Happy Friday friends!  It has been a couple of Fridays since I have linked  up with Kacey over at Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five For Friday.  So here is what I have been up to over the last couple of weeks.

One

Let me start with our spring break.  We had that a couple of weeks ago.  We left rainy California and headed to sunny Scottsdale, AZ for some spring training fun.  Our son is a huge baseball fan and this was his first time.  We had a blast!

Baseball season also began at the Dooly household.  I love this time of year!

Two

This past week was Easter.  We had a four day weekend for that, which was nice.  It was gorgeous weather, so we were outside a lot.  Decorating eggs is always a favorite for my son.

Three

In math, we began our shape unit.  This is always a fun unit to teach.  We began with sorting shapes and learning the names.  I pull out shape posters to help with determine which shape was which.

Four

We are wrapping up our American symbols unit for our school Exhibition Night next week.  Our driving question has been “How can we teach others about patriotism?”  My first graders have really enjoyed learning about the various symbols and monuments.  We have been using the American Symbols Close Reads,  Interactive Notebook Pack and QR pack to help guide our learning.  We have been writing caption sentences about each of our symbols.

We also wrote opinion pieces about our favorite American symbol.  We had to tell why we chose that symbol and we also added some facts to it.  They turned out great!

Five

Since today was April Fool’s Day, I had to do my favorite trick…the brown e trick.  We had a very busy morning finishing up our American Symbols stuff.  After lunch, my students were lined up and I told them that since they had worked so hard during the morning that they had earned “brown e’s”  Well, as you can imagine any first grader would be so ecstatic about this.  I even told them that we were going to make them ourselves, even better!  Next, I told them that they needed to clean off their desk area and be ready to follow instructions.  The first step was to take out scissors.  I heard one students say, “I’ve never made brownies with scissors, this will be fun.”  (hee hee).  Next, I handed out a brown ‘E’ to each students.  Some of the looks I got were priceless.  I proceeded to give explicit directions on how to open your scissors and carefully cut on the solid line.  I modeled what to do and then showed them my brown ‘E.”  I had one student throw her scraps into he recycling, you could tell she was mad!  I did finally tell them it was an April Fool’s joke and they would get a real brownie.  It made up for all of my angry students.  I love that joke!

How was your week?  I hope it was fantabulous!