the reading series. We covered triple-digit subtraction with regrouping before we got our snow and ice vacation.  So, we will be reviewing it this week, as well as moving on to graphing and probability.  You can see links to the different activities we will be doing on my Math Pinterest board . Our interactive math journals will be all about dental health this week.  You can check that out ...

Amelia Bedelia is one of my favorite girls!  When we read her books, I just love how the kids crack up.  They get so excited in anticipation of what she's about to do next.  She is always mixing up the meaning of those multiple meaning words, much like our little ones can be prone to do.  So, it's always fun to put a humorous spin on the concept. I always use Amelia Bedelia to teach the various multiple meaning words, such as homophones, homographs, and homonyms.    I always tell my students not to be an Amelia Bedelia, which they take to heart!  We covered homographs a couple of weeks ago and read an Amelia Bedelia book each day to get us warmed up.  We hunted through the text each day for multiple meaning words and especially for homographs.  Homographs are words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings. Each day, we also had a fun little activity to go along with homographs after we read the story and went on our text hunt. ...

Valentine's Day is almost here!  We are about to get a head start on our valentines for parents.  I went ahead and made some models for my students to refer to during our craftivities.  They got so excited when they saw them.  They were all about these fun rockets!  Even the boys!   I used a combination of construction and scrapbook paper for these.  I think pretty much any color would look great on the rockets.  I have included four options for messages that will actually go on the back of the rockets.   My classroom has an owl theme.  Plus, my girls are owl CRAZY!  So, I had no choice but to include some owl valentines.  They'll be a great addition to a classroom door, too.   Finally, since they went wild over the penguins last week, we are going to mix winter with Valentine's Day with these cute little penguins. You can click on any of the products above if you need a valentine craftivity for your littl...

First off, let's talk about last week.  My little ones were all about some penguins!   I love this main idea penguin from Emily Education !  She has some great supplemental packs for Journeys. We used Penguin Chick as our primary text.  On day 3 of our close read, I always give them text dependent questions.  This week, they also got their little light finger trackers out.  I told them they had to shine the light on the text evidence before they could write their answer to the question.   We also covered adjectives this past week.  We made this little anchor chart describing penguins. Next, we did a directed drawing from First Grade Blue Skies .  They turned out super cute!  I gave them six labels to record six adjectives about penguins to add to their drawing. This adjective sort and read the room are from my adjectives mini-pack .   Now, for next week's plans.  We will be studying those cute little g...