Candy Corn Quotes

My first grade book club has been reading The Candy Corn Contest, by Patricia Reilly Giff. It's a cute story about a fourth grade class that has a contest to see who can guess how many pieces of candy corn are in a jar. The main character in the story, Richard Best, is struggling with planning a sleepover for all the boys in his class, as well as trying to cover up the fact that he ate three pieces of candy corn out of the guessing jar.

I love this book, and I especially love reading it around Halloween because it means we get to eat a lot of candy corn! I always start the book club with some "behind the scenes" information about how candy corn is made. We watch a video (a clip from the show Unwrapped) and sample different flavors of candy corn. The kids love learning all of the different ingredients! We also have our own candy corn guessing jar. Every time the students take an AR test, they are allowed to come in my room and make a guess. Last week was a flurry of drama and controversy in first grade, as we learned that someone had been eating candy out of our jar! It was just like Richard in the book, only I promise I didn't plan it! Fifty pieces were missing, but don't worry--I had enough candy stashed away that the missing pieces were easily replaced.

Today we had a shorter book club meeting than usual, so I did a mini-lesson on quotation marks. I made a flipchart where the students could drag the quotation marks into the correct places in a sentence... but instead of quotation marks, we used candy corn! Here are a few screen shots from my flipchart:

The candy corn icon in the corner can be dragged to the correct place, and they automatically regenerate.

After everyone had had a turn at the Promethean board, I had each student write a Halloween-themed sentence using quotation marks correctly. They wrote the sentences on scrap paper, and once I had approved them, they were allowed to write their sentences in white crayon on black strips of paper. As a finishing touch, we glued candy corn where the quotation marks should go! They turned out pretty cute!

How Word of the Week works...

A couple weeks ago, I posted a video on here as a test-run for my new Word of the Week program... and now I am excited to announce that Word of the Week is up and running! One of my favorite things to do is to introduce new, challenging words that the students can incorporate into their writing. We have had a few different vocabulary programs in first grade learning services in past years, but this year I decided to try something new. Here's how it works!

Each Monday, I have a new word posted on my door, on a chart that looks like this:

I got the chart at Knowledge Tree, and I ordered the third/fourth grade level. So far I haven't liked any of the pictures that go with the words, so I've been drawing my own. I also made a QR code for my Word of the Week blog (click here for a QR code maker) so that parents can quickly access the blog on their smart phones.

Which brings me to... the Word of the Week blog! I am so proud of my blog. Every Monday, I post a new video on the blog. The first grade classes watch the videos on Monday mornings, and then the students can go back on the blog anytime, at school or at home, and watch the videos as many times as they want (the theme song, which was written specially for me, is pretty catchy!) The students are also encouraged to comment on the blog posts. Sometimes I have special instructions for their comments, such as naming a synonym for the word of the week, and other times they just have to use the word in a sentence in their comment. I have to approve all comments before they are published, so that keeps strangers from posting inappropriate things. Within the first two hours of school today, 15 kids had already commented on this week's word! Amazing! I've even had moms and other teachers leave comments! Click here to view the Word of the Week blog.

Finally, the weekly videos... I thought they would be a pain to make, but (knock on wood) I've made three so far and they've been pretty easy! I love iMovie :) Our first grade students have "buddies" in fifth grade, so I've been using the fifth grade students' help in filming the videos. Each week, different faculty members present the word and definition, and a few fifth graders give examples of how to use the word in a sentence. The whole things requires about 15-20 minutes of hunting down volunteers and filming, and about 30 minutes of editing. I'm pretty OCD about iMovie, so I have to keep reminding myself that the videos don't have to be perfect. I did go a little overboard for next week's video--I mean, the word is going to be introduced on Halloween, so I had to use some special effects to make the video look a little spooky!

Ms. Hunter's Ice Cream Emporium!

For the past few weeks, my enrichment math club has been working on a big ice cream-related project. I'm so glad it's finished, because now I can post their fabulous work! My math club meets once per six-day rotation, so it took us three weeks to finish this project. I have eighteen students in math club, so I split the group in half--that makes it feel like this project took even longer since I did each component twice!

The first week, I told the students that I used to work at Ben & Jerry's (true story!) and that I had decided to open up my own first grade ice cream shop. I hired them all to work in my shop. We used the interactive white board to take orders from "customers" and total up the cost of each order. I downloaded a flipchart from Promethean Planet to do this part. I'm not sure if I can upload a flipchart on here, but if you go to www.prometheanplanet.com (you need an account) and search for "Flavor Fiesta" in the math resources you should find it. I tweaked it a little to make the formatting fit my computer, and I added infinity coins at the bottom of each page (the students can drag the coins into the margin to help them total up the order, and the coins keep regenerating!) Here are some screen shots of the flipchart:

This was our final activity... keep reading!

The second time we met, I let the students get creative and invent their own sundae. I displayed our ice cream shop menu, and when they were finished creating they had to total up the cost of their sundaes. Here is the sheet we used to design our sundaes:
Ice cream
And here is one sundae that a student drew. I have such great artists in my math club! I wish I could post all of their sundaes!

Finally, on the last day of the project, the students made 3D models of their sundaes. Honestly, I was terrified that this was going to turn into total chaos. My tiny classroom has space for eight students, so my groups usually meet next door in the spacious computer lab. Since this project involved hole punchers and hot glue, I decided to let my first group sit at my table in an effort to contain the mess. Plus, I didn't want to leave the hot glue gun unattended. To my utter delight, I managed to execute this activity without a hitch! Two days later, when it was the second group's turn, I took them into the lab (I had to add a student to this group, so there weren't enough chairs in my room). Again, to my surprise, the lesson went well! No chaos! No hot glue burns! No tiny paper holes scattered across the computer lab carpet! Here are some pictures of the final products:

I cut styrofoam bowls in half and pre-glued them to the paper. 

This is the 3D version of the hand-drawn sundae I posted above. They're almost identical!

We used tissue paper for ice cream, yarn for syrup, paper "holes" for sprinkles, and polyester pillow filling for whipped cream.

I manned the hot-glue gun, and I glued the tissue and polyester if the students asked for assistance. Most of them did the whole thing with good old white glue!

She had drawn three lemons on top of her sundae, so she made lemons out of yellow paper. Cute!

 

And here is a picture of the adorable display outside my room:

Word of the week!

I am just running a test to see how easy it is to upload a video on Blogger. Looks like it's pretty easy! Woohoo! This is my first video for my Word of the Week project, which I am introducing to the students on Monday. If this is successful, I'll be spending my afternoon making a Word of the Week blog!