Famous American: Jackie Robinson

Our new Social Studies SOLs feature 10 famous Americans (Well, 9 plus Christopher Columbus...) Although we are slated to teach them as part of our curriculum until next year, we decided to get a jump-start.

As it turns out, my kiddos wanted a teacher-directed drawing for every.single.one. Unfortunately, I couldn't find lessons on how to draw all of them, but I did my best and the ones we were able to do turned out pretty awesome.

Here is Jackie Robinson. We made our own baseball cards using 1/4 sheet of construction paper. They had to write an interesting fact about him on the back, then together we learned how to draw his portrait on the front.

Pizza Fractions

Here is a collage I added to our Class Dojo page about the pizza fractions we made this morning. It was a hectic day (1/2 day sub, observed this morning, remembering all of the ingredients but forgetting plates!!!) and everything turned out great. 

We have talked about fractions for a few days, spent some time with fraction tiles yesterday, and today brought out fraction circles. The kids made various fractions, we discussed equivalency, and then they came to the carpet. We read Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza and discussed how the pizza would be split among the number of characters. Then we passed out ingredients to make our own mini pizzas (canned biscuit, shredded cheese, tomato sauce, and mini pepperonis, along with a fork and plate) and discussed the fractions involved (1/20 of the sauce was on Abbi's pizza, Braelyn used 0/20ths of the pepperonis.) They had an activity sheet to do as the pizzas were cooking, and then they had to split their pizzas into halves, thirds, and fourths before devouring! 

1st Grade Harcourt Storytown Spelling Activities

I don't teach first grade, but my school-bestie does and she asked me to create a weekly HW booklet to send home for her kids to practice spelling homework with. Of course I said I would love to! Okay, I'll admit it, though. I had an ulterior motive... if I could train the first graders to do homework a certain way, when they got to second grade (and used the Spelling Tic-Tac-Toe Boards I created for my kids) they would already know how to do some of the activities.

1st Grade Harcourt Storytown Spelling Activities

Every Monday they will write their words 3 times each. Unlike the boards, these words are already written and give kids a clear, concise space to do so. Also, the clipart is adorable ;-)

The activities vary from week to week otherwise, so kids won't get bored and feisty. Here are a couple examples:

I CAN Statements for Virginia SOLs

In order to post daily objectives for reading and math (in a way that my students can actually understand what we're learning) I create these "I CAN" posters to hang in my classroom. They use the current Standards of Learning for each subject, and break down the SOLs into separate (and sometimes multiple) pages for sub-SOLs. I used the Grade 2 Curriculum Framework as inspiration, but used kid-friendly wording.

In addition to posting them, I think I'm going to print them onto address labels to stick to file folders containing the activities that correspond to each lesson. This way I can be sure that EVERY SINGLE PART of every SOL is covered.

National Children's Dental Health Month

This month, my students had several fun activities planned around TEETH, and ended the month with an egg-citing experiment about the effects of drinks on children's teeth.

I love that movie! But I digress... What Effects Do Drinks Have On Teeth? is a fun week-long experiment where students will collect data on what happens to eggs when exposed to various drinks. I will warn you that the cups smelled bad by the end of the week, but my kiddos really enjoyed it. The parents at our Academic Fair enjoyed it, too. So did our school nurse. She gave each of my students a toothbrush and toothpaste, and our school counselor used an entire lesson to teach the proper procedure. In my packet, I also included a how-to writing prompt on brushing teeth.

Ready, Freddy! Save the Earth! Novel Study

I created a quick-print/easy-copy booklet for students to complete as they read Ready, Freddy! Save the Earth! by Abby Klein during the week of Earth Day in 2015. The kids enjoyed it so much they begged for another Ready, Freddy! booklet the very next week. I liked the review it gave my kiddos before our big reading-review test and we also got to check another chapter book off of our list. I was lucky enough to snag 20 copies from Scholastic Book Clubs in 2014 for only a dollar each!


There are 9 activities for students to work through before, during, and after the book is ready. Each booklet is half-page so you'll actually be printing two books at once. So simple!

The booklet pages are in black-and-white and contain a title page for students to color. It can be found on my TpT store.

Trading Ones for Tens

I recently added a new unit to my TpT store for students to practice trading ones for tens when learning to regroup. It's a very simple procedure that encourages kids to use Base-10 block models until they actually "see" what they're doing.

The set comes with whole-group cards for students to practice making and adding numbers 5-9 (regroup to tens), then a transitional game where students try to make a pizza by being the fastest to correctly make Base-10 models of the sum of their addition problem. Different levels of play have different toppings on the pizza!