Glowing Constellations!

I couldn't get a very good picture of these constellations we did a couple of weeks ago, but thought I'd share this "oldie but a goodie" idea anyway because the kids absolutely love making these! After a study of the sun and stars, I gave the kids half sheets of black paper. They drew a design on them with white crayon or colored pencil and also wrote their initials. Then, I gave each of them a push pin and they poked holes along their designs and initials. We hung them on the ceiling lights so everyone could look up at their wonderful, glowing constellations!

Dive in to Ocean Research

A couple of years ago, my first grade team along with our librarian began a tradition of putting up this display for Open House each year, and we still love it! After completing research on specific ocean animals, the students use a planning sheet to compose a research paper. Our librarian designed these wonderful divers to display them with. Each student creates a face, we place them on a diver's body, add a mask and voila! This year I added rainbow fish using glittery scales, but other years (depending on time) we've created all kinds of ocean plants and animals. Since we also do a kelp unit, sometimes we've added kelp. So beautiful and eye catching!

Ordering Larger Numbers with Bean Sticks and Music!

This was a fun activity to practice counting, writing and ordering larger numbers from least to greatest. Each student got a bean stick mat, beans, and Post-It notes. As music played the kids placed the beans on the bean sticks by 10's as quickly as they could. When the music stopped, the kids counted their sets of tens and ones and wrote the numbers on the sticky note. I had them write 30 + 5 = 35 for example. Then each group ordered all of the numbers at their table from least to greatest. We cleared the boards, repeated the process and the kids inserted the new numbers into the Post-It line several times. Great practice for least to greatest and fun with the music! :)

Doubles Land Neighborhoods

Teaching first graders to use double and near double strategies to solve addition problems is a difficult task. We made these little neighborhoods to help get a visual of the different counting patterns doubles and near doubles make including even and odd. The kids suggested the cul-de-sac. Funny!

Just some handy little tidbits about how to show kids the attributes of shapes in fun and more visual ways...

Corners or Vertices....









Sides... (Yes! I wrote on my manipulatives!)







Edges and Vertices (I showed the kids the pieces and built the shapes in front of them.)

Labeling Attributes of 3D Shapes

Our kids take 6 weeks tests in our district so getting from concrete to abstract pencil paper tasks is an important step to prepare them. I created this activity (see photos) to help with this. We completed this evaluative activity after doing the other activity I will post next building 3D shapes with coffee stirrers and marshmallows. The students had access to the real shapes while completing this.

Fun with the Sun

Circle maps about the sun...All of the words on circle maps all over the place drive me crazy, and my students have a hard time reading what they wrote afterwards. So.... we learned how to organize our info using bullets and some lines. Worked great! They could actually tell how many facts they listed and could read them! :)

Place Value With Students' Initials

Just a cute way to have a little fun with place value... Photos are pretty self explanatory. The kids had so much fun. My colleague next door, Ms. Pollard, had her students make the initial larger, and this worked a little better giving them a higher number of tens and ones to count.