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!

Math, Spring & Dr. Seuss

Hey everyone, it's been a while, so I have a lot to catch up on!

I'm linking up with Doodlebugs for 5 for Friday, so I can quickly give you an update on what's been going on in my teaching life & classroom. I'll be posting more about a few of these ideas soon :)

I'm also linking up with Freebie Friday with a Spring freebie which can be found in #1 and a Dr. Seuss freebie which can be found in #2!

Bring on Spring!

I decided up here in New England that I am beyond sick of the cold weather, especially when I think back to how nice the weather was last March, so my class took a couple days during writing workshop and decided to "Think Spring!" Get the writing paper freebie here. For the drawing section I just had the kiddos cut a piece of white paper with fancy scissors then draw a "Spring picture."

Dr. Seuss...

I don't know about you but I LOVE Dr. Seuss day in my class! We spent the whole day reading and listening to Dr. Seuss books and then spent part of the afternoon deciding on our favorite book, explaining why it was our favorite book and blending it into our little craftivity. They came out great! Get the freebie here.

More Dr. Seuss...

The following day we my wonderful substitute read The Lorax and then the kiddos wrote about how we could protect the Earth like the Lorax tried to protect the Truffala trees (we had been working on a recycling sort to go with the book during the previous week's centers). I got the Lorax freebie from The Teaching Bug here and the recycling sort (and other FREE Lorax activities) from Homeschool Share here.

Math...

I was picked to go to a math workshop on Monday and although I was initially a little hesitant to go and had literally no idea what I was getting into, I had a FANTASTIC TIME! I met some great teachers and learned of some fabulous ways to teach math, especially logic and number sense.

If you've never heard of Marcy Cook, go check out her website! She was a dynamic presenter and gave all the teachers there a TON of great ideas. All of the number tile activities on her website are interactive and I can't wait to try them out with my kiddos. I will keep you posted! I bought a few items while at the conference and am debating buying 3 more of the tile packs... we shall see!

I already started giving my students a "number fact" to go along with each day. For example, "Today is the 12th day of the month, there are 12 items in a dozen. How many eggs would there be if I had 2 dozen?" Marcy Cook has books with all kinds of number facts to make math relevant to daily life but I thought this was one activity I could easily begin in my room myself. I'm going to have to start keeping track of the number facts I use to help me out next year!

In the meantime if you want to check out an example of the types of tile cards she has, here are some made by a teacher to fit Marcy's tiles.

New product...

We started our time unit this week, so here is the Solve the Room product I made to go along with time. There are 3 different activities: Time to the nearest hour/ half hour; Time to the nearest quarter hour; Time to the nearest 5 minutes. Check it out!

Little Bonus...

Meet my amazing guest teacher!

I had the BEST sub (or guest teacher as we call them in my school)... look at how neat she left my table, I didn't have to do ANY of the usual extra work & cleaning coming back after she was in my room... I told our (also amazing) secretary that I want this sub EVERY time I'm out :)

Hopefully I will post again soon with some more Cook math ideas!