Snowflake 2013!

Snowflake was a busy guy this year! Sometimes he played with Mrs. Thompson's elf, and one time they even switched classrooms. Luckily our students were WONDERFUL everyday so I am sure Santa got a great report! I hope everyone has a very happy and restful winter break. I will see you all on January 7th!

He's Back!!

It's that time of year again! Snowflake came back! He noticed that my class has he same students this year and decided to come back. Of course he brought us a tree to make the classroom festive. We will decorate it tomorrow morning. We also started working on our writing project for "Cookies and Milk with Santa Night" on December 10th. This year, we read the book Santa's Stuck by Rhonda Gowler Greene. The students worked on their Santa chimneys today and will begin to write their own "Santa's Stuck" stories tomorrow. Ho Ho Ho!

We can write to inform!

Hello All! The Cupcakes and Sea Stars have been very busy learning about informative writing. In honor of Fall and October, we decided to write and publish nonfiction books about the life cycle of a pumpkin. The students also learned about captions and the importance of captions in nonfiction books. We tried a little bit of peer editing too. Students read their work to their peers and were offered suggestions for changes or additions to their writing. It went very well! I am very proud of the Cupcakes and Sea Stars!

 

*Book template from Casey Hallett on TPT*

Reading at Home

Hello Cupcakes and Sea Stars! Can you believe we are three weeks into first grade?! Now that assessment time is ending and I am beginning to send home our guided reading books, I wanted to share a little bit of research with you. I found this visual from a blog called The High-Tech Teacher. In first grade, reading achievement and growth is expected at a much faster and intense level than in kindergarten. It is important to have your child read every night. Your child has a book log in his or her folder. Please fill it out and sign each time your child reads to you. It can be a book I send home, or a library book, or a book from home. Every 100 signatures/books will get your child the prize of eating lunch with the teacher. Last year's champs who had lunch with me 2 or more times (That's 200 or more books!) were Jessica, Jose, Quin, Hunter, and Kaley. I love having lunch with the students! We have so much fun telling silly stories and eating together.

Fun Friday!

Hello cupcakes! You know what's great about teaching first grade?! Being able to teach writing right away! This week (the FIRST week of school wow!) the cupcakes worked on Narrative writing. We are still working on saying the word Narrative. Some of my cupcakes are saying "Negative" writing, but after I explained what the word "Negative" meant, they quickly tried to fix their pronunciation! :) Can't wait to see you all on Monday so we can finish our Narrative writing pieces!

Meet the Teacher Day!

Hello cupcakes! I am so excited to see you all today! This is the first year I don't have to be jealous of the first grade teacher who got "my babies" because I AM the first grade teacher! I also have a little surprise for you. Mrs. Thompson and I will be teaching together this year and sharing our classrooms. I will also be having an intern named Ms. DiCataldo. I will have her blog about herself soon! Here is some new information...

I'm Back!

Hello cupcakes! Mrs. Dapcic just got back from a four week trip to see her family in Poland. My whole family lives there. I got to see my grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I have been been going almost every summer since I was four years old! That's A LOT of trips. ;)

This year, Mr. Dapcic surprised Mrs. Dapcic with a stop in Paris! Oh boy! I have wanted to see Paris for a long time. Here are some pictures of my favorite stops there...

P.S. I miss you all! See you in two weeks on Meet the Teacher/Registration Day! (August 14th)

 This is the Eiffel Tower. It is soooooo enormous!

Laduree is a famous pastry shop from 1862. This is where the Macaroon cookie was born. Sooooo yummy! I think had too many....I couldn't help myself!

Laduree was so beautiful inside!

The Eiffel Tower looked so pretty and glittery at night!

Summer Break

Hello Cupcakes! I hope your summer is going well! Is everybody writing in their Summer Fun Journals?? Mrs. Dapcic has been very busy getting ready for first grade. I have been making fun things for our classroom with Mrs. Thompson and have completely redesigned the Tiger Book and reading folder. We are going to be very organized next year!
If you have been writing in your journal let me know by posting below. Tell me what you have been writing about, and what you have been up to! Can't wait to read your journals in August! I miss you all very much!

Rock Stars!

We had our big end of year show today! My little cupcakes are all grown up and ready for first grade!! They shared their writing and our video yearbook with their families this morning. They also put on a super performance! Check it out below.

The Life Cycle of a Butterfly Part 1

We have been learning about living things in science. Our new school has a new courtyard full of milkweed plants and this month we have seen a ton of butterflies and caterpillars roaming around. We have two of the caterpillars in our classroom and are making observations daily about the life cycle of a Monarch butterfly. The cupcakes are super excited to check out how "Cupcake" and "Sprinkles" are doing every morning. Here is a clip of what happened last week...

FCAT Ready!

That time of year is here again.....FCAT season. Although my cupcakes are too young to take the FCAT, they feel some of the school changes that occur. Our daily schedule changes and we must remain extra quiet all day. Richey intermediate teachers and kiddos have worked really hard all year to get ready for this test. Our technology specialist Mr. Walker and the intermediate grades put together a fabulous video to get pumped up for the test! My cupcakes made a cameo appearance in it too! Check it our below...

Shoe La La! We can use descriptive words!

My cupcakes have been working very hard in writing and accepted a writing CHALLENGE! We decided that we were ready to use descriptive words in our writing. The cupcakes learned that descriptive words help the reader understand their writing and visualize about the topic.

I began the lesson by reading the book, Shoe-la-la! by Karen Beaumont. This is one of my VERY favorite books, and I am sure you can guess why! Then, we learned more about descriptive words and writing with a SMARTBoard lesson I created. The cupcakes tried to guess what shoes I was writing about based on my words. They learned that if I didn't use descriptive words, they were not able to guess what shoe I wrote about. Next, came the fun part. We decorated our own shoes! The next day, we wrote about our shoes making sure to use descriptive words, and making sure to use our "3 Star Sentence" rubrics.

 In order to see if we really knew how to use descriptive words in writing, we invited Mr. Miesner, Mrs. Claud, Mrs. Lough, and some of the first grade teachers to help us out. They had to listen as we read our writing out-loud. Then, they had to look on our shoe wall and try to identify the shoe we described. The cupcakes had a lot of fun trying to challenge the adults! But guess what?? All of the cupcakes used enough descriptive words and everyone's shoe was identified correctly on the first try! I have a very talented group of Kinderwriters! As a reward, they all got a super cool mechanical pencil. They also had a blast sharing their writing news with Miss Cabral on FaceTime that Friday.