I don’t think I’ve ever been as ready for Friday afternoon to come as yesterday! It’s been quite the week (and a half) since I last blogged. I’ve been so busy that I keep forgetting to share a photo a day! Anyways, I’ve decided, instead of trying to catch up on ten days of pictures, I would toss them all into a post today! Since we last spoke, I’ve had my first 100th day of school as a teacher, explored a waterfall and sat underneath it, enjoyed some rain, and much more! So, let’s get to it!
About a week ago, I was sitting at the table getting ready to cook dinner, when I heard the sound of water sprinkling on our roof. I looked outside to see blue sky and sun, but then realized it was actually raining (for the first time in a while)!! We are in a transition between hot and dry to cool and rainy. I really enjoy the rain, especially to cool things off, but now it’s been hot and humid. I’m so excited for the rains to come!
I was trying to decide what to do for Valentine’s Day with my first graders, as the holiday is getting a little bit more popular over here. I found this idea from Fluttering Through First Grade to make compli-mats to help students see the good in one another. So I taught a minilesson on what a compliment is, how to give a good compliment, and examples of good compliments you can give. Then, I made our Compli-mats using some heart clipart from The Learning Tree. If you would like to use this compli-mat, download it free here! We started this by each complimenting ourselves, for practice. Then, I went around and complimented each student, and wrote it on their mat. After that, they scooted around to each other’s desks to share the love! Most of them did pretty well with this, after some practice. The last step is decorating them! I let them use markers to make the words stand out and to decorate the heart, which they loved!
Valentine’s Day is also my roommate Taylor’s birthday! A group of us drove to this beautiful waterfall, called Marangu Falls, to celebrate her birthday! It was so gorgeous, and lots of fun! I’ll have a more detailed post about it soon!
On Monday we learned about how the moon got its craters! I found this incredible activity from A Day in First Grade, that my students LOVED! We went outside for this activity, because it is a messy one. I did a little teaching on asteroids before getting going,because I knew my students wouldn’t have been able to concentrate if we had started the activity before the lesson. We talked about what asteroids are, what they do in space, and how they can get out of orbit and crash into planets and moons. We had a good discussion on this, and then I had one helper pour flour into a round dish all the way to the top, and another helper pat it smooth on the top. I made three balls of homemade playdough (small, medium, large) and we pretended like these were the asteroids. We began by predicting what we think would happen when we dropped the asteroids on the moon. What would be different about the small one to the big one? Then I began having volunteers come up and drop the asteroids on the moon, standing on the ground. After it fell, I would pick it up and we would examine the crater, and compare them to each other. After we got through all three just standing on the ground, we had three more volunteers stand on chairs, and drop them. We thought about what might change in the craters from the different heights, and what would stay the same. I loved seeing their faces every time a crater was made! It was a very exploratory activity, and we all had fun!
I just love these kids! So many cultures in one classroom! They are so precious to me!
On day this week, we woke up to SNOW…on top of Kili! There was some serious powder up there, and it looked stunning! This is a view at Hope, the school where I teach. My classroom is on the right.
This week we learned about greater than, less than, and equal to in math, and we had an alligator friend come help us out! We made these cute alligator/symbols on Monday, and practiced all week, deciding which number was biggest, and having the gator’s mouth open to that number, because he always wants to chomp the bigger number.
Friday was our 100th day of school! And my first one as a teacher! It was so fun, and so crazy! I’m definitely planning a post about this day all by itself, so watch out for that coming soon!
If you made it to the end of this post, you are awesome! I hope you had a great week! As you can see, mine has been jam-packed full of goodness and fun! Starting out again on my photo a day with day 22, tomorrow!
Much Love, Allie
