I admire....

When I saw that this month Amanda from The Primary Gal was having A Secret Admirer blog post, I knew that I would have a super hard time deciding who I would like to write about – There are SO many AMAZING teacher-authors in our group!

I made my choice though, and I couldn’t be happier.  In case you missed my Facebook clues to my choice, here they are…

Did you guess?

I admire Dianna from Sassy, Savvy, Simple Teaching. 

I was lucky enough to be able to try out one of her Interactive Notebook packs for first graders.  As a school last year, we spent a lot of time looking closely at the language standards from the CCSS and we noticed some room for improvement.  Her notebooks were really interesting to me and once I got the file I was AMAZED and INSPIRED.  I was able to complete 3 of the activities, but am planning to continue to have kids complete them and share these notebooks with families and my principal to show student growth.  I also would like to shop in her store some more before school starts next year.  She has many more Interactive Notebooks for grade 1 and some for other grades too!!  Check out her whole store HERE. 

Here are the notebook covers she made – There are 2 one for girls and one for boys. 

Here is one of my favorite parts – each activity has a label with the CCSS that the activity matches. 

Here is the first activity we did – Writing uppercase and lowercase letters.  If you read her directions, she has them pop up, which seemed really cool, but for the time we had, we just glued them flat. 

The second standard we showed that we met was CCSS 1.1b I can use common nouns, proper nouns, and possessive nouns.  This was SO fun for my kiddos.  They loved being able to place the pencils in the right cups – and they liked the idea that they could choose three of their own to add!

The next one we tried was sorting singular and plural nouns.  This was similar to the pencils, but had crayons.  The kids liked this too! 

Here is a sneak peek at the activity that we will be trying next – using a word bank to write a story…This one will be a great assessment of their on demand writing skills!

Do you like what you see??  Dianna has been SWEET enough to share a sample of this pack with you for FREE.  Click Here (or on the picture) to get the freebie. 

Then, if you like what you see, check out the whole pack HERE!

I want to say a special thank you to Dianna for sharing her product with me and to Amanda for organizing this – It was fun! 

An InLinkz Link-up