Shapes and more Shapes

I teach two math groups- one is working on first grade standards and the other is working on kindergarten standards. This month, my higher group has been focusing on subtraction skills while the lower group has been focusing on shapes.

We concluded this unit by making shape clowns. I got the idea from Cutting Tiny Bites. And, boy, did my kids love it! I started by giving them each a white piece of paper and having them draw a big circle on it for the face. Then they got to pick whatever color paper they wanted to make the various parts of their clown. It also double as fine motor skills practice which my kiddos sorely need. :)

 

 

Now, I know you don't know my kiddos, but each of these clowns shows their personalities perfectly. :)

I also came to the conclusion, that I needed a behavior plan for my kiddos (well, more accurately for their parents). Sadly most of my kids' parents aren't able to communicate with them (I don't even want to talk about that). There's been a ton of behavior issues between my boys- honestly, this group of boys is not a good combination. And my poor girls are getting stuck in the middle trying to keep the boys from acting out. So...I had to come up with something. I searched around on the internet (pinterest and TPT) and found this from The Kinder Polka Dot Patch. I needed to tweak it a little bit to better fit my needs...and I'm loving it! I also translated it into Spanish for a parent of mine that doesn't speak English (man that was fun...thanks Google Translate and my amazing aide, Christina!)
I made one for each month of the year and I know it's the end of January, but I'm starting to use them tomorrow! I hope this helps.

January...already?!

Yes, I know, I've been slacking. Honestly, I have no excuse other than December is a crazy time for a teacher. This year it  entailed a new student the day before an important field trip, an important field trip, being told at the last minute that we were to perform a song at our school's holiday show, 3 IEPs, my yearly formal observation (the final week before vacation!), and Polar Express Week...crazy, right?

Every year our district participates in Signing Santa. The adults (or at least I do) calls it controlled chaos. Imagine 50ish kids of varying ages (3-14ish) thrown into a school cafeteria with carnival like games scattered all around and basically left to socialize and play as they see fit <insert cringe face here>. Each year it's a big production and each year the kids love it! They get to talk to Santa, perform a song, play games, earn prizes, and take home presents. To them it's a huge success. To me it's draining, but I'm ecstatic that they have so much fun.

The day we got back from this field trip I was informed that we were to perform a song at our school's holiday show the following week... luckily we had just performed a song at Signing Santa and so we made our lives easy and recycled the song. :) Seriously, these kids are troopers- one of them literally learned the song in less than a day seeing as he started the day before this field trip. For your enjoyment here's a link to view the video of them performing at the Holiday Show (the end is the best part): Holiday Show

*For those of you that know sign language, don't judge the glossing too harshly, we were on limited time and it had to be kept simple for the little ones :)

**Michelle, we had the principal in tears over this and Jeanne approved, so the glossing is perfect in my opinion ;)