Throwback Thursday!

 I'm joining the fabulous Cara from the First Grade Parade!  I went through my posts from the past year and am re-posting it again, for all the newbies that may have just stumbled upon my lil old blog!

 ******Original Post: Hello Out There?!?!  Posted on September 14, 2012******

Wow!  I totally have lost track of time.  Guess the beginning of the year does that to you.  We've been busy, busy, busy...  testing, testing, testing, no less, but it's OVER!  Now the fun begins for us as we start to switch our kiddos.

I have 22 lovely littles in my class this year that are just FULL of energy and personality!  Ha!  :)  Really, they are great, but by Friday, I'm spent!  whew!  I'm ready for the routines to kick in and have some "quiet" time in the room.  ;)

Here's some pics from our last 8 days of school!

Cut and paste activity for what a Good Learner looks like.  {It's part of my Back to School Bonanza packet on TPT}

Find someone who....  They LOVED this!  {also part of my Back to School Packet}

Finished page!  HOW adorable!  We completed 4 pages and I am putting it together as a book for them to have.

This week we did a fun activity getting to use Venn Diagrams.  We read Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes and talked about our  names.  We usually graph the letters in our names and talk about why we like our names.  Then we compared our names to each other and completed a Venn Diagram!

First, cut out the names.  I had them typed up in boxes so that all they needed to do was cut it out.

Then they spelled their names on their desks.

Then they found the letters they had in common and placed them in the middle of the diagram.  I had them pile the same letters on top of each other to keep them from having a million a's or i's in the middle.  It also helped them find those common letters.

 (I did allow them to have double or triple letters on the outside of the circle if they would like.)  

Click on the picture below to grab yourself a copy of this activity to use in your room!  You'll need powerpoint to change the letters in the boxes.  I used Hello Literacy's Hello Font, Hello Ali  (free and adorable!!!)  I enlarged the Venn Diagram part to 11X17 (I think that's the size on the copier)

Have a great weekend friends!  I'll be back soon with an adorOWLble Owl Glyph that we did today!  I need to get them up on a bulletin board and take a picture to share!

I'm also linking this up with Manic Monday over at Classroom Freebies!  Check out all the other goodies there!