Book Character Day!

Every year my school has the annual Book Fair set up in our library. This is an awesome fundraiser for the library and a fabulous way to get children excited about books! On the last day of the book fair my school celebrates Book Character Day and my team L.O.V.E.S. it! On Book Character Day everyone (students, teachers, aides, principals,etc) dress up as their favorite book character and we all sit in the hallway and parade around the school showing off our costumes and celebrating books.

A few years ago my team started to notice that students were dressing up less and less which made us very sad. So we decided to help parents out and figured out a way to include the entire class or grade level in dressing up without putting too much work on the parents. I work in a Title 1 school and my parents are more worried about putting food on the table and paying their light bills than Book Character Day. So, thus was born the First Grade Book Character themes....

Our first year we chose the book 101 Dalmations. We had the students bring white shirts and used sponges to add the black spots. The students also made dog ears to wear using sentence strips and construction paper ears. Then the next year we did...

Where's Waldo??? The students yet again brought white shirts and we used A.L.O.T. of red duct tape! Our principals even got in on the Waldo craziness that year!

Last year we each chose a different version of the book "There Was an Old Lady.." I did the Old Lady that Swallowed Some Leaves. I had the kids bring a fall colored shirt and we used the awesome art teacher's cool leaf stamps and stamped leaves on their shirts. Then a few students carried important items for the story such as a shirt, pants, and finally I had a student dressed up as a scarecrow.

This year to go with our school Royal Quest theme, we decided to dress up as different fairy tail princesses. We had Belle, Pocahontas, Princess Jasmine, Cinderella, Mulan, Princess Ada from Bug's Life, and Tiana from Princess and the Frog.  We found our costumes on clearance after Halloween two weeks ago and had our classes dress up as different things from the story. My neighbor Belle actually drew Cogsworth and Mrs. Potts on posterboard then attached it to boxes and had students wear those. They were so cute! I wish I could show you their pictures! I did the story Princess and the Frog because I had to throw my frogs in there! My students wore green shirts and made absolutely adorable frog masks in art with the help of my very fabulous BFF art teacher.

Now looking for ideas for next year..... 364 days and counting!!!

Mrs. Halbardier


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Red Ribbon Week

Next week is Red Ribbon Week and I look forward to it every October. My school has a different theme every day to promote saying NO to drugs.Our themes this year are:

Monday: Put a Cap on Drugs (wear your favorite cap)

Tuesday: Make it a GOAL to stay Drug Free (dress for the career you plan to pursue)

Wednesday: It is Crazy to do Drugs (wear your favorite crazy hair style) <-- my personal favorite!

Thursday: Stay in the Game.... Drug Free! (wear your favorite sports jersey or t-shirt)

Friday: Drugs and I Don't Match! (wear mix matched clothes)

We also have a door decorating contest which my teammates and I get a little competitive with every single year. Last year my students and I were studying the reading skill of Main Idea and we made spooky houses. On the inside of the spooky houses we put pictures of things that matched the Main Idea of what would go with a spooky house. Then I decorated my outside door with a mountain and dark night sky along with our Spooky Houses. The theme was "Don't Let Drugs Haunt You". We didn't win but that is okay. We got the message through to Say No to Drugs!

This year I chose to do an activity I found on The First Grade Parade. (Look at her ideas! She is so stinkin creative!) We read this book....

 

Then we brainstormed ideas for what our "Mummies" do to help us feel better after we are scared. I so wish I would have taken a picture of our brainstorm because the ideas were really cute! My favorite was from a little boy that is very.... creative. Our sentence stem was "When I am scared my mummy..." and his response was "asks me 'What's wrong, Son?" It cracked me up! He really says some funny stuff. 

After we finished brainstorming as a group, students went back to their desk, wrote the sentence stem and were to pick an idea from our brainstorming chart. After we went back and made sure that we wrote the perfect sentence with good spacing, capital letters in the correct place and of course had a punctuation mark at the end and VOILA! Our sentences were awesome! 

Next we needed to make our mummies! They turned out so cute! I gave each child a paper plate, orange rectangle, black rectangle and a sheet of white paper. They went to town on their mummies and spent almost a good 45 minutes making them. We unfortunately don't get to do many crafts like this just for fun with every minute counting right now and it was so relaxing for me to watch them create! Each mummy turned out different. When the mummies were finished we took a piece of orange construction paper, glued our sentences and  mummies... FINISHED! 

Now I realize that whole mummy activity doesn't have a whole lot to do with Red Ribbon Week and saying No to Drugs but don't worry... I made it work! 

Don't Let Drugs Wrap You Up! 

 

Mrs. Halbardier