Open House Classroom Tour {Part One}

Open House... as I have mentioned before, I have a love-hate relationship with it! Okay that isn't fair... I really do love it, but it just stresses me out.... even if I try to be more prepared, even if I get help... BUT when the kids come in with their parents and take them on a tour of our room to show off all we've been doing...well, at that point I am in LOVE with the whole evening.

 Above is a shot of all most of the classroom. Yes, I am sooo lucky to have such a big room! And yes, I did share this picture on my Five for Friday... the rest are new!

 Above you see our "Fish Words" which are there year round {you can read more about that HERE} Then we have our chicks... one of the most exciting parts to Open House! The incubator is still out, because yes, there are a few more eggs! And to the right are cute pictures of my little ones- see below for a better picture of that board:

 We do some of our plant unit in the fall with pumpkins and then we revisit it all in the spring when we talk about the different types of farms. Each child plants their own seed and we watch what happens.

On my windows I put up our zoo animals.

Okay... so due to the fact that this picture is awful and the animals are only two dimensional... AND I didn't have room to put up their writing... let me share what it looked like last year:

Much better....right? Each child chooses a zoo animal after our field trip to the zoo. We spend about one to two days learning about each animal. Each child shares the most interesting fact they learned about their animal.


We have 2 different things hanging from the ceiling this year... First up are the "Math About Me" posters. This is a Freebie from First Grade Smiles. If you check out the freebie you will see I changed it a bit by having the kids create their own heads (I'm not sure about the choice I made)

We also hung our "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" clouds! This is such a fun project! This year I had one kiddo say, "I would like to make a knight." And I had to say, "Is there anything else you would like to do instead?" That translates to: Your teacher doesn't know how to sketch a knight for you to tear into a cloud...sorry!

We read the story "The Cow that Went Oink." If you haven't read it, here is the summary I put on the  board:

The kids also used SmartNotebook to draw a picture of one of the main characters. We learned how to use the speech bubble shape (meaning under the shapes tab you can click on the speech bubble)

We also wrote our own farm animal stories... this may be my favorite Open House project for 2013:

Sorry for the slightly out of focus picture! They worked HARD on these little stories!

Last item to share on this post are our two graphs:

What isn't shown in our dairy product picture is the sign at the bottom that says, "Ice cream and whipped cream also come from cows!" I learned long ago to take those off the graph because, Surprise, surprise we will have 100% of the class choosing ice cream! We read Gail Gibbons book, "The Milk Makers." I use so many of her fabulous books!

Last- Would you like to live on a farm? As you can see... for me the answer is no!

Part Two is coming soon!