Before and After, Go Fish!

It's Go Fish, but the students will ask for the number that goes before or after the number they have.

We learned how important this skill is for kids in Strength in Number training through our district. First graders need practice crossing over the decades, so I made sure to include each one up to 100.

It is also in our new Alaska Standards:

1.CC.3. Order numbers from 1-100. Demonstrate ability in counting forward and backward.

So here it is. You have to click on it to see the whole thing.


I'm going to start off by having them work with an adult. Then they can play by themselves at Workplace time. (Maybe...we'll see!)
If you see any mistakes, please let me know so I can fix it!

Where is our class?

Every year I mean to make a sign to let people know where our class is, and every year things get too busy. Imagine that, teaching too busy!

So this year I decided to make one while I was watching TV during summer break. It's a lot easier to be creative when there's not a million things flying through my head. You can click on the picture to download. I left one blank to write in your own place.

I am going to decorate a clothes pin and have a student move the pin when we leave the classroom. It will be a classroom job...which is another chart I need to make!

Hope you are finding time to be creative!

More Shared Journals

Here are a few more shared journals I'm going to use this year. Feel free to use any that you like. The lettering and graphics are from Lettering Delights.

This journal will be for sharing our best days ever. I hope to encourage the use of adjectives. Maybe students will copy and use them from the cover.


Students can write about their favorite animals and their pets in here.


I hope students can share about their favorite books and inspire others to read them, too. I will need to teach about not spoiling the end, giving reasons to read the book, who will be interested in it, etc. I think I will need to write a sample page to give them ideas. I want to write comments to each student's writing, too, since I don't do that with their monthly journals anymore.


I think this one will be easy for the kids to write in. I think it will be the first one I introduce.


If you have ideas for other shared journal, let me know and I'll see what I can do!
That's the scoop from the zoo today!

I was reading about shared journals over at Delightful Daily 5 Cafe. She explains each component of Daily 5 so well. I highly recommend reading some of her posts. This particular post was about introducing Work on Writing to the class, and she reintroduced me to Shared Journals. I remember trying them back when I taught 5th grade, but haven't thought about them since coming down to primary. She had some great ideas and I am going to try it this year.

Here are some journals I came up with. I will glue these sheets onto spiral notebooks (if Walmart carries them in Kodiak this year...). You can click on the picture to download each page.For the students to record their owies.For students to record their favorite things in the whole world.
For students to share their recess shenanigans (instead of telling me!).

I'm picturing students choosing a journal at Work on Writing time, reading what others wrote, commenting on other students' "posts" or starting a new page with their own ideas. We'll see how it goes - I may need to make a T-Chart to share my expectations!

That's my thought from the zoo today!

Classroom Coupons

Pintrest is awesome! I found some super cute classroom coupons on Pintrest from Seusstastic Classroom Inspirations. She has some great coupons to download for free, which got me thinking. So, I made some others that I can use in my classroom, and I thought I'd share a couple.

You can download these by clicking on the pictures.

I think I'll only let the kids redeem their coupons on Fridays to cut down on chaos. (I don't like chaos!)

I'm going to put these in my prize box, which is only going to have pencils, erasers, and coupons this year. It gets so expensive trying to keep a prize box full being an hour's flight from a dollar store!
(Is there one in Anchorage? I don't know. I usually fly to California to shop a dollar store and that's a lot farther away!)

If anyone has more ideas for coupons, let me hear them.
That's all from the zoo today!