Arrival Bins Winners and Back to School fun!

Thanks to all who entered the contest!!!  I meant to post this earlier today, but I’ve been sick with a horrible head cold!  Jennifer McAdoo and Amy Braswell are the winnners!!!  I’ve emailed your prize!!!

I’ve been busy with all things school lately!  I’m so happy to say that I am teaching a straight TK this year!!!  I absolutely love my sweet students and we are off to a great start!!! Here are a few things we’ve been working on:

These shape busses are always a favorite activity!

I’ve also been busy updating my Back to School pack! Here are a few pictures of some of the included.

This is a close-up of the shapes on the bus activity that’s included in my Back to School pack.

Lunchbox syllable activity. Both color and black and white versions are available for all activities! Simply print what you need!

Click any of the images above to be taken to my TpT store for more information in this packet. I hope that all of you have a great week!

Freebie Friday…

Hellooooo everyone!  It has been a wonderful week for my family and I.  We spent most of the week at Disneyland (our family happy place).

I’m having a blast this summer so far and I’ll be honest with ya–its been really difficult to think about the beginning of the school year right now.  Don’t get me wrong–I’m super excited about meeting my new bunch of kiddos in the fall, but I’m loving all of my family time right now too.

This week’s freebie is a revised version of an oldie but goodie!  It’s my numbers 1-10 practice pages!

Each page has the opportunity for students to practice number formation, identification AND they are able to practice creating sets.  Oh I also forgot the number word is written on each page as well.

Just click the pictures to be taken to my TpT store to download your own copy.  If you love this free activity–I would appreciate it if you could leave feedback!  Thank you so much!

I hope all of you enjoy the weekend and soak up all the family time and relaxation you can get!

Some shamrockin’ fun!

It’s March!  Hurray!!!!  One of my favorite holidays is just around the corner.  I thought I’d share some of the fun things we’ve done in the past to celebrate.

We always read Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato.  I always try to read out loud with my best Irish accent (which I’m sure is ridiculous…😂).  Last year my class made these adorable potato people.    My class also completed these leprechaun directed drawings from First Grade Blue Skies.  They turned out SO adorable!!!

 We also worked on writing questions.  First we brainstormed some question words whole class and made a poster.  Then during our stations we worked on writing down the questions to ask a leprechaun.  I had this large leprechaun cut-out that I purchased from Dollar Tree.  I taped it to the door and had students ask the leprechaun a question.  Oh my goodness–this was SUCH a cute activity and I absolutely loved the questions that my students wrote in their leprechaun letters.  

I uploaded this fun activity as a FREE item to my TpT store!  Just click here to download.

We also had a little visitor at our house!  My kiddos were SO EXCITED!!!  He left little green footprints and shamrocks everywhere!  Here is a photo:

The visiting leprechaun also left green milk in the fridge!  Ha!

I’m looking forward to this silly little leprechaun visiting again (and I’m looking forward to Shamrock Shakes)!  We also have a little tradition of making green dinner that night.  I usually just tint some pasta and alfredo sauce and serve with broccoli–yum!  What do you have planned for St. Patrick’s day?  I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!

 

 

 

Hippity Hoppity…Spring Break is on its Way!

Whoa…it’s officially Spring Break!  I’m so excited, in fact, I just spent the last hour crafting some super cute chunky necklaces to match my little princesses Easter dresses and I’m watching Hart of Dixie on Netflix.  Life is good.  If you are interested in seeing my little crafty adventures, I’ll post some pics on my Instagram page later :).  Anywho, I guess that’s enough of my random ramblings, I did mean to post some pictures of some of the fun activities we finished in class last week.

We just finished a week of learning about oviparous animals and rabbits.  It was so fun!  We read one of my favorite Easter books, Max’s Chocolate Chicken by Rosemary Wells.  We made some bunnies, and I let students choose if they wanted it to look like a bunny, Max or Ruby.  I’ve also used this template in the past to make Peter Rabbits.  Here is a sample picture:

I didn’t get a picture, but one of my colleagues had her students do opinion writing with their Max and Ruby bunnies and there were absolutely adorable!  What a good idea for using this book to teach opinion writing :)!

I also found these adorable bunny shaped eggs at Dollar Tree and made a fun sight word review activity for my kids.  They loved it!

I actually made a couple of different versions, so if you are interested you can pick up the recording sheet and a few other things as a freebie from my TpT shop.  You can all get them here.

We also made this fun Bunny Peep snack from Pinterest:

We made this writing poster to sequence the steps for make the snack:

And after we taste tested, we made this simple graph:

This snack was easy peasie and super fun too!  My class really enjoyed it.  If you would like some fun sequencing activities I included them in my Hippity Hoppity Spring pack.  Just click the picture below to download a copy for yourself.

Happy Spring everyone!

 

Teaching Major Events and Creature Reports…

The last month of school we worked on identifying major events in text and how they effect the characters (Common core standard RL 2.3). We reviewed what a character is and how we could identify what a major story event is. This standard is important because it helps to make connections to the text and understand the plot. We read Verdi by Janell Cannon and narrowed down the story to three major events. Students discussed with their partners what they felt was one major event from the story. We then worked on completing this worksheet together and created this poster about the story. He Here are some pictures of the graphic organizers that we used.  If you would like a FREE copy of this simply click one of the pictures below :).           Students also researched an animal and created reports. I made a little Amazon Creature Reports form for them to use to guide the process. I totally meant to take pictures of this to show you guys, but ran out of time at the end of the year. If you are interested, you can pick up a copy of my creature report organizer and writing papers by clicking any of  the pictures below.     Ok, I’ll admit that I may be been a tad inspired by the Octonauts when I created the creature reports :).  My kids love that show!  

A Peek into my class…

I never did get around to posting a classroom tour at the beginning of the year (oopsie). Here are a few pictures:

View from the door. It was open house the night that I took this picture.

 

Culture dolls and culture reports. They turned out SO cute!

 

I love, love, LOVE the way my writing board turned out this past year. I cut black poster board in 1/2 to make it look like a clip board. I super glued tacks to clothespins and then covered them with washi tape.

I ended up making quite a few decor items for my class.  Here are some pictures of some of the things:

 

 

I’m very happy to say that I have now finished and added these decor items to my TpT store.  Click any of the pictures below to be taken to my store to check it out :).

Here are some sample photos of just a few of the many items included in this decor pack.

 

As a special introductory price this item will be 50% off for the first 48 hours!  Thanks for looking and I hope that you liked taking a little peek into my classroom!

 

 

 

Newly revised…

I recently updated and revised my A-Z letter recognition pack and let me tell ya–it’s FULL of great resources!  Check it out for yourself!

 

I revised the letter recognition pages.  This pack includes 26 different practice sheets with an ASL image for each letter.  I have always found that pairing the letters with sign language  really helps your struggling students.  Check out the picture below to see what the worksheets look like.

I also added a few things to this pack.  I included 26 different letter sound puzzles with both color and black and white versions.  Choose which version would better fit your needs!

Another new added item is ABC-flip books.  There is also one for each letter.  This activity takes very little prep, but is wonderful for teaching beginning sounds and vocabulary.

 

This is only a few of the included items.  Below is a list of the included contents and if you would like to download a FREE sample of the letter A flip-book, letter worksheet and sound puzzle, then click the link below to be taken to my store.

 

Thanks for checking this out!  I’m pretty excited about my own upcoming kindergartner working on these activities :)!

 

What I’ve Been UP to…

Hellurrrr my bloggy friends!!!  I know that I’ve been MIA for a while and let me tell ya–it’s been one busy year so far!  Today is the first official day of my Thanksgiving vacation and I am thankful for some rest!  As many of you know, I am at a new school this year and teaching 26 lovely second graders!  I’m loving second grade and I have learned SO much in a short period of time.  Being back in the general education classroom is very different than teaching special ed.  My grade level team is great and I’m really enjoying getting to know so many of the staff members on campus.  I’m also coaching cheer again at my elementary site, but my squad is much larger (I have 31 girls!).  I’ve slowly been making things, but I’m just now starting to get into my “groove” I guess in the classroom.  Last week I posted a new fun Fall Literacy Center pack, which my kiddos just loved!  There are five literacy centers included.

These activities are also included in the pack, but I also wanted to sell some of the activities individually in case you were interested.

We also made Stone Soup last week!  One of my favorite activities to complete with my students!  Here is a picture of our yummy soup, which my kiddos loved!

I just uploaded these fun companion activities to my TpT store in case you are interested :).

Here’s a little free activity for you that we completed in class this week :).  We also made posters that featured the characters, setting, and B-M-E (beginning/middle/end) of the stories (sorry I forgot to take a pic of this :().  Click the venn diagram below to download the activity.

I hope that all of you have a nice and relaxing week!  I hope to post some more things this week, so come back and check often!  🙂

Facebook Post Party!

It’s par-tay time!!!  I hope that many of you are enjoying your summer vacation!  I know that I am :).  Check out my new sweet puppy Coal sharing CJ’s doggie bed–too cute!  He’s been keeping me pretty busy the last couple of weeks, but I’m just enjoying him being little right now because I know that he is going to be humongous when he is all grown!

So tonight I was on Facebook and I saw this photo, and I noticed that some of my sweet bloggy friends were having a party!

I thought well that sounds like fun, so I’m joining in!  Here is a little freebie that goes along with the wonderful Daily 5 book that I’ve been reading.  Click the picture below to download the posters, which by the way are going to be the colors that I’m using in my classroom next year!!

I just finished reading chapter 2 and I can’t wait to read more about this wonderful approach to managing your literacy block with students.  I’m working on finishing up my answers to the blog book study for this chapter and will post my answers tomorrow.  I hope that you guys enjoy the posters!

Giddy Up! Wild West Unit…

Yee-Haw!  Howdy everyone!  Sorry that I haven’t been able to post very much lately, but I have  BIG surprise later in this post that I hope will help to make it up!  I’ve been busy working away on this lovely new unit I just posted to Teachers Pay Teachers.  Here are some sample pictures and click the pictures below to be taken to my store:

And now for the BIG SURPRISE…

I posted a FREE Wild West Mini-Unit for all of you!  I wanted to take the time to thank all of you for your support!  Here are some photos of some of the activities included in the free unit that my little kiddos completed last week:

Help the Cowboy Get to His Horse! Roll and Cover game

Giddy Up! Tally Mark Station activity

Cowboy graphing activity 

Cowboy Boots pocket chart worksheet 

So what are you waiting for?  Head on over to my Teachers Pay Teachers store to check it out!  Happy Monday y’all!

~Barb