Super September

Wow!  School sure has gotten off to a super start here in first grade.  We decided to start fresh with a new theme this year.  Out with sock monkeys and in with...much to our students delight...SUPERHEROS!  We even went so far as to dress up as superheros on the first day of school, capes and all.  We took pictures of the first graders using a gigantic cardboard superhero cutout (we had to have them stand on the table because it was so TALL!) cut them out and had them finish the sentence starter "God made me a superhero.  I can..."  They added a background picture to finish it off. 

"Daily Five" Math

This year we set a goal to REALLY try and best meet the needs of all of our students.  We had language arts down...daily five had us in our groove.  Next was math.  We were pre-assessing math and using the information to differentiate the best that we could and our students were showing growth, but we just felt that we could do more.



Deanna went to a conference and ended up meeting a teacher who was implementing the Daily Three.  She brought the idea back to school with her and....we played with the idea...a lot....and well we made it into "Daily Five" Math.  We have just begun this journey, but are super excited to share our successes and our failures with you as we embark on this adventure.  Stay tuned for our email to parents, our organization tools, and some of the games that we will be using!

Keep on Dancing in Your Teacher Shoes!

Deanna and Jenelle

New Year's Resolution

Well, many people vow to exercise, eat healthier, become organized, or give up a bad habit.  We on the other hand resolve to get back into the habit of blogging.  We don't even know what happened to us.  It should have been SO much easier this year seeing as we are ACTUALLY in the same grade teaching the same thing ACROSS THE HALL NOW FROM EACH OTHER!!!! Or is that the actual problem...

Regardless, we promise to be better bloggers AND creators.

Keep on Dancing in Your Teacher Shoes!

Deanna and Jenelle

We've Been Grinched

It been a while...sorry about that.  We have been having so much fun in first grade this year that we have been too busy (a.k.a. Exhausted) to blog.  Since our last post was in the fall we thought we should at least get a Christmas post in BEFORE Christmas.  So here it goes...

On one of our many adventures through Pinterest-land we came across a photo that blew our mind and inspired us to go Christmas crazy.  It was a photo of an Elf on the Shelf who had tied up a Grinch stuffed toy.  So fun!  So we decided to go all out and had our stuffed Grinches wreak green havoc on our classrooms.  He even taped the Elves to the wall so that they could not escape!  When the students came into the classroom it was like an explosion of excitement and panic (Our poor elves!).  We took action right away and wrote top secret letters to Santa letting him know that the Grinch had been very naughty in our classrooms!  Of course we made sure to say how smart and wonderful the Grinch was out loud so that he would not suspect that we were tattling on him.   The Grinch also left us some really fun outfits to wear in his honor..AKA gave us a really great excuse to dress up!!! We followed up the next day by having our elves tie up the grinch and then finally on the last day of school before break they were both sitting together reading a story about the true meaning of Christmas (magically throughout the day the pages even kept turning).  We know that this post is BEYOND late, but we wrote it and never posted!!  Oops!!!!
Keep on Dancing in Your Teacher Shoes!
Deanna and Jenelle