Have you ever had a student teacher in your classroom?  Over the years I have had many, some good and some that needed some more time to practice.  But right now I have an excellent student teacher for the semester.  Yep, she has been in my room since January 15th and will stay until May 10th.  I am very lucky that she is so willing to learn and work hard.  She is the best kind of student teacher.  It has been easy to transition out of the classroom for parts of the day since I know she is able to manage the students in a positive manner.

Spring has not quite sprung and so we needed to boost up our winter blues behavior.  So we implemented classroom dojo and the kids love it.  They are super excited to see how many points they can get on their avatar each day.  After spring break we are going to give each student a punch on a punch card each day they met their goal.  When they fill their punch card they will get to pick from a catalog of items to do.  Sarah over at First Grader...at Last! has a wonderful catalog she created that her students can choose from when they fill their punch card.  You can see it here.  She has great ideas!

Our 120th day of school

The 120th of school came on our first snow day of the school year.  Then it was icy so we missed the 121st day of school.  So on Monday, when we finally returned it was technically the 122nd day of school but hey we are in first grade so we pretended all day that it was the 120th and went so fast I barely remembered we had had school that day.

The kids had a blast as we built our way to 120 counting by 2's, 5's and 10's.  Together we made a pizza counting by 5's.  Then we made a monster counting by 2's.  We got into small teams and made towering ice cream cones and counted by 10's.  It was a lovely way to start the day.

We made our own trail mix that had some of their favorite treats. The students had to be able to make 120 using the amount of ingredients in their snack bag. They loved the snack and it was a good way to see who could make 120 with multiple addends. Many students kept it simple by putting 10 or 20 of each snack type but others made it way more challenging by adding my 5's.

We spent some time making a crown that showed 120 dots.  The crowns either had 10 streamers with 12 dots on each or 12 streamers with 10 dots on each one.  They students loved making them and wore them all afternoon.

Celebrating day 120 was a nice alternative to the 100th day.  Our kindergarten classes have a huge celebration on the 100th day numbers so it was nice to make this a special day for our first graders.  Common core has first grade learning up to 120 so that is how we chose this number to celebrate this year.  The best part of celebrating for the kids was taking a well deserved break from the normal routine.  We love a reason to celebrate!