Solve the Room (again!)

I posted about Solve the Room back in January and I'm here to share some more...

Those of you who don't know about Solve the Room... you might know about it but just call it something different... Read the Room.... Scoot.... Roam the Room.

It is a very easy to implement... you put cards up around the room (by mid-year or earlier I have my kiddos put up and take down cards)...

Give students an answer sheet & a clipboard... (all of my Solve the Room products have a similar answer sheet like this one...)

And then let your students move about solving the room!

Solve the Room is DEFINITELY something I have to model at the beginning of the year... Voices are off (unless you're asking a friend quietly for help to find a card), look at the card, figure out the answer, then record - in the correct box! The modeling time pays off because after one or two sets of Solve the Room cards, my students can do this completely independently during Math rotations, allowing me to teach the small group in front of me without putting out any fires, and that makes for a happy teacher!

Clicking here will bring you to my TPT store with the search "Solve the Room" already plugged in. You'll find Solve the Room products that will work with grades 1, 2 and 3.

And here are some of my newest Solve the Room products - great for 1st and 2nd grade!

And if you want all these at a reduced price, bundled together...

Do you use solve the room in your class? Let me know in the comments!

Favorite things - Summertime!

I'm starting my July with some linkies... check out my July Currently here.

I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for Favorite Thinks Linky!

Since it's the first day of July, I HAD to choose my favorite summertime things!
I LOVE LOVE Summer! It's kind of hilarious how much I like summer because my husband hates the hot weather! He works on a golf course and so when it's super hot out, he has to work even harder... so my less than busy months are his busy months!

1 - LOVE LOVE LOVE the beach & live about a mile away from it, which means I can hit the beach up for an hour or two or camp out the whole day there.

2 - We share a driveway with our neighbors and they work at the same golf course as my hubby (the golf course is basically our backyard!) so we spend a LOT of time together whether it be brews at the fire pit or horseshoes at the pits we built last year or running our dogs around on the golf course or all beaching together. It is the perfect summer set-up!

3 - Running - it's my stress-relief during the school year, but in the summer there is SO much more time for running!

Go link up here!

It's July - Currently!

My summer resolution is to post on here at least twice a week and so I'm staring with a couple linkies! Check out My Favorite Things Linky here.

I'm linking up with Farley over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade! for Currently July!

LISTENING - I'm a littttttle [read a lot] obsessed with Grey's right now! It's a realllllly bad thing that I chose it as my next Netflix show - there are SO many seasons!

LOVING - The hubs and I finally have a membership to BJ's Wholesale club and our obsession with Pineapple juice has skyrocketed since we can get a 24 pack of small cans for cheap!

THINKING - I just converted my Classroom Jobs TPT product into Chalkboard themed! I made a lot of little things for my classroom last year that were Chalkboard themed and have decided to do a lot more this year! Check out my Chalkboard Themed Jobs by clicking below!

WANTING - So this morning there was a crazy amount of rain and thunder and lightning and now the weather is a sticky kind of cool (I realize that makes no sense but the weather rarely makes sense in New England) so it's no beach today... Tomorrow is looking like a good beach day though!

NEEDING - I really didn't do a great job posting on my blog probably since January. I had a student teacher and with finishing grad school there was a lot on my plate and sadly posting on my blog fell to the wayside. This summer though I'm going to try to do a better job - hopefully 2x a week!

ALL-STAR - I have the best grade level partners like ever! I have always gotten along great with guys and my grade level team is made up of myself and 2 fabulous guys. They are so easy to work with and we always have fun together - all while managing to get A LOT of work done. Even though I'm the youngest I'm kind of the mama bear of the group. I am always making sure they remember deadlines, are ready for upcoming units, have copies of everything and overall make sure that our grade level team is completely on point. After 2 great years I'm starting to think we all couldn't survive without each other and it will be a sad, sad day if one of us ever leaves!

Now go link up to July Currently too!

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!