Has it REALLY been that long?

Oh man! I didn't realize how long it'd been since I last posted! For the sake of being OVERWHELMED with all I have to say I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching to make me stick to FIVE things on this lovely Friday!

Shadow day is always a hit! We ventured out on a breeze day in April to measure our shadows every hour-hour and a half. It is such a fun but crazy interrupted day! We love seeing how our shadows move and shrink throughout the day. One of my grade level partner's kiddos said "my shadow shrunk like my underwear does in the dryer!" Out of the mouths of babes!

We just started our shape unit last week and have been using tons of foldables from Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook!

We also played some guessing games, asking questions to guess our shape. The questions were: how many sides does the shape have? How many vertices does the shape have? How many corners/angles does my shape have? Are any of the sides equal length? Are the sides parallel?

We worked hard through April and are just now wrapping up our Fairy Tale unit. Some of my high flyers used this 3-way comparison chart to compare 3 different versions of Cinderella. They did such a nice job showing the very specific similarities and differences!

 

If you haven't heard of any of the I Read to You, You Read to Me books you definitely have to check them out! We LOVED the fairy tale version to get us started on fairy tales and they are WONDERFUL for fluency AND point of view... so many uses! 

My kiddos were obsessed for nearly a month, asking to do more activities with them! Definitely check them out if you haven't! There are also a Mother Goose, Scary Tales and Fables versions too!

Finally, I'm hoping to do a full post on having a student teacher, but here's a peak at my student teacher playing a Mystery Place Value game!


WOW it felt awesome to post again on here :) Thanks to those of you tuning in!

After School Fun!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Five for Friday...

This week has been busy, busy, busy and on Sunday the hubby and I leave for our honeymoon (6 months after the fact!) Yay for April Break, I really need it this year!

 

Last Friday (after I had already linked with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday, we had a writing celebration. My kiddos had worked very hard to write a non-fiction piece, researching, writing, typing and illustrating so we had to celebrate! Half the kiddos read a section of their piece, then we had a "gallery walk" where the students walked around and could read stories out of each others' published boxes, then the other half got to read a section of their piece.

Remember the Marcy Cook workshop I went to last month? Well, I finally introduced these number tile task cards to my kiddos. If they had started using these earlier in the year I think these cards would be way to easy, but a lot of my kids are finding these as an exciting challenge because there is only one correct space for each of their number tiles and if you put the wrong one in one place you have to practically start over. Some of the kiddos are picking up on putting the "have to" tiles down first (places where no other number would fit) and working from there. So glad I purchased the tiles and cards. I think I may order more cards for next year from her website.

We are working on place value to 1,000 so I went searching for place value games on Teachers Pay Teachers and found loads of FREE games to use for math centers. Here are a few my kiddos have loved and a link to where I found them...

The above picture show a mystery number game, available free from Love to Learn here.

This shows a penguin place value dice game. This game came bundled with a few other games as well. Get it for free from Stephanie Stewart here.

This picture shows a Place Value Go Fish game that can be played with or without recording matches on the recording sheet. Find it free from T is for Teaching here.

As a part of my grad class that I am currently in (Multicultural Literature) I had to do a community outreach project. So I recruited a high school teacher who happens to be a mom of one of my students and some of her high school juniors and seniors. The recruits came after school one day this week and helped as I read The Legend of Blue Bonnet by Tomie DePaola and then did a craft with BLUE popcorn. Find the craft idea here.

The kiddos and high school folks had so much fun, we already planned for another event in May! So excited :)

In celebration of the FINALLY feeling like Spring weather, here are a few pictures

A Long (but exciting) Week

After being out with a stomach bug 2 days last week, a 5 day week felt VERY long! Today I'm linking up with my 2 favorite linky parties Five for Friday from Doodle Bugs Teaching and Freebie Friday from Teaching Blog Addict. The freebie is on #4 this week, it's a foldable for place value.

Here's my week...

Okay so this one is from LAST week, but since I couldn't link up last week, here's a cute Saint Patrick's day craftivity we did in my room. The kiddos cut out the hats, wrote why they were lucky which went inside the hat. It is my plan to post this as a freebie before March 17th of next year!

We've been working on poetry elements and as a second grade team we have taken our love for March Madness and created Poetry Madness! The kids are just loving it! We took a lot of fun poems from poets like Shel Silverstein, Judith Viorst, Jack Prelutsky and others for our bracket.

I was made the happiest teacher in the building on Tuesday when I FINALLY got the easel the PTO has been attempting to raise money for since December (2 events got snowed out!) It's the EXACT easel I had last year at my old school and after 4 days of teaching with it again, I don't know how I survived without it for so long. It also meant I had to move my room around a little which made my kiddos go nuts! I also went deskless in the past 2 weeks which I plan to post about to encourage anyone who is thinking about it to just GO FOR IT! I LOVE not having a desk!

I had to change up my morning meeting area now that we have an easel... I like it so much more now!

We are starting our place value to 1,000 unit in math. We made a pocket foldable (it uses a little bit of glue so I guess it's not a true foldable) for place value pockets. The numbers were made with index cards cut in half the long way. Get the foldable printout freebie here. Print back to back, but do just 1 first to make sure the pages are in the correct direction (I always have a hard time getting them in the right direction when it's a foldable!)

 

We had a ballet come to our school and perform Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs this week. It was one of the best performances/assemblies I've seen in the last 2 years!

BONUS

I just LOVE some of the shirts my kiddos wear, they crack me up!