Halloween Inspired Wake Up Work

The week of Halloween is a little wacky at our school.  We take the week off from our Treasures reading curriculum and incorporate some fun Halloween activities.

I created a week's worth of Halloween-inspired Wake Up Work to help the kids stick to our morning routine.  It also serves as a grammar and phonics review of Unit One which we just completed.

If you're interested in giving it a try for free here it is.

Treasures Wake Up Work

We use Macmillan/McGraw-Hill's Treasures for our reading program.  I was looking for a way to provide consistency and reinforcement for my students, so I created our daily Wake Up Work.

We complete a different activity with our sight words each day.  Monday is an introduction of the week's words.  Students trace and write each word.  Tuesday they put their sight words in ABC order.  Wednesday they look at pictures using the beginning sound to decode their sight words.  Thursday they unscramble each word and Friday they fill in letter boxes (short, tall and fall) to discover each sight word.  

We also focus on one sight word a day to read and highlight.  The sight word of the day is also featured in the sentence on the back.

Students read, trace, unscramble and illustrate the sentence.  Each day we work on a grammar and phonics skill covered in our Treasures unit for the week.

If you'd like to take a closer look you can preview Treasures Wake Up Work - Unit 1 Preview.  Even if you don't use Treasures, I think this would make a great resource for morning or practice work!

Owl Inspired First Grade Classroom

This is my 3rd year back in the classroom after being home with my babies for several years.  I've been so encouraged and inspired by other teacher bloggers, I've decided to start my own.  Here's a little glimpse into my classroom.

Here's a view from my teacher table.  I decided to get rid of my desk this year to free up some space in our classroom.

I'm still in the process of putting our classroom library together.  My students are really enjoying this area.  This year I'm implementing Daily 5 and those pillows are a huge hit!

Another view of our library.  One of the things on my "to-do list" is to cut a piece of plywood to cover the back side of the shelves.  I'd love to paint it with magnetic/chalkboard paint.

Our author study board and books are housed in the classroom library.  Don't you just love David Shannon!

Here's our Work on Writing area.  You may have noticed by now . . . I dig owls!  I was inspired by many other bloggers to create writing topic cards.  Of course, I had to use owls:

I bought these bookshelves from Kmart for $20 each.  They do double duty and house our Word Work activities on this side and Writing on the other.

As I introduced new word work activities to the students, I put a label on the containers.  It helps my students know which containers are "active" and ready to use.  I just realized I don't have any owls on these labels!  

Here's a shot of our Morning Meeting area and calendar. We're almost at the point where our Morning Meeting time will be totally student led.

Here's our student mailboxes and extra supplies.  That's Miss Hoots up top, I'll introduce her a little later.  

Our focus wall is by my table.  It's easy to reference when I'm working with a small group of students.  

I know it's hard to read, but here's our class banner that reads, "First Grade Is A Hoot"!  We sure do think so.