Saturday, is that you?

After being out of school for 4 days (snow and ice), it doesn't really feel like it's the weekend. But the sun is out for the first time all week and that's definitely a good thing. I'm really looking forward to getting back into my classroom and doing all the things I had planned for last week. I'm disappointed that we missed Groundhog Day and Chinese New Year though :(. We will finally celebrate our 100th day, REALLY begin our coin unit (I don't count last Monday as beginning the unit), and the kiddos have some cute centers in store for them.

One of the centers I was excited about last week, that we will now definitely be doing this week, is my "Contraction Cones" activity. My teammate, Mrs. Claborn made some contraction cupcakes that are way cute (check out her blog here), and then I saw this post on Once Upon a Time in First Grade, and I was inspired to make my own. Now, I KNOW what you're thinking - I could have made these myself. Here's the deal. It was one of those weeks when there was something going on every night. Then it got to Thursday (crunch time) and I stayed at school really late, then had to run an errand at a teacher store and when I saw them, all I could think was how much I didn't want to cut out my own over the weekend. Sometimes, it's totally worth a few bucks to save yourself some time and a hand cramp from too much cutting. So, I bought these:

They're made by Carson Dellosa and you can get them here, or at your fave teacher shop. We're only working with contractions with not, so I made a list of 10 contractions with not, and had exactly enough to make 2 sets. The students will match the ice cream containing the two words with the cone that has the newly formed contraction. I'll add a picture of the final product once I'm finally back in my classroom. To avoid having to sort through two mixed up sets later, I put a silver star sticker on all of the pieces of one set, and a gold star on all of the pieces of the second set. I'm sure they'll still end up jumbled all together, but I had to try! The kiddos will record the contractions on this recording sheet. You can see it below.I know it's totally lacking cute clipart, but I think I'm way more concerned about it looking cute than my kiddos are!

And now, I need to get out and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts! After all, there's a 40% chance of more snow/ice/freezing rain tomorrow!