The Post-Winter Break Blues: Back to School and Penguin Timel!

It's that time again, friends. Tomorrow we head back to school. I'm very fortunate to have a work day tomorrow. I'm super-excited to get in there and get organized!

I spent a little time at school  this past week because I (of course) decided to COMPLETELY rearrange my classroom. I really felt like the "feng shui" was off in there or something. I know absolutely nothing about feng shui, but I felt like it wasn't a calming atmosphere. Hopefully the new set up will be better. I plan to share pics of that very soon!

While there, I had some time to get a few things together for the next couple of weeks, and I thought I'd share a little about what we're doing!

We'll be starting our math time with a little 5-a-Day review. I recently edited the last few weeks of my semester one 5-a-days so that we could start the year off with some review rather than new topics. (That is the point of it!) 

For some reason, I still have a few weeks left from the semester one pack, so we'll finish those up before starting the newest set. These have helped my little firsties tremendously!

I'll also be introducing new math tubs. This is their favorite part of our guided math time, so I can't wait to get going with these new games and activities.

Can't wait to get these laminated tomorrow! They're from my new January Math Tubs bundle.

In language arts we'll be working on the vowel team ee. I cannot believe we're already there, but we are! That's exciting though because I'll get to pull out my Word Work Vowel Team bundle!! FINALLY! Something I created LAST YEAR that I don't have to edit for this year! You can check out more about our word work routine by checking out my previous post: Word Work Made Easy!

The ABSOLUTE best part of January for me is starting my penguin unit. I cannot wait! Do you study penguins? I just can't get enough of those quirky birds! Our whole team does the penguin unit and we turn our hallway into a penguin colony for Open House.

I'll do a how-to on these papier-mache penguins soon! Each child chooses a penguin species to research, and they create a keynote presentation on their ipads.

 In order to make the research a little easier, I created QR codes with required info for their data collection sheets. Once they had the required info, they could continue their research using books, websites, etc. If you don't have ipads, they could use the facts task cards and easily make posters, books, etc. This is all included in my All About Penguins unit.

While at school, I also updated my book display!! LOVE.

What books do you enjoy reading in January?

Finally, you may have noticed that I haven't blogged in...a while. I had a good reason though! We shared this news with family and friends over the winter break.

I've pretty much been sick and tired for the past 3 months, but I'm finally starting to feel better and plan to do a much better job with this little blog. Thanks for checking in! Check out my TPT store to find out more info on the products below.