Holiday Link Up

I haven't been the best with posting over the past week or so... the holiday craziness is getting to me! So, I decided to link up with Amy Lemons for her "holiday party."

My teammates and I have been traveling "around the world" with our students, learning about various holiday traditions! We got some of these awesome ideas from Rachelle Smith's Holidays Around the World Unit.

We first travel from our school to the country using google Earth.

The kids think this is BEYOND awesome! If you have a smart board or promethean or even just a computer projector and you don't have google Earth, you should download it! I plan on using it a lot more since my grade level partner thought of it for this mini-unit.



Next, we read a book or watch a video about the country (sometimes both). We also have been adding information ourselves with the help of some google searching about holiday traditions.
The kiddos then fill out the "suitcase" packet filling in the blanks about what they learned about that country.

Then finally, we make a fun craft or do an activity to go with what we learned.

Here are some of our highlights...

Stockings for England...

Gingerbread Men for Germany...

 

Sparkly Poinsettias for Mexico...

We also have made shoes for the Netherlands, played Dreidel for Israel, thought about what Christmas would be like in the summer, made brooms & reindeer hats... so fun!

So what do you do for the holidays? And be sure to click on the link at the top to check out what other people are doing in their classroom for the holiday!

Busy (But Short) Week!

Well we got to celebrate 100th day (finally!) this week, but with 2 snow days, I guess Valentine's Day has to wait until Tuesday...

I'm linking up again with Doodlebugs Teaching for Five for Friday...

We had 100th Day this week! It kept getting pushed back because of snow, so we ended up with Tuesday 100th Day and Friday Valentine's Day... oh and Thursday yet another snow day, so clearly it wasn't a crazy week at all... oh wait...

Click the picture to see yesterday's post about all our 100th Day fun!

You just gotta love when the white and red Scholastic box arrives! This time I had a bunch of points and was able to order a normally $25 pack of National Geographics for Kids Animal Books. The kiddos went NUTS over these!

We made these bear bags for Valentine's Day... too cute! Too bad we won't get to use them until we go back to school on Tuesday after President's Day. I'm definitely officially sick of the snow!

I thought this was such a cute idea for a Valentine's Day teacher present... taking note for when I'm a Mom and my kiddos are school age!
Sorry for the poor quality it says "I'm soaping you'll be my Valentine"

Lastly, here are a few new products on my TPT page, check them out!

Don't forget to follow my new Facebook page for flash freebies and other fun stuff!

100th Day!

We had a super fun 100th day in our classroom! Our celebration kept getting pushed back for snow, but we finally we able to celebrate on Tuesday! I didn't do an entire day of 100th day fun like I did last year, mostly because with the snow coming today I needed to finish up a few things in reading that I didn't want to leave hanging. But we still had time for quite a bit of fun...

We started the day by decorating 100 Day crowns to wear throughout the day!

I got this crown freebie here.

For some reason this group of kiddos LOVE hats... this is the 4th or 5th hat we've made this year.

 We spent our writing time writing about what we would do if we had $100. It is too cute the perception kiddos have of $100. I had kiddos saying they'd buy a car or a quad, an iPad, even a mansion... too funny! My kiddos then worked on writing 100 words, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I got both of these freebies (and others) here.

During snack time (which I think was the favorite activity of the day) we made a 100th day trail mix. I found the mat to organize the trail mix here.

We spent the afternoon doing 100th day math. We found out how many times we could do different activities in 100 seconds. Sorry for the poor picture quality. This was also a freebie, find it here.

We clapped our hands, said the ABC's, hopped up and down, wrote our names, sat down and stood up, counted to ten and blinked our eyes, all while counting which was a little tricky. Here's my kiddos standing up and sitting down. They were exhausted after 100 seconds, too cute!

We also played "roll to 100" where my kiddos took turns with a partner rolling a dice and adding their rolls together until they got to 100. For some reason I don't have any pictures though and I can't find the exact version we used, but TPT has a bunch of free versions of this game if you search "roll to 100."

Check in tomorrow for 5 for Friday. Hopefully we have school tomorrow so we can exchange Valentines!

Friday Freebie & Sale!

Linking up again with Five for Friday!

I'm also linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday (scroll down to #4 for the freebie)!

 My TPT store is having a sale and today is the last day, so go check it out, 20% off everything!

My kiddos earned a celebration (10 smiley days). They are the easiest class when it comes to celebrations! The last one we had was "wear your pj's to school day" this time they chose "bring a stuffed animal to school day." The only thing I didn't think of was to tell my kiddos the stuffed animal should probably fit in your bag...

I know I posted about it earlier this week but I am SO happy to have finished all my calendar sets, including the Mega-Bundle of all months! If you purchase the bundle you save $$ Check it out!

NEW PRODUCTS!
HERE'S THE FREEBIE... With Valentine's Day coming up, check out this Valentine's Day Writing Freebie.
The first link is a direct link to the freebie (Google Docs), the second will take you to the TPT product page.

I also have a new TPT product focusing on Topic, Main Idea and Details. It includes differentiated worksheets, is CCSS aligned (Reading Information) and can be used in 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade. Click below to check it out.

If you haven't already, check out my facebook page, started this week, for this blog & my TPT page!

Feeling the Stress of the New Year!

It's been a while since I posted. I started a new grad class the first week of the year, and am feeling the stress. My past 2 classes have really integrated our classroom into our work, so it didn't feel like we were doing a ton of "extra work" or it felt like it was benefiting our kiddos so much that the extra work was okay! This class is called "Educational Issues: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives." That being said, it's a lot more about becoming aware of and learning educational issues that affect us as teachers and gaining a better understanding and perspective on them. Well this is all well and good, but the assignment load is feeling unbearable.


The good news is my big research paper and presentation will be on Whole Brain Teaching, so hopefully that means a few WBT posts in the next 8 weeks!

Before I show you what's been happening in my room, here's a great project I took on the day before we went back to school after break. It was super easy, all you need is a glass jar (I re-purposed a pasta sauce jar), stickers and mod podge and if you want to paint the lid, I used acrylics. Oh, and a small notepad to tie to the jar or just have available near the jar. The purpose of the jar is to put happy memories in it during the year so at the end of the year you can open up the jar and read all the happy things that happened over the year :)

Alrighty, here's some of what we've been up to since the new year in my room...

We had one awkward day back (Thursday) pretty much knowing we'd have a snow day on Friday, so we did a lot of New Year themed things. Resolutions was our #1 project for the day...

Each kiddo shared with the group what their "classroom" resolution was. They they could take that resolution (or choose a different one) and tell what they could do to reach their goal...

We also started a non-fiction unit... so we made an anchor chart for text features.

When making the anchor chart we tried to focus on how the features help the reader rather than a "definition" for each. This proved to be a little difficult for some of the text features!

In the theme of non-fiction we've been doing a lot of animal "research" which the kiddos have LOVED. Here is a simple Can/Have/Are activity we did...

The next few are a mini frog and bat research project where the kiddos worked with a partner doing a KWL then doing "research" on frogs/bats by reading a grade level nonfiction text on bats. I plan on posting these in a "mini unit" on TPT soon so be on the lookout!

 

 

I differentiated these "by hand" writing in some "hints" for my struggling kiddos and questions like "why did you choose this fact/why is it important" for my high flyers.

Our next step is to read about birds and use our bat research to compare and contrast birds and bats. These will also be included in my upcoming TPT product. Currently I have 2 "levels" with more or less difficult vocabulary.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the catch up... hopefully I will post before the end of my 8-week class!

Here's a little puppy love to leave you with...