Five for Friday {Linky Party}

I am so excited to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!  I always love reading these posts on everyone's blogs and now it is my turn to get in on the action.

So here it goes...

 We have been working so hard on informative writing in my classroom and the students have done such a great job!  

We started off by introducing informative writing using the are, can, have layout (the kids LOVE this).  Here is the organizer that we used - click on the picture to download a few different options of the organizer.

We spent a lot of time working on brainstorming.  When the students had that down, we moved on to adding details...which started off like pulling teeth slow.  It took a lot of modeling to help the students understand that the detail had to actually give more information about the sentence it was connected to.  After weeks of modeling and practicing we were finally ready to try it out on our pumpkin writing.  And I am thrilled to say that they did a great job!  Here are a few of the writings:

(I forgot to take a picture of the second page if their writing ran over!  Oops...)

I am so proud of them and how well they did on these!  I can't wait to see how their writing continues to improve throughout the year.

This one goes with the pumpkin writing.  A first grade writing wouldn't be complete without a craft!!

We used small orange paper squares and covered a paper plate to make it look like a pumpkin.  Then, I gave each student a small piece of brown and green paper and they made a stem and leaves.  I love how each one is unique!  It was amazing to watch how carefully they worked on these.  When I modeled it for them, I just glued the orange squares on the paper plate haphazardly...not the students!  They were so meticulous about it - it was cute to watch (:  I think it brightened up our little hallway.

This one is a random 'ah-ha' moment.  

My husband and I love to play games - board games, card games, word games - you name it and we play it.  One of our favorite games is Phase 10.

Something that we always struggled with was keeping track of what phase we were on.  Until now.  Enter the paperclip tracker.  Yep, it is as easy as that!  We put a paperclip on each card and now we can just slide it down to keep track of what phase we are on.  (By the way I won last night!)

I can't believe that it is almost Halloween!

I love decorating for holidays and we started putting up our Halloween decor this weekend.  Our neighbor had a Halloween party last weekend and she had spiderwebs on all of her picture frames.  I loved how it looked (and how easy it was) so I stole the idea for my own house.

We have only lived in our house for three years, so I do not have very many decorations, but it is fun to add a little bit every year (especially when I am able to save so much at the sales afterwards).

This is something new that I have been working on...and I can't wait to share it with you (and get some feedback)!

There are so many great interactive notebooks available.  I use them weekly and my kids love them!  I am even in the process of making some of my own.  But as much as I absolutely love interactive notebooks, sometimes I just need something quick and easy.  So I created a phonics booklet.  Each page is a quick activity that allows the students to work with the phonics skill.  The students could do one page each day or they could complete the booklet it one sitting.  

Here is what it looks like:

There are 10 pages for the students to complete.  Each page has a different activity that corresponds with the phonics skill.  Here are some close ups of a few of the pages:

Here are all of the pages that are included in the book.

I would love to hear your feedback!  My goal is to have all of the short vowel phonics booklets completed by the end of the month. 

There is a peek at all of the random things from the week - enjoy your Friday!