First Grade Surgeons

Have you ever heard of a doctor that was in first grade?  Well at California Elementary we had a class full of surgeons today….contraction surgeons that is!!  Once again, I pulled out Contraction Surgery {made by the very talented Christie Berlener over at First Grade Fever} to culminate our unit on contractions.  We’ve learned about contractions here and there when reading poems or books that contained these type of words throughout the year.  However, we devoted our entire week to learning about contractions this week.  I love this little activity so much {as do my kids} that I always love to end our unit with it.  We learned all week about how contractions are really shortcut words for two other separate words.  We learned which letters to remove and that an apostrophe {or a band-aid} is placed where the missing letters used to be.  This kids got to use their scalpels a.k.a. scissors to remove the correct letters and then stitched their patients {or words rather} back up with glue and an apostrophe band-aid.  Needless to say….they LOVED it!  Check out our pictures below.

Penguin Love

I'm so excited about my newest unit I posted to TpT Flippertastic Penguins:  A Fiction and Nonfiction Literature Unit.  In the coming weeks I will be using this very unit in my first grade classroom.  My students will be conducting their first research project of the year.  I love teaching the kiddies about researching and they always soak up all the information.  Nonfiction is so much fun to teach.  We have spent a lot of our workshop time on reading nonfiction text.  We've learned how to react to information that we learn.  Now it is time to get our feet wet and conduct some research of our own.  Take an early peek at the unit...and I'll be sure to come back and post the pictures of our research once we get started. 

We are also currently learning about weather in science.  I'll be using bits and pieces of my Primary weather unit the next two weeks.  Today we learned about weather tools...most specifically the thermometer.  We watched this Brain Pop Jr. video to dig a little deeper about thermometers and temperature.
                                         

Have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE Brain Pop Jr.  We use it a lot during our social studies and science lessons.