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I may be a bit late but...Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful, relaxing, much-needed winter break. Personally, I spent my time off wedding planning with my fiance. We are so excited for what this year will bring for us!
I may be a bit late but...Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful, relaxing, much-needed winter break. Personally, I spent my time off wedding planning with my fiance. We are so excited for what this year will bring for us!
Coming back from break has always been hard for me...and not just because I have to start wearing real pants again. I always hit the hard realization that half of the school year is over and start to panic. Are my students halfway to their reading goals? Have I covered enough standards? Will we meet our SLO? My natural reaction is to come back in January with my eye on the prize, hitting the ground running and never looking back.
While I may have had good intentions, I was always met with resistance from my firsties. Who can blame them? They come back from break refreshed...but also wildly out of routine. This year, I slowed it down for our first couple days back, in hopes for a better transition. Check out these awesome FREEBIES for some winter fun and an easy transition back into your normal routine!
Here in Ohio, if there’s one thing I can guarantee for each January, it’s snow. Lots and lots and LOTS of snow…which makes snowmen the perfect theme for the month.
We eased our way back into math after the long break with this easy craftivity. Back in December, my best friend and fellow teacher down in Texas sent me photos of this beyond adorable craft that she created with her preschoolers, perfect for shape recognition. I was determined to modify it into a first grade activity!
Up to this point in the year, we have focused almost entirely on addition and subtraction skills. Adding an addition and subtraction review to the craftivity made the project perfect for first! Students sat on the carpet with whiteboards, markers, and erasers. We studied the chart, and solved each math problem to find out how many pieces we needed to make our melted snowmen. For example, we started with an easy subtraction problem to find out how many pieces of blue paper we needed (one!). Once we solved this, we returned to our seats, grabbed a blue piece of paper, wrote our names on the back, and returned to the carpet once again to solve the next fact. We then moved on to the next problem.
Breaking the project up like this gave kids a little break between each math problem. What they didn’t realize is that they were still working on their math skills while working on their melted snowmen!
Again, I don’t give the kids a pattern for this. I think their projects turn out much cuter this way! This project is the perfect way to transition into more rigorous academics, and ease the students back into routines and procedures after break.
How do you transition your students back from a long break? Sound off in the comments to share your ideas!
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