If you give a teacher a Unit....

Manic Monday by the Bangles
Hit play or hit the link and listen.....You might as well have some background music, while you read right?

OK, so for the past few weeks this has been me at the end of the day.

Then I try and remember this and I get back to myself again. Add to that, I have my own 2 kids to take care of and I'm ready to put on a cape and red boots!

Ok, so Mondays are always busy especially when I have to get myself and my 2 kids out the door in the morning. Every day I've got to make breakfast for us all, make lunches, walk the dog, pack the homework, do my hair, my daughter's hair and now my son's (believe me that's a good thing--he used to look like that book Bedhead all the time).
This is usually my son--Only with dark brown hair and a bit cuter :).  
As I finally sit down to write this, I have already done homework with both my kids:
1st grader--adding 3 addends using cubes and writing them a different way.
3rd grader--multiplication word problems, U.S. Geography and Reading Log.
Made dinner--do you wish you had smell-a-blog... it was yummy :P

 
and....bathed and showered my kids.  I don't have much time until my daughter is out of the shower and asking for ice cream, so I will continue on and tell you about my school day. 

Luckily for me, we are all on a routine now, so this Monday morning went pretty smooth.
I had all of my papers ready to be copied in my bag, so when I got to school I went straight for the new copier and didn't even have a line to wait on. (yes!)

This is a short week for us...what does that mean?  It means Thursday is an Early dismissal--kids leave 2 hours early and Friday is a workday. We get to plan, do report cards and gab.

So, I took a detour from my usual Basal story and decided to do a Book Study.  I ordered the Laura Numeroff "If you give..." set from Scholastic and it came in on Friday afternoon. I was pretty pumped about it, so I paired off my class and gave them each a different book.  They read it together and then started a flow map in their journals.  Today we paired up again, but this time I was armed with a great unit from Erica Bohrer's First Grade . I've only just begun this Laura Numeroff Author Study Unit, so I will share snippets as we work on it this week.  Since they had already read one of the books, they completed the Buddy Reading Log and wrote their favorite parts.

In the afternoon, during reading block,  I read If you Give a Cat a Cupcake and If You Give a Moose a Muffin. We began completing an organizational chart from the unit, which designates the animal and item, setting and the "biggest mess" from each book. Tomorrow, we are going to compare 
(time out--My daughter just asked me for ice cream--I'll be right back)

 the two books using the Venn Diagram in the unit and complete the Fantasy/Reality sort for if you give a Moose a Muffin. (I will try and share this later in the week, tomorrow I take my daughter to dance for 2 hours... so blogging is not in the schedule)

In Math today we used the Base 10 Mats I shared in my last post (scroll down or click here to download the mats)
I placed them in my Clear Board Communicators.  We are able to then re-use these again and again.  I made 2 versions, 1 with the picture of the Base 10 Block and 1 without.  I copied them back to back and place them in the clear board (love these things).  The kids were able to place the blocks on the mat and get great place value practice.

Come back later this week to hear more about  the Laura Numeroff Unit and the Monsters we will be making to go with my Fall Into Writing Unit

Thanks for dropping by,