A little bit of this, a little bit of that...

I cannot believe that February is almost halfway over. It seems that it was just yesterday that I was retraining reminding my firsties of the expectations in our classroom when they returned from Christmas break. 

For the 100th Day of School we decided as a team that we would ask the students to dress up as if they were 100 years old! OH MY WORD!!! They were too precious! I of course also had to join in on the fun and my kids thought it was the coolest thing ever. I have to admit that I enjoyed it too! 

We also had to have some fun door decorations to celebrate the feat of being in 1st grade for 100 days!

We also had a blast learning about the Moon! Thanks to Kristen Smith it was even more fun for my students. If you have not seen her moon packet on Teachers Pay Teachers, it is a must have! We learned about the moon phases and then completed a fun project using Oreos. It has been activities like these that are making me so excited to be teaching Math, Science, and Social Studies next year!

What sort of things have you been up to in your classroom? 

First Observation...Check!

Today was my first observation by my field supervisor and I was very pleased with how it went. I got 112 of 120 possible points and fell right into the middle of the Proficient category which is the highest that you can get. Honestly, I was a little surprised that I scored so high just because I did not think that she would do that on the first one. The things that I got counted off for were not big ones either, and one was because one of my friends unfortunately did not take her medicine this morning and she was a little out of control and I had to do lots of redirecting with her. 

When I am teaching I do lots of think-pair-shares and also having the students give me a thumbs up if they agree and a thumbs down if they disagree. One of the statements that I asked them was false so they were supposed to have their thumb down. I noticed one of my brighter students had his thumb sideways and I was a little confused so I called on him to share his thoughts with us. I had to giggle though when he said that the statement was false but he refused to give me a thumbs down because he is an Aggie and they do not do that. It was too cute! 

Another one of the really good kid moments from my lesson was when we were talking about organisms and that an organism is a living thing. As part of this, I asked the students to tell us their favorite organism. One of my boys informed me that Baby Jesus was his favorite organism. I just had to smile because Baby Jesus would be considered an organism and I just loved the answer. 

My observation form is a carbon copy and one is for me, one for my field supervisor, one for my mentor teacher, and then one copy also goes to the principal. After school I went down to the office to give the principal his copy and we ended up chatting for a while. We did a little mini interview and he gave me some advice about my resume and also some sample interview questions. He also told me that I am guaranteed an interview for any open positions on the campus, but that I would not necessarily just be given the job. I really respect him for that and am glad to know that I will at least get an interview. With the job market being so tough this year, he told me that I really need to sell myself. I'm hoping that my interview will go well whenever it might be. I need to get working on my resume now so that he can help me with it. 

Hope everyone's week has been wonderful, here is to it almost being Friday!

Inherited Traits

Tomorrow is my first observation by my field supervisor and I am nervous, but feel very prepared. Lucky for me, the 4th grade teachers have completely rewritten the CScope curriculum and created power points for all of the science lessons. Since there is not really any text support in CScope you pretty much have to do something like this. If you use CScope in your district, how do you all supplement the material?

For my lesson tomorrow, I decided that I wanted to create a few things for the kids to do to make it a little more interactive. In part of the lesson, the students sketch two organisms and then have to figure out if they are related or not. I made a simple graphic organizer for them to use for that and I also created a notes page that they can add to throughout the unit. It will make students list different examples of the traits as well as writing the definition for the three types of traits that we are going to focus on. The lesson plan that I have to create for my field supervisor requires an extension so I created what I thought would be a fun home-school assignment that the students can do that won't take too long either. Not too sure how many of you all could use these resources, but I thought somebody might be interested in them. 

Are We Related? Worksheet

Inherited, Learned, or Instinctive Worksheet

Inherited Traits Extension Activity

Inherited Traits Letter Home for Extension Activity

Inherited Traits Vocabulary Concentration Cards

I still cannot figure out how to do the screenshot when I am using Google Docs, does anyone know of a tutorial that I can use for that? I am thinking about just putting it on Teachers Pay Teachers and just make them free. If you sell on TpT, how do you like it? I am considering setting up an account to sell some things that I have created and will be creating in the future.