Teaching Lessons

A few people have told me during my time in the schools: "The most creative people teach first grade". Now I don't know how entirely accurate that is or if the first grade teachers in our school are any more creative than the second or third grade teachers.  But I'm definitely beginning to see how it could be true.

Those of you who have spent time in the schools, know how truly time consuming it is.  The job is never done.  I really should get back to my continual planning, but I thought I'd take a break and share some cute ideas.  

 I've been doing 2 guided reading groups every day since I've been there--which I've had free reign on.   I've picked the books, picked which mini-lessons to teach each day etc.  Tomorrow is one of my last days teaching them and I thought we'd do some fun things that focus a little less on decoding/phonics and more on the whole words in the story.  

Clearly, I got these ideas from Pinterest, but I think they turned out really cute.  So, I thought I'd share them for any of my teacher friends. 

This pictures is just of a reference chart that I made for the students.  The book we're reading, Who Spilled the Beans, is filled with adjectives (and they're some pretty hard adjectives for the level we're at).  Hopefully teaching the kids what the words mean and their purpose for being there will help them a bit.  

The activity we're doing is to place a few different household items in several paper bags and have the students feel the objects.  Together we will assemble a list of adjectives (words that describe what's in the bag) and eventually guess what the item is based off of our adjectives.  

Our next lesson is on compound words.  I don't know why--but all my life I've loved the concept of compound words.  Nerdy, I know--but I'm SUPER excited for this lesson.  Let's be honest, I picked out the book we're reading SO that I could teach a lesson on compound words. This lesson is for the book Pancakes (go figure). 

These I think will turn out really cute.  After discussing what a compound word is and brainstorming our own list of compound words, each student will have a chance to make a "compound book".  I've made one to model to them what we're going to be doing:

This is just a piece of paper cut in half and then folded so that it can open up.

They write each word on each flap and draw a picture, then they do our "word squishing" and push the two words together to make the word we write behind the flap.  

I like this way because they have to think about not only which words make up the compound word, but the meaning of each word.  With most compound words, you're able to make some kind of sense as to why these two words are pushed together.  

I'm getting observed tomorrow, so hopefully the lesson goes smoothly.  I feel like it will.  Thus far, I've figured out that my best lessons are the lessons that I like and have faith in.  Wish me luck!

UPDATE:  So my adjective lesson ended up being a HUGE hit.  I didn't have paper bags, so I just put things in a basket and put a pillow case over them.  They felt a really big twizzler and a lemon.  It worked really well.

I wanted to share the highlight of my day--

As we're wrapping up our guided reading group, I wanted to do a quick conclusion/comprehension check so we did  a whip around where we went around in a circle and each student quickly thought of one adjective to describe ME.  These are the adjectives I got:

"Peach" (that's what color I am)
"Nice"
"Cute"
...
"Huge"

... we then had a quick mini-lesson about the difference between huge and tall.  I understand where she's coming from, seeing as she's probably 3'... an adult being 5' 8" is HUGE to a little girl.  But it was about all I could do to just not die laughing.  Tomorrow this huge peach teacher is having a frozen yogurt party with her kids to become even huge-er.  OH yeah!