I can statements

Well thankfully it's finally starting to be sunny and warming up here. June has not been a great month for weather. Today the high should be 69F and by this weekend warm up to 75F, and mostly sunny all week. This is excellent! Kids playing at the lake and me reading/taking sun by the lake is all I want to do this week.

I have been checking out these "I CAN" statements. I think these are pretty awesome. I am seriously thinking about making up my own for next year. I think it's really empowering for the students to know exactly what we expect them to learn in their daily lessons.

Speaking of learning, I still vividly remember 2 students from my last bunch of first graders. They were both insistent that they couldn't read!! They would flat out tell me "but I can't read", and this was after a month or two after school had started. We had already started learning sight words too, so they had all the basic skills to get going. So then we would look at their workbook and sound out the words together, for example "bat". They could too read, but they just had their mind set that it wasn't possible to read English. Today they are good readers. Just makes me laugh! I wonder how many will tell me next year that they can't read?

Currently July

Today I am linking up with Oh' Boy 4th Grade for my first Currently post! Yeah!

So this year I finished up with 2nd grade, and will be returning to first grade next year with a new lot of kids. I'm pretty excited! I could TOTALLY be a first grade teacher every year!! I even confessed it to my principal this spring in our spring review. I don't think she will allow that, but at least she now knows.
I have been blog stalking first grade blogs, since my current collection of blogs are mostly second grade ones. Don't worry 2nd grade bloggers, I still think you are excellent and full of useful wisdom! I already have lots of ideas for next year. It will be my 3rd year teaching first grade. So I am happy to feel like I have a clue how I want to teach those cuties!!! And when I think about next year, I mostly have been thinking about English. What types of author units I want to do, if I want to subscribe to A-Z reading (and I'm leaning towards it more everyday), how to organize writing and reading in the classroom, and so forth.

Here is my currently July!

Art - Ryijys and Castles

In Finland, the ryijy is a traditional craft made from yarn. Basically it's a shag carpet!! These have been made in Finland for hundreds of years, and they use to be used in homes as textiles. Nowadays they are merily for decoration on the walls. They can be also quite expensive, hundreds of euros, because of the amount of time that it takes to do a large piece of art.
I had my class just try it out and practice the technique. I only required them to make a few lines with the yarn. 

Then for our castles. We collected cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls for this project. It took us many weeks to accomplish. We also made a base for the castle from cardboard boxes (which I diligently cut in advance for the students). When it was all done, students then created characters for their castles. They enjoyed this project very much!

Non-fiction books and Shape poems

It's officially been one month since summer vacation started.
The summer weather here is not that great, cloudy and rainy. So I'm a bit bummed about that.
Some of our English projects for the end of the year:
- writing poems
- writing own non-fiction book
The non-fiction books was total fun for the 2nd graders. We had a few mini-lessons how to take the facts read in the book and rewrite them to be our own sentences for our own books. They got really excited about writing on sticky notes and collecting their notes. And wouldn't you know it, there was a handful of students that of course were not paying attention during those mini lessons, and did their notes all wrong. They had copied directly from the book. Well I decided they would then start again. I'm so mean!

Here are a few finished book pictures. Enjoy!

Here then are two shape poems:

Possessives, puppets and books

Yep, it's almost been a month since my last post (and honestly it doesn't feel like it). Life has been a bit hectic.
Possessives:
I have some students that are able to use possessives in their writing, and some that don't have a clue. I found some 20 cute pictures in PPT, printed them and laminated them. I passed them out to each child. They had to then find 5 different students in the class, mixing girls and boys. When they found a student, they wrote about that student's item (ex: Jake's puppy is very cute.) The sentences were not the best quality, but the focus was on using that apostrophe in the student's name.

Then we have finished up our last hand craft project, hand made puppets:

Then finally they wrote their own stories, here are a few covers they made:

That's it folks!

Winter PE

Well it just doesn't want to get any warmer here yet.
We still have plenty of time for winter activities with all this snow and ice.
Our PE lesson today was again cross country skiing.

I then played two different games with the other half of the students that were with me. 
Again we played the food chain game. This student was the fox and she had found two hares.

The last game we played was a vole and weasel game. We first all had to pack down the snow and make paths that crisscrossed. Then once that task was done, the game rules are as follows:

All students are voles, except those that are chosen as weasels (tagers). Voles dig tunnels under the snow in winter, and weasels are clever since they too go into the tunnels to find food in the winter. Since the weasels are hungry and want to eat the voles, they are going to chase and tag the voles. Once a vole is tagged, it turns into a weasel and the game continues until everyone is tagged. Now the new weasels help catch the voles that are left. The game ends when they are all weasels. Then they come back to the starting point, and we chose new weasels and start again. Oh and everyone needs to stay on the paths at all times!
They enjoyed this game very much. It is good physical exercise running through that snow! It is also a good game for teamwork: how to capture the voles with your team mates. If on a path that joins another, then they needed to trap a vole from both sides instead of chasing the vole only from behind.

More Solar System

So this week flew by, but it still felt great! Woo hoo!
We finished up the week with some moon phases cookie activity. I'm sure you all have seen this before. Once students had made the 4 phases I required, they ate the cookies. I told them though that they now needed to draw those phases on their paper, after the cookies were eaten. They all thought this was the best day ever! Don't you love the enthusiasm?

Then for art students had a choice to make a rocket or an alien spaceship picture from scrap paper. We have made many projects lately, and I wanted them to use up the scraps left over. See the large bin of scraps!

We didn't have much time today to work on them, but here are two that are almost ready.

Another activity for art we did was critiquing art. I looked up some art from the Met, showed them to the students and we told what we liked about the art. Then I had in advance put one number (1-21)under each students art work, which was hanging on the classroom walls. Then I handed out a slip of paper that had one number (1-21). Once the students received the slip of paper, they were to go and give a POSITIVE comment about the art piece. The other rule was that it had to be specific, not just "It is nice".
Today's photos were taken with my iPhone since a fellow college had borrowed my classroom camera.