Laughing with Lane: Friday Flashback on SUNDAY!

Well hello long lost friends! I think I am finally caught up on life! The house is organized, my classroom is organzied, my kiddos are in a routine, I finished all my parent conferences (shout out to my awesome parents who came on time for their appointment! yay!!), Rudy is almost trained and my favorite holiday is this month! Needless to say, I am a happy camper these days! Now it's time to catch you sweet peeps up on all the giggles that have been happening in Miss Lane's first grade classroom! I thought I would like up with Amanda over at Teaching Maddeness to rewind our crazy week!

First Up...Bat Research!

Between blogs and pinterest, I feel like bats have been all the rage lately. I did bat research for the first time last year and was amazed at how much my nuggets loved it. It engaged all my boys like nothing I've ever seen and even my sweet little girls loved learning about these interesting creatures! To get them excited we talked about how bats hibernate in caves and when researchers study bats they have to wear a head lamp inside the caves, so we made our own "headlamps" that the nuggets wore while we researched. Kids love hats, so anything we can turn into a hat, we do!

I smell a freebie! Well since you are probably over bats and well on your way to Election lessons, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving, you can file this in your "For Next Year" folder! We used this thinking map (pictured above) to create our sentences and then the kids published their writings in their "Going Batty" book. We even made adorable bats from their handprints and some googly eyes!

Next Up...Main Idea and Details

I love teaching reading. I could teach reading ALL DAY LONG. EVERYDAY. This week we were working on finding the main idea with supporting details. In reading groups, we read some great non-fiction books from Reading A-Z. If you don't have a subscription, I HIGHLY recommend it! (It's a little pricey, but well worth it!!!) This group was working on our table whiteboards (best 12.99 I have ever spent)! This kiddos LOVE thinking they are writing on the table and even though they do it every day the love it with their WHOLE hearts and act like they've never done it before each time!

Finally...PUMPKIN carving 101!!!

Our class decorated our class pumpkin as our favorite book character. We voted and our favorite was sweet Arthur! After our fall festival we decided that we wanted to carve Arthur's face out of our pumpkin. We explored our pumpkin, documented our steps in carving, and wrote "How to Carve a Pumpkin" flipbooks. Such fun! I loved seeing their expressions as they explored the inside of our gooey pumpkin guts!

HALLOWEEN!

We spent our Halloween Wednesday dressed in our comfy jammies and rotating around classrooms with our kindergarten friends! The nuggets loved going back to see their "old" teachers and the little kindergarten friends loved coming and acting like first graders! The teachers partnered up and choose one book and one craftivity to go along with their book for the kiddos. We spent Halloween in Miss Lane's class reading Franklin's Halloween. (I love that book but after the 6th time reading it I was WORN out and had it memorized...I'm not sure how high school teachers do it!)

Warning: Ignore the falling letters and silly faces! It's pretty hard to get 16 kids to smile at the same time!

I hope everyone has a wonderful SHORT week and don't forget to VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!! If you need help deciding check out this amazing video from the sweet friends at Ron Clark Academy!!!