Recycling to Help Save the World

Each year, my school has a service learning project where we work on doing something to help make our world a better place.  This year, my class decided to focus on recycling to help our world.  We read many books about recycling and then my students researched recycling even more so that they could become experts on the topic.   Here are some of the books we read.

Once we became experts, my students wrote a book about recycling.  You can find this book in my TpT store for free!   This book helped them better understand what recycling is and how to do it.  They also shared the importance of recycling.

After we became experts on the topic, my students then collected various recycling items from home to make recycled instruments.  Here is a list of items you will need to make a shaker, guitar, and maracas.

• aluminum cans
• plastic bottles
• beans
• rubber bands
• saran wrap or foil 
• cereal boxes or cracker boxes
• Easter eggs
• plastic spoons
• masking tape

Once you've collected all of these items, you can have your students decorate their instruments.  So you may want paint, construction paper, or markers to help them decorate. Here you can see my students decorating their shakers using construction paper and markers.

Then, we put tape on the cans and surrounded them with their decorated paper.

  Once they completed this, the students added beans to the cans so that they can shake!  Then, we covered them with saran wrap and used a rubber band to hold it on top the can.  Students could then shake them!

Check out my students teaching you how to make a shaker and showing you how to use it!

Once we made the shakers, we then made the maracas!

My students added the beans to the eggs.  Then, they placed them in between two spoons and taped the spoons together.

You can see my student teaching you how to make a maraca and then showing you how to use it!

Last, we made our guitars!  Students cut out a rectangle in the middle of the box and then slid rubber bands over it.  They were able to then strum the guitars.

You can see my students teaching you how to make them and showing you how to use them!

Thanks for checking out our service learning project.  I hope this helps you spread the word on recycling!  It is important to keep our Earth safe and clean. 

 

Daily Calendar Routines

Each day we have calendar time!  This is one of my favorite times of the day because my students are active and engaged with the learning.  It is a great way to review several math skills.  We spend about 20 minutes on calendar each day.  Some days are shorter than others depending on what we have going on.  As the year goes on, I add more skills to review.  However, we are faster than we were at the beginning so our length of time for calendar doesn't change.

You can see my calendar/math wall set up here.  I try to post all the skills that we review each day and then any other math learning targets we are working on.

We always start by counting to 100 by 1's, 5's, and 10's.  Sometimes I have them start at a different number to help them count on from any number.  

We also say the months of the year and the days of the week.  We review that there are 12 months in a year and 7 days in a week.  We also practice reading/spelling our color words, as well as identifying the coins and how much they are worth. 

We review our shapes and what makes them that shape.  For example, a square has 4 sides and they're all the same size.  We also review telling time to the hour and half hour. 

Then, each day we track the weather.  We find what the temperature is outside, look at the thermometer to determine what color it is, and then use the inky pinky to track our weather each day. It helps us learn whether the temperature outside is cold or hot.  We can better understand what the numbers mean when talking about degrees. 

We always finish our calendar time by completing our journal pages.  We fill out a calendar, a weather tracking sheet, and then a review journal page.  The journal page gets more difficult each month because we are learning more skills throughout the year.  This whole packet can be found on TpT at Growing Kinders.  It is an amazing packet filled with great review skills during calendar time. 

If you have a daily calendar routine, I would love to hear about it!  Please share a comment below.  Happy Wednesday!

Morning Meeting

What is morning meeting?  Well, it is a time for students to gather together and start the day in a positive way!  This is my first year implementing morning meeting, and I love it.  I have always struggled in years past to find time for it, and I am telling you it is definitely worth the time.  It takes a little longer than what I want, but I truly love this time we spend each day and the routine we have.  We cover so many skills and standards in the 15-20 minutes we spend on morning meeting each day.

You can see my schedule above.  I mostly have it posted so that I don't forget any of the steps.  (Yes, I am that forgetful!)  We start by staying our class mission statement.  We wrote this at the beginning of the year, and it is our class promise to do our best each day.  You can see them reading the mission below.  It's a quick mission that takes us about 1 minute to complete.  It's a great reminder to keep us on track during the day.

Then, we gather around the rug and do a little dance and sing!  My kids LOVE this.  We do the same song for the whole week, so by Friday they really know it.  I typically use Dr. Jean songs.  My kids love to sing and dance to them.  They usually have motions, so that makes it even more fun!  The songs help teach us fluency, and they help us get our bodies and brains moving.  It is a healthy way to start our school day.  Who doesn't love to sing and dance? 

After we sing, we sit down and share.  I usually have 3-4 students share each day.  My goal is to have each student share at least once a week.  There are some days a student shares even though he/she has already shared, but he/she is so excited about something that they want to tell the whole class.  So, I of course can't say no to that!  Sometimes I give them topics to talk about.  This teaches us how to stay on topic (good for writing skills), we learn how to tell stories in order (also good for writing!), and we learn to listen/speak in front of others.  Do you see all of these standards we are doing?!  It is amazing, and most importantly we are coming together as a class and building relationships. 

After we share, we gather on our rug spots and practice some phonics skills.  We use the Michael Haggerty phonemic awareness book.  I read from the book and the students respond.  It is a quick practice and fun to complete.

After phonics, we move on to our poem.  Here we practice so many skills.  We read one poem a week.  I use the alphabet poems and each poem has a puppet to go along with it.  My kids LOVE making the puppets.  Each day we read the poem and practice fluency (we use different voices), finding rhyming words, punctuation, words that start with certain letters, etc.  You can read more about my poems here.  I refer to our poem and vocabulary portion of our morning meeting as shared reading and writing time. 

After we read our poem, we move on to our vocabulary portion.  This is also our shared writing time. I introduce 3 new vocabulary words each week and we practice these new words by putting them into sentences.  I try to find a picture that would go with the vocabulary words, and then we practice writing sentences using the new words we learn.  We reread our story each day.  We focus on concepts of print at this time, spacing between words, punctuation, capital letters at the beginning of sentences, and many more skills!  You can read more about our shared writing here!

As you can see, I am a firm believer in morning meeting.  Everyone does it a little different, but this is the way I enjoy doing it.  We have fun each morning and it is a great way to start our day!  If you have morning meeting, please share below what you do!  I love to hear how each classroom uses it. :]

Learning about Famous People {Ruby Bridges}

During Social Studies we are learning about famous people.  We learned about Martin Luther King Jr. last week (perfect for Martin Luther King Jr. Day).  This week we learned about Ruby Bridges!
She is the perfect person for my students to learn about and reiterate how brave and strong she had to be during such a difficult time period.  She is also perfect because she is close to my students' age, so they can try to relate to her and how she felt at that time.
Ruby was so brave and showed my students that they can be brave too.  We read this great book (picture above) called The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles.  My kids loved it and held on to every word as I read.  Then, we did a fun activity to help us remember the story and discuss it.

You can see my students hard at work coloring the two school houses.  One school was Ruby Bridge's and one was ours.  Then, we discussed how our schools were the same and different. I found this cute and FREE activity from First Grade and Flip Flops.   

I put it together a little differently than she showed, but I thought it turned out cute!

This was a fun activity and really helped my students better understand how far our country has come.