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 for Friday

As some of you may know I've had a student teacher since about January and that combined with grad school and becoming a Jamberry consultant and everything else has made it tough for me to post as often as I'd like, but with today off for Good Friday, I'm back with a Five for Friday post!

 We've been working on time. We had such a fun time timing each other to find out how long different actions would take! The actions they chose were too funny... swinging arms dancing, disco dancing, push-ups, hand washing... you name it, they thought of it!

Our amazing reading consultant worked with my student teacher to introduce found poetry. If you've never heard of found poetry it's so easy and fun! Take a book with beautiful language like Owl Moon, read it asking students to listen for beautiful language. Record the beautiful language on chart paper. Put these phrases and words on sentence strips. Students then manipulate these sentence strips to create a poem. It was awesome having 3 teachers in the room for this!

The poems they came up with were pretty awesome!

My kiddos have been doing an awesome job making inferences. I found an awesome what's in the teacher's bag? activity here. The students LOVED it!

We also made picture inferences! I found some awesome pictures for making inferences thanks to pinterest and we did a "carousel" activity where each group made an inference about the pictures around the room.

Our student teacher came up with the idea of turning ourselves into clocks! We had fun figuring out what time our bodies were showing.

The Harlem Wizards visited our school and one of my kiddos was picked to do a few tricks with "Big Mike" so cool!


Hopefully will be back with at least one more post next week!

Five for Friday (on a Friday!)

Hey all, I'm actually linking up on a Friday for a change! Late on Friday, but still Friday!
Also doing a little blast from the past in this post because it's been a while!

A few weeks ago we were delving into our money unit! We love the game Rich Robots! I found it here a while back. It's a great introduction to coins.

More Money, Money, Money! We love Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook! This great activity had flaps that made this sheet into a fun flap book. Check it out here.

For my grad class, I did a co-teaching action research project on topic & detail with one of my favorite co-workers! Here my kiddos are getting serious about topic & detail!

I have a student teacher right now (part of why I haven't posted much, it's actually a lot of work!) but let me tell you, it is making it SO much easier to do reteach! I grabbed a group of kiddos who struggled with subtraction with regrouping and did a little reteach activity today. I got this game from Amy Lemon's I Can Regroup Addition & Subtraction Centers!

Check out my new favorite app Shadow Puppet! My students wrote How To stories and recorded them using this app! It's basically a really fun presentation app. You can do a lot more with it than my kiddos did on their first try, but seriously so fun & such great final products.

Check out one of my favorites by clicking the image above.