Thrills and Frills in First

Arrrrgghhh you ready for some spelling?

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

AAAARRRGHHH.. Can you guess what phonics skill we covered this week??
The controlled -r (ar) pattern is my ALL TIME FAVORITE phonics skill. I go all out with my firsties and we become pirates for the entire week. I found some cute pirate decorations from Hobby Lobby to give our room the pirate feel..

This week we also read a TON of pirate books, some of my favorite are below.

We started our unit by reading reading Babbling Abby's Pirate Mark story from her Pirate Unit. Students wrote down all the-ar words from the story.

Throughout the week students had to find -ar words throughout the building.

Once the pirate map was filled we went on a treasure hunt throughout our building.

The Clues are from our Pirate Center Unit.

Here is a screen shot from our Instagram with more pics. (If you don't follow us on Instagram yet our name is ThrillsandFrillsinFirst, we post more there than we do on our blog ) When the students found the last clue a treasure of pirate erasers and pirate notebooks was waiting for them. In the past, I have put pirate pencils, pirate tattoos, and stARbursts in the treasure chest.

All our centers for the week all focused around our pirate theme.

Students had to Read the Room with their Pirate Masks. The cute masks were from Party City.

Like every good pirate they had to hunt and search the picture for the hidden -ar words.

For our Grammar center students had to read -ar words and decide whether they are a verb, noun or adjective. (Pirate bags are from Target. Sorting mats are included in the unit)

In our Writing Center students had to edit Pirate sentences.

To purchase our Pirate Center Unit click the picture below.

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SUPERHERO Sentences

Monday, January 19, 2015

In my opinion there is nothing better than watching my firsties become sentence writing masters. That being said… it is one of the hardest tasks for a first grade teacher. I mean where do you start? Punctuations? Adjectives? CAPITAL LETTERS!!!!!! The list goes on and on. In previous years, no matter how much I focused on one of these topics, June would come around and there was always a handful of students who still FOGOT A CAPITAL… My worst nightmare!

I started using SUPERHERO SENTENCE WRITING unit with my students during our writing block. They loved the SuperHero concept and for some reason it just stuck with them. From proper spacing techniques, to writing big detailed sentences, my kiddies were picking up on it all!

Spacing Sue Stick

Editing Activites - Whole Group & Independent Practice

Super Punctuation Practice - Kids love figuring out which Super Hero they should choose for each sentence. (The Question Queen, Exclamation Eddie or Period Paul)

Here Detail Dan reminds the students to add details into their sentence writing. These practice pages takes students through 3 steps of how they can make a juicy sentence by adding in details. THIS WORKS WONDERS!

Check out our Superhero Sentence Writing Unit for more super helpful activities to turn your students into writing heroes!

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HAPPY 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO US!

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that this entrepreneurial journey has been in the making for 365 days. We can vividly remember the day this idea came into existence. Just two best friends stuck in traffic, talking about our classrooms, lessons, and activities. It originally started as a hypothetical joke…” hahaha we should totally start our own Teachers Pay Teachers store…” however, another hour and a half into our ride, that joke turned into a serious brainstorm session. Ideas kept popping up…one after another. By the time we made it to our friend’s house in Connecticut, we had a notebook full of dazzling ideas.

From that moment, we decided to get straight to work. To be honest, I think we both thought this was going to be a fun, creative and easy journey. Fun and creative it was…but easy…HA. We quickly learned that EASY was not the case. The list of things we needed to learn, and guidelines we needed to follow kept popping up at every corner. We also realized that we were now having to think of ideas, lessons and common core related materials that would be effective and easily adjusted to a multitude of different environments, not just our own like we were use to.

Thrills and Frills in First has become a part of our everyday lives. Most days are filled with educating all day, and creating blog post and products all night. To be honest, there are even times when we are so engrossed in our tpt and blogging sights that we forget to get dinner on the table… All we can do is shake our heads when our husbands ask… “hey babe..where’s dinner?”. Oops it happened again. Or times when we are out to dinner with all of our friends and the two of us end up in a Thrills and Frills conversation, soon to realize our friends waiting for us to table our business conversation for another time LOL. Luckily we have supporting husbands and friends that realize our passion and creativity for what we do.

We wanted to share our excitement and enthusiasm as we reach our one-year mark. We are having a 1 Year Anniversary Giveaway Celebration. We have fellow educators and product creators who have donated materials for this fabulous giveaways.

The first giveaway is for K-2 products including:

Enter to win below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Interactive Notebooks

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Last year we began incorporating INB (interactive notebooks) into our curriculum. When meeting with guided reading groups I have my students work on their INB pages or complete the independent pages during their word work station.

I love using them because my students can go back and refer to any skill/concept that we have already covered in class. INB also help assess our students' understanding of skills, and it is easy to differentiate skills based on my students' needs.

INB are also extremely easy to integrate into any classroom, you can choose to do it during small group, or as a whole group activity. We typically do our INB on a 2 page spread, the left side is for introducing/teaching the skill and the right side is for independent practice.

Now, I know we all want our students to make their notebooks pretty, but that is not the point of INB, it is for learning. My students are allowed to color their pages if they finish their "must do" Daily5 work early. To resist the constant coloring of pages, I will copy the INB pages onto colored paper. By doing this, it makes it look nice, but my students aren't constantly asking to color everything in.

To make things run more smoothly, in the beginning of the year we complete the activities as a whole group and have recently begun completing them during our small group rotations.

Below are some samples from our Interactive Notebook Unit for First Grade.

To get our Interactive Notebook Unit for First Grade click on the picture below.

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Creepy Crawly Spiders... and FREEBIES

Thursday, October 30, 2014

I actually despise spiders, well any insects to be honest, but I cant negelect my students of all the spider fun that is out there. My students are always so engaged when learning about nonfiction topics. Below are just some of the fun spiders activities we did this past week.

We read a ton of spider books.

We also did a close read of Little Miss Muffet.

The Little Miss Muffet close reading activities are part of our Close Reading with Nursery Rhymes unit. Click the picture below to check it out.

During our close reading we highlighted rhyming words.

Defined new vocabulary words.

and answered comprehension questions..

We also visualized Little Miss Muffet and wrote the word that suggested her
feelings.

Common Core Standard RL.1.4.. (Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.) We visualized Little Miss Muffet and wrote the word that suggested her feelings.
(This Freebie is at then end of the post)

We also read Little Miss Spider and discussed her character traits.. (freebie at end of post)

We also made these paintings of spiders and wrote some interesting facts about spiders.

You can get ALL the materials above, yes, even our Little Miss Muffet Close Reading Activity, by clicking the link below. =)

To BUY the complete close reading unit click HERE.

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Pumpkins Galore!

Monday, October 27, 2014

With Halloween and Thanksgiving around the corner…what's better than a unit on PUMPKINS! Our class began this percolating pumpkin extravaganza by discussing their they preexisting schema. We cut out little pumpkin seeds to put down our thoughts and added them to the little pumpkin. I left cut-outs of seeds on the board for students to fill out as they begin to learn new things about pumpkins. This anchor chart was taken from The First Grade Parade and it is just wonderful!

To build some background knowledge about pumpkins…we started with a close reading activity based on the story From Seed to Pumpkin. This close reading activity took us three days and brought the students through an in-depth investigation with vocabulary, comprehension questions, finding and citing evidence, and sooooooo much more.

Students focused on finding text evidence before writing down an answer to their comprehension questions. We use post-it notes with the word "CLUE" to indicate where we found the answer within the text. Students are also learning to restate their question as they answer it. After the three day close read, students were able to find evidence, restate the question and use context clues to predict the meaning of difficult vocabulary words.

Our From Seed to Pumpkin unit can be found at our teacherspayteachers website!

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Teamwork Makes the Dream Work!

Sunday, October 19, 2014

There is nothing better than working with a group of teachers who collectively work to create the best environment possible for their students. One of the reasons I love going to work, is because I have a team of teachers who ROCK! We plan together, create together, thrive together and I dedicate this video to the them! (since we will all be minions for Halloween!)

In the spirit of collaboration, for the 1st unit of study "Me, My Community, My World" we decided to end the unit with a continent study. Each teacher took a continent and create lessons, activities and crafts for the students. We had a rotating schedule for 7 days where each class would rotate from 1st grade teacher to 1st grade teacher. Each day students would grab their "passport" and take a 45 minute journey to another continent. Teachers decorated their classrooms, and had hands on activities for the incoming students to participate in. From the moment the students walked down the 1st grade wing, they were transported across the world from continent to continent.