Five for Friday

Like many others, this week has been jam packed. Between GRADE testing, DIBELS testing, Mother’s Day, the Science fair and Field day (which was canceled due to the weather) things have definitely been interesting.

So interesting and so chaotic that the past two nights I came home (not even realizing I was tired) and fell asleep for a couple of hours…all while having my laptop lying on my chest…definitely not a good idea, but I am soo glad I didn’t drop it. 

So onto my pictures:

The whole school was asked to participate in the Relay 4 Life event by decorating the bulletin boards in purple. I am on an owl kick lately an went to some blogging friends and asked for some help with a cancer saying that I could incorporate my owls into. LOVING how it turned out and the owls the kids made are sooo stinking cute. Some poor owls lost some ears in the process…but we tried to revive them by gluing them back on. And now after looking at this picture and realizing it the lettering is off centered and the “owl” part might be misread as “all” I am going to be changing it up on Monday…I am a bit of a bulletin board perfectionist. 

We also worked on some Mother’s Day projects this week. The kids painted wind chimes…painting is a messy messy activity.

and created this adorable craft to use as cards for our Mother’s Day gift. I just LOVE the crafts from A Cupcake For the Teacher.

 

This in process one made me laugh…he may have left it this way too

And one little sweetie was being exceptionally squirrely pleasant this week and decided it would be fun to use marker and color his entire arm in. Oy!!!!

and yes I made him scrub his arm….thank goodness it was washable marker….

Head over and link up with Doodle Bugs and check out what everyone else was up to this week.

Summer Craft Fun

Alrighty, I am popping in just for a minute to share my latest craft and show you all the sales happening this week for Teacher Appreciation Week. As I am sure you know by now, TPT is having a Teacher Appreciation Sale on May 7th and 8th.

  Thanks Ashley Hughes for the adorable button.

Now onto the craft. Like I posted previously, everyone is gearing up for the end of the year and I am no exception. The kids will be working on my end of the year snapshot books (you can read about them HERE) as well as doing some fun crafts.

Last year I created this beach ball craft activity pack.



I recently updated it with new graphics and added a couple of extension pages.
This year, I am excited for my newest craft, Have an “Owl”some Summer!

We are going to be making these little guys sometime this week and I will be using them for our Relay for Life bulletin board (I will share more on that another time.) After the boards for cancer come down, our board will continue to have these guys on it, but it will be transformed into a summer lovin’ board for the countdown to summer.

You can check out either of these summer crafts by clicking on the pictures above.
I am off to load up my cart and work on a couple other things for tomorrow and then off to bed. This girl is TIRED!!!!

Happy Shopping Friends!!!

End of the Year Snapshots

Is it summer yet? I am not sure about anyone else, but I know I am in survival mode. Summer cannot get here fast enough. Throw moving into the mix and having bouts of sickness running through my house for the past two weeks, I can barely keep my head above water.

I did recently manage to get my end of the year books ready to go and I wanted to share them with you. I created one for grades K-2. We will start working on these shortly and will do a page a day until the book is complete and the kids can then take it home as a “souvenir” of their year.

Girl and Boy Cover pages in both color and black and white pages

 This Is Our School, This is Me At the Beginning/End of the Year, and an All About Me page

What A Friend I have In You and 2 Favorite Things Pages

 When I Grow Up, A Trip To Remember, and Light Bulb Moments

A letter for a Special Teacher, A Letter for a Special Student, and Things I Have Learned

I am loving these books and I cannot wait until the kids get to start working on them. You can check them out by clicking on any of the pictures below.\

It’s Friday :)

Happy Friday. Man what a week. It was Kindergarten registration the last two days and boy what a treat it was to see all the incoming kinder kids. Some little loves sure are something…hopefully they find some how should I put it…calm….to them over the summer because wow-eee were they a treat. Haha

I am relaxing from a very busy week and thought I would link up with Doodle Bugs for her Five for Friday linky.



1. The Spring Fever bulletin board I put together. The kids made the bird part of my Spring Fever Craft pack and I made a big Spring Fever Bird for the center. The flowers are made out of tissue paper.

I love how this kiddo was doing so well on the “stictching” and then all of a sudden he cut off half the birdie’s face. Sure gave me a good chuckle.

2. We talked about chickens and where they come from today. I whipped up this cute chick poster so we could write different facts about chickens on it. The turned and talked/brainstormed different things about chickens and where they come from and I was blown away with what they knew. It was fun to start a discussion about the life cycle of a chicken. (I didn’t have paper that was big enough to do a big chick so I ended up taping several sheets together…hence the lines you can see in the body.)

3. I thought I was going to lose a hand this morning while opening a science kit. They had the tote zip tied together and I had only a small space to get my scissors in to break it open. Well apparently the fatty part of my hand was in between the scissors and when I broke through the zip tie I caught my hand and a gigantic blood blister was the result.



The swelling has come down tremendously since this morning, but boy does it still hurt and writing anything is a pain because the pens rub right on it.

4. And I know it is a Five for Friday, but I only have 4 good pictures for you and I am too tired to do anything else, so I will leave you with a “relieved it’s the weekend” picture of myself lounging in my bed….6:45 is an okay time to be in bed correct?



Have a fantastic weekend friends

April Showers and Earth Day

Happy Good Friday blogging friends. I am so thankful for each one of you. Thank you for making my blogging experience worthwhile.

I wanted to take a second and share my latest packs with you. I am gearing up for spring (we may be seeing a hint of spring this weekend and I cannot wait…this crazy weather is getting ridiculous).
In honor of Spring and April being only a couple days away (can you believe another month is almost over) I created an April Showers, Bring May Flowers Craft pack.
 


This pack includes everything (minus yarn) you need to complete this umbrella craft to help welcome Spring and April into your classroom. Craft templates are included as well as several activities that can be done in addition to the craft.

This pack also includes a Spring word search a several options to create a classroom graph based on Spring and rain. 

I also just completed my Earth Day Mini Unit and Craft Pack.



This unit includes various KWL charts, bubble maps, class graph and chart parts, Harmful and Helpful Activity, An Earth Day Little Reader, Earth Day writing, and an Earth Man Craft and Writing Activity (all templates are included for the craft). This pack is similar to my Groundhog, Dental Health, and President’s Day Mini Units and Crafts.






You can check out any of these units by clicking on any of the pictures above.

Now that you made it to the end of this post I am going to give away one of each of these units to 2 lucky readers. All you need to do is be one of the first 2 commenters and you will get these units for free Please be sure to leave an email address. (Also if you are not in the top 3 please do not hesitate to leave a comment. You never know when I will be generous and give away more and I always LOVE to have comments from my followers.)

Peek At My Week, Money Mania, & A Freebie

So I have come to the conclusion that I am a bit OCD. I decided I was going to try my hand at the Visual Lesson Plans and about a million hours later I finally finished. I LOVED doing these and hope to continue with them, but let me tell you: The formatting and wanting everything to be just right made this simple project turn into a HUGE project that took forever and a day to complete. But I am loving the end result and I hope you can find some new things by taking a peek at my week.



To get a copy of these plans, click the picture of the plans (or click HERE), and it'll take you to a PDF document to download...when you download the PDF, you can click on all the pictures and links to take you where you can find all the activities (TpT, blogposts, websites, or Freebies!)
 

Whole Group Language Arts is all of the stuff I have to do for our Reading Series: LEAD 21. The Word of the Day is my transitioning technique that helps my day run smoothly. We talk about the word of the day daily and have it on display in the front of the class. Students know that they do not move from the carpet or their tables until I say the word of the day. This allows me to get all of the directions for our next activity out before they start moving. It helps eliminate the million questions kids ask about the activity because they are able to hear all the directions the first time. And it makes for a happy teacher :) 

Thursday is an Early Dismissal Day and also the classroom Easter Party. The room moms are in charge of the afternoon activities and party and I will be doing some fun activities with them in the morning. 

Our theme for reading for the next 4 weeks (well three now because we are on week 2) is Life All Around. Each week we have a different theme question that we are able to answer at the end of our reading for the week. This theme falls nicely with our study of plants, which we are doing from my Plant’s Galore Unit. I will be sharing more about this very soon. As soon as it is finished, I will update the file with the link to it in my store. 

For math class, we have been busy learning all about money. One day the kids will know all the coins, what they are called, and not know what they are worth and the next day they know what they are worth, but not what they are called.  I created a pack that will hopefully help to reinforce these skills a bit more and drive home “all things coins.”

Our reading series is broken up into 3 different segments each day. We start out by having a half hour of whole group instruction and then due to our schedule we break our centers up into two parts. We have two 15 minute rotations, snack, and then come back for 2 more 15 minute rotations. We then do our math block because of students who are in Learning Support. This is followed by the 3rd reading block segment which is writing which is only for 15 minutes. This is not enough time to get ample writing practice in so at least once a week, normally on Fridays, we will do Kid Writing instead of stations. I will work for half an hour with half of the class on kid writing while the other half is working on something at their seats. After snack, we switch and I work with the other group on their writing. This allows me to see what skills the students are mastering with their writing each week and allows for more individualized instruction based on their needs. (A Freebie is included in my plans as part of my center work for the week so definitely download and check it out.)

So there is my first try at visual lesson plans. Now off to keep myself occupied for the rest of the afternoon. (Actually crossing my fingers we get this storm they are calling for…A couple days ago I wanted no more snow..but I could sure use a couple days off after the day I just had…mental health days anyone?) Have a good week.

Five for Friday

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs to share my 5 pictures from my week. It was a very crazy week. Started off having a snow day Monday and then a two hour delay Tuesday, went to school Wednesday and Thursday, and woke up this morning with 6 more inches of snow so we had yet another delay.



The snow last night wasn’t supposed to happen, but apparently a snow belt appeared out of nowhere and hovered over us and a couple towns close by and dumped a TON of snow on us in a matter of only a couple hours. And from what I hear we are in for a whopper of a storm at the end of the weekend and beginning of next week that could dump a couple more feet of snow on us..I think we have about a foot outside already. 

Didn’t the Groundhog get the memo that it was Spring on Wednesday? I saw this cute picture on Facebook and had to share.



And with all this talk of snow, I sure have a bad case of spring fever. I worked on getting a Spring bulletin board ready to go today. I managed to get my big birdie complete and it will be ready to hang up next week with the kiddos birdies, willing we make it to school any next week. The craft/bird comes from my Spring Fever Craft pack.



For kids that can’t tie their shoes, I sure have enough kids that end up tying their shoes or their legs together? Doesn’t make sense to me? haha



And this week, we did a very complicated directed drawing activity, but the kids did EXTREMLY well this. We made sunbursts and they had soooo much fun picking their colors out and making cool designs on their paper. It was time consuming, but was so worth it when they were all done.



So that was a peek at my week through pictures. I apologize for the poor quality photos. All but the groundhog (not mine) and the snow picture, they were all taken by my phone and my phone takes HORRIBLE pictures. I kept forgetting my camera at home, thus the :( pictures.

Have a fantastic weekend everyone :)