Best of the Best! and Throwback Thursday!

Summer is the time to party!  There are so many great Linky Parties and I'm having a blast surfing through new blogs and finding so many new ideas for my classroom!  I couldn't choose, so I've linked up with two parties today!  

First, I'm linking up with Classroom Confections "Most Wishlisted Items"!  I know I've already started making my wishlist for Back to School shopping, have you?

My "Most Wishlisted Item" in my TpT Store is my St. Patrick's Day themed "r" controlled vowels practice game!  I used this in literacy centers most of March!  My students enjoyed it so much, they asked for me to take it out on "Game Day" at the end of the year!  As I'm putting things away for summer, I had to go dig through boxes from March!  Lol!  Makes me so happy that they wanted to play a learning game for fun!

Click on the picture above for your "freedom freebie"!

  

Second,  I'm also linking up with Cara Caroll's Throwback Thursday Linky Party! 

So here is my contribution  to "Throwback Thursday"!  

From Spring:

We had so much fun in First Grade last week!  We did a little "magic" which the kiddos found amazing!  I love doing this project with my class each year!  Like most great projects, we start with a wonderful book!

After reading about Babushka and her beautiful eggs, we made our own! 

We started with a plain circle and drew shapes and squiggles.  Then we colored each shape or space a different color.  We tried not to have two touching spaces be the same color. 

Then we carefully cut the circle into strips about the same width as our pinky fingers.  We made about 6 cuts, which gave us 7 strips!  We cut the strips over our background paper so they would fall in order on the paper.  Then we glued them down onto the background paper, leaving small spaces in between each strip!

Viola!  A circle becomes an egg...like magic!

These cuties wanted to make a second "magic egg" and work together!

 

This is not a jelly bean!  It's a _________.

We also did a little writing with Jelly Bean shapes!  I love this writing assignment and my firsties did, too.    We started with jelly bean shape tracers and a variety of color choices.  Each child chose a color for his or her jelly bean and traced and cut out the shape.

Then we had to decide what our jelly bean, wasn't!  Each child created a picture using the shape and completed the frame sentence:

This is not a jelly bean!  It's a _________.

This is not a jelly bean.  It's a shoe.

This is not a jelly bean.  It's a cat.

And, my personal favorite....

This is not a jelly bean.  This is Mario!

My kiddos had so much fun with this little writing assignment that I'm thinking about adding to independent literacy tubs for the remainder of the year.  I'll add different shapes each week and let their imaginations go wild!

Have a great Easter Weekend!