American Symbols

Part of the first grade standards for Hawaii state social studies is to learn about American Symbols! My teaching team puts together these adorable books that I want to show you and provide some resources for where you can put together your own!  I've included lots of pictures, lots of links to products and freebies that I use, and also a freebie I put together for you that you can download at the end of this post!

We start by singing a silly song I found on YouTube by KinderBlossoms.  We then do a simple foldable in our Science and Social Studies Books.

I use the organization idea from my gal Corinna at Surfin' Through Second to separate my notebooks.  You can download the song freebie here.

We then make US Symbols books that I prep and comb bind ahead of time.  We use a combo of pages from Lindsay at Teacher Bits and Bobs and craftivities.  Each day we introduce a new US symbol, write about it, and make a craft.  We start with the world's oceans and continents, then focus in on our state in the US, Hawaii.  I like to play a continents and oceans song from YouTube, too.  I can't find the one I usually play, but there are a lot of good ones if you search on the site.   

These are some of the crafts we've done in the past. 

However, I switched some of them up this year.  We made the eagle and Liberty Bell crafts from Mrs Ricca's freebie President's Day packet.

For the Statue of Liberty, I did a directed drawing.  I love this one from Art Projects for Kids and also this one that is just her head.  The kids' paintings turned out beautiful! The parents loved seeing this project at Open House!

Speaking of Lady Liberty, I like to throw in this fun experiment when we learn about her to find out why she is green if she is made out of copper.  The kids love it! I bought this pack and use the worksheets in our science and social studies journals from Kindergarten Boom Boom, and also these directions from Buggy and Buddy.  I printed this out and put it by our experiments during Open House.  You can download it here.

For the flag, I cut white rectangles as the background, smaller rectangles for blue, red stripes, and then glitter for the stars.  

For the Pledge of Allegiance, I use Lori's freebie, just shrunk down to fit on the page.

There are a couple pages we made ourselves.  That includes symbols for our state and school, the White House, the world, and an assessment.

We also did a Lady Liberty OCDE Project GLAD® Pictorial Input Chart.  I'm becoming an OCDE Project GLAD® trainer, so I try to practice the strategies any chance I get!  The kids were fascinated that you can walk inside the statue and see out from the crown! I also wrote a poem that I included in my freebie.  

Via Pinterest

You can download my freebie with a poem, interactive journal, crafts for the world, state symbols, and the White House, as well as an assessment for free on my Google Drive!

How do you teach the US Symbols? 

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Nicole Heinlein

What's Going On In Wonders?

This past year I finished teaching a full year of Reading Wonders in First Grade! Phew! It's been a rough learning curve! Luckily for you, I'm creating my unit focus walls to make implementation easy!

What I've learned along the way is that the weekly tests emphasize concepts that aren't necessarily focused on if you are following the Teacher's Edition book to teach.   I realized my kids were bombing the tests because I was focusing on comprehension, spelling pattern, sight words, and grammar.  Most of those elements are represented on the test, but there are usually 3-4 questions based on the structural analysis and vocabulary.  And some concepts only have one practice book page and no other lessons tied to it! 

One week the structural analysis focus was final stable syllable:  RF.1.3e  Decode two-syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables.

I didn't even know what that was! And I've been teaching lower elementary for over 10 years and have a Reading Specialist certificate!  Luckily, I found out what they were on Pinterest.

Via A First Grade Teacher's Passions and Obsessions

A final stable syllable comes at the end of a word (final) and is always pronounced the same way (stable).  Examples are -le (table, apple, single) and -tion (contraction, motion).  

I also found this video to help introduce the concept to students:

Via Turtle Diary

The vocabulary focus that same week was inflectional endings -s, -ed, -ing: L.1.4c  Identify frequently occurring root words (e.g., look) and their inflectional forms (e.g., looks, looked, looking). 

For these lessons, I turned to a favorite blogger, The Teacher Wife! 

Via The Teacher Wife on TpT

My students have been practicing writing words with -ing and -ed in their reading notebooks.  We'll do some more activities from this pack throughout the week.  

Luckily, there are some amazing lessons on blogs and TpT that can be used to supplement some of these skills and standards!

 
Don't forget to download my freebie editable newsletters! And if you like them, I would love you forever if you left feedback! <3

If you are a Wonders teacher, how has it been going for you?

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Nicole Heinlein

Class Made Books

I love making books with my class.  When I taught kinder, we made one every week!  By the end of the year, I auctioned them off for the students to take home.  They were ecstatic to get to keep them!

Class books are great for writing opinions about books (common core standard W.2.1!), writing to a prompt, and also publishing.  One year I submitted one of our class books to Student Treasures (read about it from Laura Candler) and we gifted our hard cover book to the library.  Now students can check out our book!  So cool!

This year in 2nd, I won't do a book a week, but I do plan to make several.  The first book we made was an ABC book with all of our names.  It was a great way for students to get to know each other and to get silly with the prompt.

We started by reading the story A, My Name Is Alice by Jane Bayer.  The kids love it - especially since the H animal lives in Hawaii! :)

Here are all of our pages laid out, ready to be alphabetized.

Some sample student pages.

E, my name is Evelyn and my friend's name is Emily.  I like to eat eggplant and I like to play with Easter eggs.

R, my name is Reece and my friend's name is Ryan.  I like to eat raw fish and I like to play with race cars.

J, my name is Joe and my friend's name is Jaymon.  I like to eat jello and I like to play with juggling balls.

You can head over to my Teacher's Pay Teacher's store and grab a copy of this ready-to-go class book!

Do you make class books in your room?  Do you kids love it as much as mine do?

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Nicole Heinlein

My Favorite Things and a Surprise

I'm joining up with another one of my blogger friends, Mary from Sharing Kindergarten, for another fun linky party: My Favorite Things.

I really love my Macbook Pro computer! I'm addicted to FB, Pinterest, and reading teacher blogs!

Another thing I am obsessed with is college!  I love taking courses and I'm not sure I'll ever be officially "done" with school!  The class I took this spring had most of reading assignments as articles in PDFs, so I bought myself a Kindle so I wouldn't have to print them all out.  It is AMAZING!  Plus, I got to read Fifty Shades of Grey on the airplane last weekend and no one knew! :)

Lately, something that has been making me really happy is my Birchbox subscription.  Birchbox costs $10 a month and they send you large samples of beauty products.  Last month I got an awesome chapstick, an elastic headband, some perfume, some makeup brush cleaning solution, and nail polish.  It's super fun to get each month and it's not a big commitment at all.  If you are interested in joining, click here!!

In my classroom, the one thing that has made the biggest difference in the past couple of years is my implementation of the Daily 5.  So my big surprise is that I am teaming up with Melissa at Seusstastic Classroom Inspirations to host a grades 1-2-3 Book Study for the Daily 5! 

We have an awesome crew of other teacher bloggers who are joining us for the fun!  Each chapter will feature teacher bloggers from each of the grade levels, we will host linky parties so you can join in and tell us how you use the framework in your classroom, and we also will be adding in some freebies to help you implement next year!  

Who's as excited as I am for this???

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Nicole Heinlein