Five for Friday

I've bene neglecting the little blog lately, so I decided I would link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday! You can link up too by clicking on the button below.

Here was my short week...

We've been using these place value mats I made to help with our addition and subtraction. The kids love them because they get to use Expo markers. I love them because they are reusable thanks to the plastic sleeves I picked up at the Dollar Tree before school started. I wasn't able to get an entire class set, so the other kids just use a regular document protector, which works just as good. I found some page protectors like these on Amazon. You can check them out HERE. It's a set of 25 for $31.88, which is a great price!

I have no idea what I saved that file under for the place value mat, but I will put it here to download as soon as I find it!

I wanted to have some of my kids start taking home fluency strips and passages to practice reading at home. I needed a central location for them to store everything so it wouldn't get lost and would be easy for parents to get to. While I was visiting my family in Texas over Thanksgiving, I noticed that my niece's kindergarten teacher had made pencil pouches using gallon sized bags. She reinforced the bottom where she punched holes, and then she clipped them in the binders. Genius! 

 *The fluency strips are from Jane Loretz from See Jane Teach Multiage. My kids LOVE them. It helps that they're Star Wars themed. The kids progress through different levels that involve the characters. You can check them out HERE. 

The passages are from Christina Decarbo. I like them because they help my kids practice their sight words, but they are reading them in text which is so much better! You can check them out by clicking HERE.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely LOVE Amy Lemons' and Katie King's new Rooted in Reading series. I have a comprehension group for 40 minutes in the afternoon, and these activities have been so great for them. I haven't been using the grammar pieces as much, but we have plenty of engaging activities to do with just the comprehension pieces. So...I wanted to make an anchor chart for the MLK Jr. week. While I can make a pretty decent anchor chart, I really liked the one Amy made and shared in the set. I blew it up using my projector, slapped my chart paper on the board, and TRACED it. Now I have a beautiful anchor chart to go along with our lesson. Not only am I using the great materials they created, I can also use the same eye-catching anchor charts! (Oh! Go check out Amy and Katie's newest Rooted in Reading set for February by clicking on the picture below!)

My last classroom was really big. So I had to be creative in my new classroom because I wanted all the same components of my old classroom. My meeting area is super important, and I knew I had to make it work. It's been fine for the most part, but recently, I've noticed I have to start every group meeting with "Scoot up! Fill those gaps! That's not an acceptable place to sit. If I can't see you, you can't see me! Are you sitting by a successful buddy?" It's driving me nuts! So, after stalking Chris from Famous in First's giveaways for Sit Spots, I finally gave in and bought some for my room. They seem random colors (trust me, it's killing me on the inside!), but they match stickers on their desks. Each pod (4 desks) has 4 colors (pink, green, yellow, and white) that the kids are strategically placed at. My thinking is that they will still have to sit on their assigned colors. I might make them sit by their current elbow buddies, but we'll see how it goes. The ultimate goal is to get seated quicker and start our lesson.Go check Sit Spots out by clicking HERE.

I've said this before, but I love our CKLA domain studies. We just started Cycles of Nature, and the kids are already loving it. The curriculum called for us to complete a seasons chart as we read one of the listening pieces. But I am really big on engagement, so I thought it would be more fun to take all the chart details and divide them up among my 6 pods and have them work together to determine where they went on the chart. Each table took a turn coming up, and as they stuck their cards up, the other tables discussed whether they were correct or not. The best part was when they had to move other misplaced cards because they had to determine where that it was supposed to go. It was pretty quick and was way better than me standing up there and writing them all out.

And of course, a new domain wouldn't be complete without me dressing up for it! 

I hope you're having a great long weekend! Stay safe and talk to you all again soon!

Five for Friday

Another fantastic week has come to a close...which means I am one week closer to my first Fall Break! We have 2 more weeks to go, and I am so looking forward to having a break. It's not that I'm tired of teaching or stressed out. That's not it at all! But...I am looking forward to time to recharge, so I can keep teaching full throttle. I love teaching, but let's be real...it's mentally exhausting! This will be a much needed break for me. I'm hoping to post some pending products to TpT and organize my clipart, but we'll see how much I actually get done.

In the meantime, I'm linking up again with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Head over to her blog by clicking on the button below and check out more blogs!

We've been working on place value, so I've been trying to come up with some creative ways to practice while still sticking as close as I can to Engage NY. I made this spinner activity to use as an independent activity while I small group on another skill. The kids loved flicking the paper clip, and I love that they were practicing their place value skills. You can click HERE to download a free copy of the page to use in your room! The fonts are all KG (Geronimo Blocks, One More Night) and the adorable stars are from Krista Wallden's Dragonfly Creative Kit. It was a a FREE DOWNLOAD! You can download the kit HERE. I made the spinners myself using my mad shape skills. Ha! I'll be making more pages to accompany this one, and when I finish I will put them on my TpT store.

One of our activities was counting up on an empty number line, and some of the students really struggled with it. While the others were working with the Place Value Spin, my small group and I used these old, magnetic, dry erase sentence strips to practice counting up. I bought these sentence strips 6 years ago, and I used them ONCE. I'm glad I was able to dust them off and use them again.

More place value! This was another way we practiced empty number lines and writing in unit form. I'm really happy I decided to let the kids write directly on their desks. It took a LONG time for me to embrace this because I like desks to be clean, and this is a bit messy. But, it beats digging out the whiteboards and gives them a bigger work surface. I bought the plastic sleeves holding the charts at the Dollar Tree.

I laugh when I see this picture. It's from the beginning of the school year, and I was teaching the kids a chant. I look excited (and maybe a little bit crazy), and I really hope I have this same excitement all year! I love my new school, and I'm really glad I listened to Him and closed one door so He could open another one for me. 

Okay, okay...I couldn't help myself. Have you "peanut-ized" yourself yet? I want to "peanut" all my students. They'll love it! Go try it HERE. 

I hope you have a restful, happy weekend! 

Five for Friday

I can't believe that another week has come to an end! I am really enjoying my new batch of second graders, and that makes it so easy to get up and go to work every day and even stay up late at night and create fun stuff for them to use. But, no matter how much I love them, I am still soooooo tired on Fridays. Whew! They do suck it out of me!

So...I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday  and giving you a quick peek into my week!

I made these expanded form self-checkers my very first year of teaching. I broke them out today for the first time after a 2-year hiatus from teaching math. I remember it taking me FOREVER to figure out how to make them, but they were sooooo useful. I'm going to try to update them for my teammates...and hopefully it will be a lot easier this time around!

We just started using CKLA after beginning the year with Treasures. It has definitely been hard for me to embrace it because it just doesn't fit my teaching style. So...I've been doing everything I can to make it more engaging for the kids and myself while also not straying from the curriculum itself. The kids seemed to LOVE the first domain, which was fairy tales and tall tales. The skills strand feels a little...well, bland. I've tried to turn comprehension questions into teamwork projects and make chants for the phonics pieces.

I might have even wore a cowboy hat one day. :)

I found this awesome book at Pottery Barn Kids in Denver last weekend. It takes kids through a story of a boy becoming a reader, finding a place to read, someone to read with, and how he should use voice. It is amazing. Definitely try to find it!

These A-Z bookends were another fabulous find at Pottery Barn Kids. They matched my classroom perfectly, and I am now just waiting to bring the Diary of a Wimpy Kid collection up to school to put between them.

I decided I wanted to make a fun shirt to wear to work today, so I whipped this one up last night. I seriously love my Silhouette Cameo and my heat press.

Click on the pic below to head on over to Doodle Bugs Teaching for more Five for Friday link-ups!