10 Things I Want To Do This Summer...

Flashback to May 2012... I decide to start up this little blog as a fun way to share what's happening in my classroom and connect with all the brilliant teachers and enchanting classrooms I have been following for years. It was going to be great, I was going to be great - blogging every day (or at least once a week). Flash forward and I'm sad to say I haven't blogged since November... of 2012! So needless to say, I didn't do great. So I've decided to make another go at it and am starting with this fun linky! Here it goes {again}...

1. BLOG! - I really, really want to get better about blogging {as said before} and am setting an easy, attainable goal for myself. One post a week but absolutely not less than three a month! 

2. TPT! - I started up a TeachersPayTeachers shop a little while ago and put just a few of my novel studies/activities on there. I have zipdrives FULL of activities, novel studies, and units I would like to post and my goal is to get a bunch of them up on TPT this summer! I just need to add the "finishing touches" on them and they are ready to roll!

3. CREATE! - I want to create new literacy and math centers to use in my classroom. I taught straight grade math this year but will be back to multi-age math next year and really want to have a solid set of math centers, games, and activities created, copied, and ready to go for all of my units before September rolls around. It will be a lot of work this summer, but then I will always have them and they will be a huge time saver in the future. Same goes for literacy centers...

4. UPDATE! - I really want to update a bunch of my units that I already have, especially my pumpkin and monarch butterfly units that I do first thing in the fall. I also want to update my class website, which I will be honest and say I did not do much of this year. :/

5. Professional Reading! - I have not done much professional reading since finishing my masters program. I think I did too much of it during those two years and needed a break! Again, being practical, I am setting an attainable goal and only picking one book I will definitely read this summer, which is...

 I actually already have it in my Amazon shopping cart,
so it will be ready to be read poolside once summer is officially here!

In addition, I have wishlisted a few other books, which include...

         

I've had The Book Whisperer on my wishlist for a while now, so I would love to finally read it. In addition, the other two books listed caught my eye right away and I think would be fun professional reads for this summer. :) 

I am also looking for a great book or resource to help with math stations/centers. Let me know if you know of one!

6. FUN READING! - The number of books on my Amazon wishlist that I want to read for fun is unreal. My library has a 7 book limit for inter-library loaning and I consistently have 7 books rotating in and out of my account, including at least one audio book for the car at all times. Right now I'm listening to The Fault in Our Stars on CD and am loving it {I have Life After Life in my center console for when I finish it}. Here are the ones I have at the top of my wishlist! 

                

7. BE HEALTHY! - I've actually been working at this for the past two years. I've been working on eating healthy and living healthy. My husband and I do a lot of biking, hiking, and walking. This summer we also hope to take up kayaking and stand up paddle boarding. I tried the whole "working out" thing and, well, it just didn't work out. Instead I want to do things I love that will keep me in shape and healthy.

8. ENJOY! - I want to spend time enjoying my favorite things and people - my friends, my adorable little nephew, my family, and my husband. I want to see these people as much as possible this summer and cherish every moment with them!

9. VACATION! - The hubs and I plan on going to the Adirondacks for our one year anniversary. <3 In addition, I hope to do a bunch of mini-vacays, to places like Rhode Island, Maine, and Hampton Beach. The beach is the perfect place to read all those books on my wishlist! :)

10. GET CRAFTY! - Ok, let's be honest... I have over 7,000 pins and some 150 different boards on Pinterest. And of all those ideas I've pinned, a good couple hundred are crafty things I want to create for my home and classroom. The number of these things I've actually done - less than ten! :/ So I REALLY want to give my house a facelift with some of these awesome crafts. First on my list, creating a pallet garden for our deck like the one below. We've already got the pallet and soil, now we just need some time to get it done!

So that is my summer bucket list! I can't wait for summer to get here so I can get started on it! 

There's an Elf on OUR Shelf!

What a day today was! Our class received a special delivery... straight from the North Pole! In fact, when the package got delivered to our classroom it was STILL cold! Here is what our special package looked like:

And what was inside??? An Elf on the Shelf of our very own! I forgot to take a picture of what it looked like when we first opened the package but this is what we saw:

And weren't we excited! There was even a letter to our class from the big man in red himself!

After reading the letter we read the story, which explained how our new classroom friend works. There is one big rule with the Elf on the Shelf - Don't touch the elf! We made sure everyone could follow this rule before moving on.

Next we named our Elf, just as Santa asked. We made a giant list of names, then narrowed it down to two favorites - Snowy and Melody.

Meet Melody: 

It turns out a LOT of kiddos in my class have an Elf on the Shelf at home, but none of them have a girl elf! We can't wait to see what excitement Melody brings to our classroom!

Well, that's all for today! But be sure to check back in because Melody is going to be helping us with a very special task come next week... stop by to see how I use the elf on the shelf to incorporate geography, holidays around the world, and more!

Election Day Activities!

Yesterday our classroom was filled with Presidential-related activities! I stayed away from talking too much with my littles about the candidates themselves and who their parents were voting for, but instead focused on what the president does, how he (or she someday!) is elected, the voting process, etc...

We started our day coming up with a list of character traits we thought our President should possess. We've been talking about character traits from our read alouds all year, so this fit in nicely. We made the following chart:

Then I had the kids write about what the world would be like if THEY were the president (click here to see where I got this idea). Here is what they came up with:

Adorable, right? 

Then we did some Presidential Math! I made slips for each state (+DC) and the number of electoral votes they have. We read Grace for President, which gave a good overview of the voting process and how electoral votes work. Then I gave three-four "states" to each child and had them complete the following worksheet:

Click here to grab this document

And here is the document for the states/electoral vote slips I used.

The kids had a ball with this activity! After we finished our worksheets we took the slips for each state and created a line plot on the floor. We did a lot of analyzing of this data! We found the range of the data as well as the median and the mode (great review for those concepts!). We also answered questions such as, How many states have more electoral votes than our state? How many states have less electoral votes that our state? This was great prep for our state standardized tests in third grade, which ALWAYS has a line plot question asking just this type of question!

            

After we finished our math activities I had the kiddos take back their electoral votes to hold on to until after lunch.

(Cue lunch break and one exhausted teacher enjoying her few moments of calmness until...)

The kids returned from lunch VERY excited because before they left I told them we would be holding our own election right here in our classroom! And who were the candidates they asked??? None other than Charlie Bucket (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and Roxie Warbler (Roxie and the Hooligans). We read both of these chapter books earlier this year. When the kids got back I had them make a web graphic organizer for each of the characters where they listed the traits that would make that character a good president. Two groups worked on Roxie and two on Charlie for ten minutes, then they switched. We put all of their ideas into one chart on the board:

Then I had the students decide, who would you vote for? They put their vote on the back of their electoral vote slips (C for Charlie, R for Roxie) and placed their votes in our special ballot box. 

Then they went back to their seats and wrote WHY that character would make a good president.

Get that file here.

I think the kids did a GREAT job with these activities and some had some really meaningful thoughts as to why they chose a particular character. "I think Roxie Warbler would be a good President because she has a spark in her that would set a wildfire." Love it?!?! 

And I'm sure your just dying to know, who won the election?!?!

354 to 184 - Roxie Warbler Won! 

I hope you all had as much fun on Election Day as we did! I'd love to hear your ideas as well! 

Yoo-hoo... its me! I'm back!

Hi Blogger Friends!

Sorry I've been MIA the past month... the beginning of the school year proved to be more overwhelming than I anticipated. But now I'm back and hoping to get back to posting. For now I am setting a small goal - once a week I will post about things that went well in my classroom. If I get more than one post in, great! So for this week, here's what we did and what went well:

We read the story Owl Moon and used many of the activities from this unit to guide our instruction. My favorite part of this mini-unit was having the students create their own mental pictures based on a page from the text. They came out great and I've noticed an improvement in my students' own narrative writing after focusing on descriptive language/imagery during these activities. Here are some examples of our mental images:

Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)

In ELA we are also learning about subjects and predicates. The students created subject/predicate foldables based on an idea I saw on Pinterest (where else?!?!). We have actually been practicing finding the subject/predicate for two weeks now - this has been a tricky concept for my kiddos. But we are getting there!

My 2nd graders were practicing short vowel words, so I used the short vowel picture discs found here to create a fun center for them called Monster Short Vowel Match Up. I wanted my students to practice determining the short vowel sound in a given word without actually seeing the word (which all worksheets in our reading program did - grrr!) so I had them use these discs instead. My littles worked in their small reading groups on this center. Each child took a turn picking a card from the pile and deciding which monster to "feed" it to. They were challenged to feed the monsters all the "food" before their time at that center ran out. They also had to fill out the worksheet below. The worksheet was a way for me to see if they were able to spell the word on their own with the correct vowel sound. For such a simple center, the kiddos had a ball! I plan to bring these monsters back under different aliases throughout the year for other word work centers. :)

 

Click here to get the worksheet I used for this activity.

My 3rd graders were practicing long vowels using the VCe pattern. We used activities taken from here to practice this skill. I have found my students always LOVE the I Have, Who Has? games and try to incorporate them as much as possible!

In science we have finished up our unit on butterflies and spent the past week talking about insects in general. We learned the parts of an insect and looked more closely at bees and ants. We compared these two insects to butterflies in a venn diagram. The kids were really interested in all three insects and loved these two books:

             

In math we FINALLY were able to start our math journals! Yay! 

Here is what 2nd grade did this week:

Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)

And 3rd grade:

Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)

If you are wondering, I do not teach math all together with my students but instead break into math groups for Math Workshop. I have one third grade math group and two second grade math groups. The curriculum for each grade level is too different for me to teach math through a multi-age approach but I am loving math workshop!!! I will try to post soon about how this works in my classroom.

Finally, we read Roxie and the Hooligans as our read aloud for the past two weeks. The kids LOVED this book and it was a great text to guide discussions on bullying, hurtful words, and how characters can change throughout the course of a story. Coming up next... Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!

For those of you that didn't give up on me and are still stopping by to see if anything's new, thanks! I promise to try to be a better blogger!