Help Henry Fundraiser

30 Teachers have joined together and donated well over $100 worth of teaching products for this fundraiser!  You can have all of these for your $20  $10 donation to Help Henry! Your donation will go to help Henry’s family pay for the numerous plasma transfusions and medical attention required to help little Henry get well.

This bundle is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.!  You really do need to grab it while it's half price.  

Happy Spring - Happy Earth Day!

It's finally spring, although yesterday we had some snow here and today it is only in the mid 40's!  Yikes!  Well, regardless of our weather we are excited about this year's upcoming Earth Day holiday!

There are so many fun things that you can do to celebrate earth day!  This year we began by spending time learning all about taking care of earth!  Some years we actually go and visit the local recycling center but this year with all our snow days, it did not work out for use to go but if you have one near your school you should consider going there as a field trip.  It’s pretty cheap (just the cost of buses) and the kids LOVE it!!

After we read some wonderful mentor texts like The Great Kapok Tree, and Just a Dream, we read a wonderful non-fiction texts called Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet by Harriet Rohmer.

Then kids were ready to write an opinion piece about why we should take care of earth!  I love reading their opinions after all our research!  

They did a great job!  If you are interested in doing this project, check out my earth opinion/informational writing unit in my TPT store.  It has a graphic organizer, final draft, craft and a few fun earth day word work activities.

I also loved having my kiddos write an earth day poem!  Check out this fun freebie by Lisa Lilienthal

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Earth-Day-Acrostic-Poem-Freebie-569440

The Great Kapok Tree Freebie

The Great Kapok Tree by Lynn Cherry is such a great book, and we had a blast reading it!  I love the way the story draws the reader into the rainforest and makes us think about the environment from the animal’s perspective! 

After we read the book, we talked about the rainforest and learned a bit about each animal in the story us the non-fiction book Rainforest Animals by Maria Lopes.  

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To get ready for our 2^nd lesson, I showed them this youtube of The Great Kapok Tree which is read by                         Mrs. Thomas.  I love finding little youtube gems like this and allowing my students to experience the story in another way.  After we had read it a 2^nd time, I gave pairs of students a part of the story (from my TPT sequencing FREEBIE) and we formed a big circle on the carpet and retold the story.  It took us a few times to get all the animals in the correct order but the kids loved it and they did such a great job acting out their parts! 

To wrap up our lessons we created our own kapok trees! To create the trees, students traced their forearm and hand onto brown construction paper and then created leaves in whatever shapes they wanted.  

I put the youtube video on again and they were amazingly quiet as they created their trees and listened to the book being read; in fact I think we listened to it a few times while they were creating!  Once their trees were completed they cut up the events from the story and put them back together to retell the story.

Feel free to hop over to my TPT store and grab your own Great Kapok Tree sequencing freebie!!

As always, thanks for stopping by!  Please leave a comment and let me know some of the fun ways you have used this story in your classroom!!

Monday Math ~ Fact Families

Happy Monday!  I thought I would quickly share some fun math resources for teaching fact families that I found recently!  As you may already know, I love www.TeacherTipster.com, so it will come as no surprise that I found yet another awesome tip on his website.  This video is made for teachers to watch and shows us an interesting way to teach students how fact families work.

Watch the video, but it basically using the color wheel as a way to explain the reciprocal property.  The idea is to use student's knowledge how they can mix primary colors to get secondary colors; yellow + blue = green just as blue + yellow will also equal green and if you could magically take the blue out of the color green you would be left with the color yellow...  Again, watch the video because he does a better job at explaining it than I am but I tried this lesson with my class as a way to introduce fact families and they LOVED it!

Now the next video is a cute puppet show that is made to show directly to students.  Krys and Kai's Math Minute Fact Families is about 9 minutes long and is a great mini lesson between the teacher and a cute blue puppet.  There are other videos made by Krys Tina which look promising but I have only used the fact family one so far!  

My last fact family share is from Teachers Pay Teachers and is a great freebie made by Beverly Clore.  Check out her Fact Families Unit, it has fact family worksheets, addition and subtraction practice pages and some crayon themed math center/station activities.

As always, thanks for stopping by! Please leave a comment and let me know some of the fun ways that you teach fact families!

A few great point of view books

Hi there!  This week in class we have been working on understanding point of view.  I have found a few fun books that seem to really engage my students while clearly showing them point of view.
The first series of books are the Chester books from Melanie Watt.

The Chester series of books features a rascally cat named Chester who battles with the author Melanie Watt to turn her stories into books all about him.  He uses a red marker to scribble over her typed words and they battle back and forth in the most humorous way.  My students have loved every one of her Chester stories.  

After we read a few of the the Chester books we tried our hands at being "Chester-like".  Students used  a book that I wrote about my dog Dewey and had the best time scribbling all over the pages as they changed the story to be about another character (some created their own Chester story and others used their pets as inspiration.)

Check out my Chester Point of View Activities over in my TPT store.

I found another fun book for teaching point of view in a comical way!  A is for Musk Ox  by Erin Cabatingan is a super funny book where a musk ox hijacks an alphabet book from a zebra.  I found a fun alphabet book on www.enchantedlearning.com and students had to turn the plain old alphabet book into an alphabet book that was all about them. It was a nice point of view follow up activity and it was great adjective practice for them.

I just love finding new mentor texts.  What other books do you use to teach point of view??

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I can not believe it is March already.  The weather here is not cooperating and we are having yet another snow storm today!  It's crazy!

I'm sorry I have not blogged in so long!  My Dad got really sick at the end of December and that totally threw me off my schedule.

Thankfully, after almost a month of hospitals and rehab, he is mostly recovered and getting stronger everyday!  

School has been crazy too, especially since we have a had 9 snow days!!  I mean, I like snow days as much as the next kid but 9?  At this rate I am afraid we will be in school until July!


Anyway, Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  I hope you have some fun things planned for your class!  We are reading one of my favorite St. Patrick's Day Stories, The Luckiest Leprechaun!  What a cute story about the friendship between a cranky old leprechaun and a scroungy dog!

Usually, a leprechaun makes his way into our classroom  and leaves a few signs of his mischievous visit.  He leaves  some cute little green footprints, scatters chairs, books and leaves use a hidden pot of gold (Rolos).


We will also be doing some fun word work activities from my Word Work Unit for St. Patrick's Day, Easter and Spring.  Usually our word work consists of a weekly list of 1st grade word wall words where they practice spelling them and using them in sentences but sometimes I like to switch it up for them and give them some extra word work with a fun theme.  They love it; they especially love creating words using the letters from other words.  How many words can you make using the letters in Saint Patrick's Day?  I have other theme word word packs in my TPT store, feel free to hop over and check them out!

Here is a fun math Freebie from my TPT store! It's a place value matching worksheet where students match up the place value clues to the matching shamrock. There are two versions; numbers to 120 and a challenge with numbers to 250.

What fun things are you all going to do to celebrate the holiday?

Gingerbread Crafts & Freebies

Every year I like to have my students create a special holiday present for their parents and for the past few years we have been making these super cute gingerbread ornaments. 

The first step is to cut the men out using sandpaper from the dollar store.  I usually cut these out ahead of time because cutting sandpaper can be very challenging for those little student scissors.  

Once they are cut, I have students rub a cinnamon stick over them to give them a yummy smell and then glue them to a piece of brown construction paper.  

I let the gingerbread men dry overnight and then students can cut out around the brown construction paper and begin the decorating!  

Gingerbread men can be decorated with crayons, puff balls & goggly eyes.  To finish them off you just have to punch a hole in the top & add a ribbon to hang it from.  It takes us a couple of days to finish these adorable gingerbread ornaments but they are so worth it! 

Now for the FREEBIE!  Gingerbread Adjective Craftivity!  Check this out in my TPT store, you can  have students create their own gingerbread person using construction paper and then use adjectives to describe them. There is also an alternative follow up Create Your Own Gingerbread Person adjective practice worksheet included!

Thanks for stopping by!  What are some of the fun things you make for parent gifts this time of year?  What do you you give your students?