Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits

Teaching with Heart and Creativity

O”FISH”ally in School….and a little bit of life…

To celebrate being official first graders, we did an art project combined with writing! 

We began with a directed draw of a fish.  It’s always amazing to see how each one comes out so differently. 

 Next I put one color of paint at each table.  The students were allowed to paint each section a color.  Even though I have 14 rambunctious boys and 8 sassy girls, they were just fantastic about keeping the paint where it goes and following the rules!  I have learned that this class loves to be “trusted” with big kid tasks!! {wink wink}

 After the painting the fish dried over night.

 I took a black Mr. Sketch and used the thick side to outline their previous sharpie lines.  Then they glued them to black construction paper for a bigger pop!  They added a big googly eye.

 We wrote sentences to tell about our fish.  This class rocked my socks off with their beginning first grade writing! 

 Since it is hard to read, here’s a close up…I also have a template without sentence starters which may have been a better fit for this group!!!

 I usually make this a bulletin board with both the writing and fish and it’s a bright fun display, but since I have a wall of windows this year, I decided to string them up!  It just makes me so happy!

 If you want to grab this art and writing idea, you can find it here in a set of 4 projects.  If you want more bulletin board ideas, I did a post that showcases some of my favorite art and writing here!

 It’s so nice to ease into school with two 4 days weeks in a row!  I took some time yesterday and went up to my classroom to prepare for week 2.  I put our new math tubs together. I am using all 5 math activities from my new FUNdamentals and Friendships unit and I began to pull a couple more from my Back to School 10 Math Centers Activities. 

 We are in a math adoption year in my district so our current adoption is out of date, and no longer aligns to the new standards.  Because of this, I created A Teacher’s Math Resource to help guide my instruction to meet all standards in a sequential way.  Last week we began with a couple number sense lessons which you can check out here.  This week, we will continue with number sense.  A big inspiration for me with figuring out ways to make it fun and engaging for the kids are these posts by Cara which you can check out here and here.  She’s always thinking of ways to make math come to life!

If you notice in this picture below, I have a math wall where I show the essential questions and big ideas that we are working on as well as math words.  I also made student friendly concept posters to help your students relate to the big ideas.  You can get the first math unit of study for free here.  If you like it I have the entire first semester finished and for sale here. 

The amazing Gladys at Teaching in High Heels has a cute set of math posters called Marvelous Mathematicians. 

Her posters focus on the thinking process for solving math problems.  Check them out here!

On a more personal note we have made some home improvements!  After living in our home for 7 years, we finally added a fence!!!  You may know that we have two crazy dogs.  One large and overly hairy golden mix and one pretentious toy poodle. 

So here’s the house with the fence!!! So exciting!   Can you see it?  Well in person it is very visible.  This picture isn’t working out the way I hoped.

 left hand side close up

 Right hand side close up

But before you get too impressed…I came home on the first day of school to find a flooded kitchen.  So we had no water in our kitchen the first week and these fans blowing all night and all morning.

Here my kids are eating their breakfast in a mess of fans and torn up baseboards.  Now normally no one comes over unless my kitchen is clean and now I am showing it to you in it’s worst condition.  When life happens, you just get real.  This is what I have going on right now.  The fans are so loud that I can’t hear the keys clicking as I type. 

Well I am off to dinner with my family…One good thing about a messed up kitchen with no water?!?!  Mama can’t cook very much!!!!
Take Care Bloggy Friends and enjoy your Labor Day! 

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    Comments

    3. Ms Apple Blossoms says

      Love those fish! Those are adorable!

      Sorry about the water accident…that is no fun. And agreed, your house is beautiful. I also just read your post about taking it off the market. Such a beautiful post. I'm so glad you were able to come through that time and I think posting it really helps us remember just how human we are and how real life is.

      Reply

    12. Lisa says

      It's great that your kids get more responsible with "big kids tasks" 😉 The fish look really great.
      When you wrote about your math standards I realized something I never thought about since a started reading blogs by teachers from the US. Nobody seems to be using textbooks or other prewritten resources in elementary schools. I only read about things the teachers made themselves. Here in Germany there are some teachers who teach completely without prewritten materials, but they are rare. There is a really big market of schoolbooks and exercise books for very different teaching styles and methods and I only heard about teachers who didn't like the material their school already bought, who don't use any.
      Do you or anybody else know why you don't seem to work that way? Is it a money issue or are the things available not good? I thought about it, because here they have to adapt the material whenever they change the standards…

      Reply

      • ReaganTunstall says

        We have an adopted curriculum here. Our math standards changed through the state. Because of this the current text book no longer aligns to the new standards. This year we will be choosing a new adoption that will align. Most teachers use both textbook and teacher created materials where I work. Great question!

        Reply

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    24. Jessica Everett says

      Do you have a current link to the fish art? I am not seeing it in your store.

      Thanks!

      Reply

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