Back to Business

Okay so today was our first day back after break.  I'm sure you can all relate to how painful it was waking up this morning!  Spring Break was fab ... the weather in Florida was SOOO perfect last week.  What a sweet taste of summer :)  One of my little darlings did help brighten my morning - she came in with a sweet little card she had made for me over break.  It read "Dear Mrs. Hagaman, you are so so so so so (this continued for the entire front of the card, the insides, and all down the back) so so skinny!"  Well, not quite the adjective I had been expecting, but hey, I can work with that!

I spent most of last Friday in the room catching up and doing a little Spring cleaning.  Things had been feeling way too junky in there for me lately and I've been super inspired to get more organized by all the ideas I've gotten from other amazing blogs.  I still have a long way to go, but I did accomplish a new system for filing papers, copies, and other weekly materials.

 Wahoo ... one step closer to conquering the paper flow monster that tends to eat me alive sometimes!  I also copied this great idea for organizing my teacher bag from Tiffany at The Nest Effect.  I already had a 31 Gifts Utility Tote (thank you awesome parent who is also a First Grade teacher!) so this sounded perfect for me.  It's only been one day, but I definitely felt more organized for the week!  Like I said before, the paper flow monster tends to get the best of me ... I'm hoping this will help things from getting lost inside that bag!

This week we're kicking off our Fairy Tale unit so I'm excited to share all the fun things we'll be doing with that.  Today we tried a fun new game during our Reading Intervention block that I got from Chalk Talk.  I've been targeting long vowel teams with my RTI group and we've been working hard to decode real/nonsense words with these patterns.  This little game was perfect for that ... they loved it!!

 It's called "Trash or Treasure?"  Basically I just took old scrap paper and wrote real and nonsense words with words on the back. I crumpled them up and put them in the bin.  The kids pulled them out and read the words: real words were recorded under the "treasure" column and the nonsense words were "trash".  Adorable!

Click Here if you would like a copy of the recording sheet I made to go with this activity!

Hope everyone is having a great week!

-Amanda