19 Days and Counting!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday and can't wait until I'm linking up with Summer preparations for next year!

 So there are 19 days left of school, and we're hanging in there... thank goodness it's not too hot in New England right now because we'd be barely hanging on if it was hot!!!

 Last Friday my grade level partners' butterflies were ready to release and none of our chrysalises had opened yet... I was so nervous we wouldn't have any butterflies in our room, but thankfully we came into school Monday and ALL our butterflies were ready! Butterfly release day is always an exciting day, and we got to have 2 this year!

This year instead of the 2D/3D shape snack sort we normally do, we built shapes with marshmallows and toothpicks. The kiddos had a ton of fun and had to think about the number of sides and vertices/edges, vertices and faces while building. Grab the recording sheets here.

One of my girls came in with this and it made my heart smile! There are NEVER 'name things' with my name spelled correctly who would think there'd be a bottle of coke with it spelled correctly!!! Proof that it is the little things in life :)

Loving our end of the year door! I have families sign up at the beginning of the year to decorate the door each month. Families that work schedules that don't allow them to volunteer love to help out by coming after school and decorating the door! I also love to see how proud the kiddos are when they helped their parents.

Until next week... (or hopefully sooner!)...

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!

Five isn't enough & Giveaway!

Linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching Five for Friday, but feeling like 5 isn't enough to retell my crazy crazy week, but I'll try!

[one]

If you haven't already, you should check out my giveaway! I'm giving away your choice of products from my TPT store if you win! You have through the weekend to enter, the winner will be announced on Monday.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

[two]

My grade level visited my former school this week to learn more about Daily 5 from one of my favorite teacher friends! If you didn't get to see the post earlier this week, it's a worthwhile read. Mrs. R is a phenomenal teacher and we learned so much that I plan on having a part 2 post about our visit.

[three]

I read about gonoodle from a few bloggers last week, and tried it with my kiddos this week. They are IN LOVE with it and absolutely OBSESSED with reaching the different levels for our character. It has been a nice motivator... we'll do a gonoodle brain break if we can (fill in the blank). It also was perfect for indoor recess Thursday when it was rainy.

[four]

We did a fun shapes activity with food! I did it last year without much organization other than naming each food shape and sorting in different ways. This year I found a table that organized by shape, but we ended up editing the different columns with whiteout, I plan on making a nicer version for next year so if you like this activity be on the lookout for that freebie!

[five]

This week was a "craft" week. We did a cute mother's day ice cream cone book... you can find it free from Primary Circus here.

 I also had a second reading and craft event, read about our first one here. We read Not Norman A Goldfish Story and did this cute fishbowl craft. We had high school friends to help us again, so it wasn't too much work for me :)

 

[bonus]

Check out this cute Teacher Appreciation week cupcake the PTO gave us! They also provided breakfast Monday, lunch Friday as well as a little treat each of the other days, so sweet :)

Have a wonderful weekend, I hope you all felt appreciated this week!

What a Great Week!

This week has truly been fabulous. Launching Daily 5, studying caterpillars, and the beginning of Fairy Tale & Shapes units, wooh!

So in honor of a wonderful week, I'm not only linking up with Doodlebugs Five for Friday but I also created a FREEBIE to go along with Daily 5, hooray! as well as a shapes freebie and am linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday!

First things first... If you're looking for the freebies, scroll down to #2 for a Daily 5 freebie and to #4 for a shapes freebie!

If you read Tuesday's post, you know Daily 5 is my new obsession! I am so proud of my kiddos and how well they have adapted to the change to our normal centers schedule. I truly can't wait to start Daily 5 on day 1 next year!

If you missed the post on my ravings of Daily 5 and CAFE, check it out here. And be sure to stay tuned as we visit my former across-the-hall-neighbor next week. I can't WAIT to post a blog about her adorable room and fabulous teaching!

I hope you enjoy the pictures (from the post linked above) of my kiddos trying out Daily 5 this week!

If you know anything about me and my classroom, I LOVE cute, I LOVE bright and I LOVE fun when it comes to my classroom decor! For all these reasons I have created a Daily 5 Freebie that features a full page poster and half page poster for each Daily 5 (plus computers if you use that instead of or addition to the 5 rotations). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of those up in my room, possibly as a clip-in system. I also will be extending this freebie to include CAFE as well, but that might not be until the summer, so if you want them for next year, keep your eyes open ;)

Click the image for a direct link or click here to go to the product page on my TPT store.

My FAVORITE thing to teach in reading is Fairy Tales. If you want to check out another post of mine on fairy tales check it out here.
This year I created a new castle for my kiddos ideas of fairy tale traits to fill. They did an awesome job this year, adding a new trait to my list: special helpers; and the only one from my list that they didn't come up with on their own was special numbers!

In addition to identifying the traits in a fairy tale, we are keeping track of the Cinderella stories we read to see which traits the different versions have or don't have.

We've been doing exit tickets after we read each story for the kiddos to compare and contrast the one we just read to another version. I realized that I haven't really used exit tickets yet this year (which made me a little upset with myself). The kiddos thought they were "so cool" especially the first time because they had to hand in a ticket before they could get their snack... oh the little things that keep kiddos happy!

In math, we started our geometry unit... 2D shapes, 3D shapes and partitioning. I introduced 2D shapes and found that my kiddos were very familiar with the different shapes, but were a little confused between trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms. We made this anchor chart together which goes into detail for each quadrilateral.

To give my kiddos even more practice with shapes, especially those tricky quadrilaterals, we made a shape book. You can grab yourself a copy here. Just copy double sided (with rotation on or make each page go the opposite way), fold down the middle and staple!

We FINALLY did the culmination of our shadows unit! We actually did it this past Friday, but I had already posted my 5 for Friday post, so I'm including it in this week's Five for Friday!

We went outside 4 different times and traced and measured our shadows so we could see how shadows move throughout the day. The kiddos (and I) had a blast!

They also did a great job figuring out why their shadows changed... granted we had read about shadows earlier in the year, but the fact that they could pretty much all tell me their shadows changed because the sun isn't in the same place in the sky during different times during the day and because the Earth is rotating. Yay for my kiddos!


And a little bonus...
Check out how fast these caterpillars are growing!!!! In just a week... it's incredible!

Have a wonderful weekend!