Batty for Bats!

Batty for bats!!!  This week we are just loving these furry little mammals!  It's Halloween week and we have been spending our time reading and devouring facts about BATS!

Here are a few fun SafeShare songs that my kids LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

Beware, you will be sining Echo, Echo, Echolocation! After you view this cute little JumpStart song!!

After we researched and learned all sorts of fun things about Bats we started practicing sorting facts from opinions!  We practiced this all last week with our spider research so it was a fun way to continue practicing.  My kiddos did an amazing job of taking their opinions and supporting them with facts!  

 In math we are working on surveys and bar graphs, so of course we had to take a survey about bats!

Do you think bats are cool or spooky?  COOL won by a landslide!

The bats they created turned out super cute and are hanging all around our classroom making everything look very spooky and decorative for Halloween!  This cute little bat even made his way into my guided reading tree!

Check out my brand new Batty for Bats Opinion Writing Unit!  It comes with everything you need to take all your bat research to the next level! 

As always, thanks for stopping by!  Happy Halloween everyone!! 

Fun Spider Fact and Opinion Writing with Freebies!

All week we have been having such fun reading and researching all about spiders!  One of the best books I found was a National Geographic Kids book with awesome text features and full color photographs!  We cleared out our library of all their non-fiction spider books and dove right in!   I found some great spider freebies on the Kidzone website to supplement our learning.  My kiddos had a blast learning about our 8 legged friends.

After all our research, we used Amy Lemons cute little power point freebie to practice seeing the difference between facts and opinions!  This was the perfect activity to help bridge the facts that they had learned and their thoughts and feelings about spiders.

After our whole group lesson on facts and opinions, students worked in pairs to sort their research sentences into facts and opinions.  After students sorted their sentences, they wrote their first opinion pieces and created cute spiders to decorate our room just in time for Halloween! Their writing turned out great and they were so excited to create the spiders!!

Click below to pick up my Spider Opinion Writing Freebie! 

Next week we are going to focus our research on Bats!  I just love this time of the year...

A Safe way to use YouTube in the classroom

Who doesn't love YouTube?  There are so many great educational videos out there.  I love finding songs, brain breaks, book read alouds and even the occasional indoor recess movie!  What I don't love about YouTube are the ads that pop up after the videos!  Yikes,  they can be so distracting and occasionally they are down right inappropriate!

So, what's the solution?  Safe Share. SafeShare.TV is a simple website where you insert your youtube link and Safe Share gives you a SafeShare.TV link that eliminates all those distractions.

http://safeshare.tv/faq/english 

Here's how to create a SafeShare link in 3 easy steps:

1. Copy the link of the YouTube video you want to SafeShare.

2. Open SafeShare.TVand paste the link from YouTube into the box in the middle of the page.

3. Click on the green, General Safe Link button and a the click the red link to safely view your video in a new window.  You can copy and share that link in emails, power points, and documents.  

Bonus, you can click on Customize video and edit how much of the video you would like to see.

Here is the SafeShare link for this cute little Adaptation video that I found on YouTube!

Here are a few of my favorite SafeShare (YouTube) videos:

Echolocation - cute song with catchy tune!

Continent Song - I love the graphics and photos in this video and the song is so easy to sing, the kids will be singing their continents in no time.

Bruno Mars sings Don't Give Up with some Sesame stars!  I love showing this to my little guys and reminding them to work hard everyday!

Friends of Ten is a cute little song about all the combos of making the number ten! This has been great for the beginning of the year in 1st grade!  

What are your favorite classroom YouTubes?  Please share below and check out SafeShare for yourself!  Oh yeah, did I mention that it's FREE?  Gotta love that!!

Made It Monday! Computer Decorations & More

School starts for us in 1 week!  So, I guess summer is just about over!  I have been super busy with all those last minute projects…

I am linking up with 4th Grade Frolics again to share my Made It Mondays for this week!

My first project is a computer make over!

I have decorated my computers in different ways over the years but this summer I ran across these giant goggly eyes in a craft store and just had to buy them!!

First you need some fun border (I decided to use zebra and cheetah), glue and some duct tape.

I measured the top of my computer monitor and cut the border to size.  Then I cut some ears using border and pink construction paper.  I used the big goggle eye for my computers but made one with white and black construction paper and it looks just as cute!

Once I was done making all 4 computer toppers, I started making little rolls of duct tape and put them all along the top of the computer monitor.  By the time I was done adding tape to all 4 computer monitors, my zebras and cheetahs were dry enough to put on the computer monitor.  I pressed them into place and then cut a piece of matching border on the back side so you could not see all my tape.

The whole project took me less than a half of an hour and I think they turned out so stinkin' cute!   :)

My next project is yet another basket make over!  I love getting my baskets from the dollar tree because  you can't beat the price, but they are usually not too cute!  

So with a little ribbon, some wooden letters and paint, I turned these plain baskets (in boxes) into cute journal baskets.  

We use monthly writing journals and math journals!  Click here to check them out in my store!

My last project this week was a welcome back treat for my team!  I work with 4 of the sweetest, most supportive teachers!  I just love my team!  I found this cute little project Tara's Glue Sticks and Tape, and made them for my team.

I am late posting this tonight but thanks for stopping by!  I am off to go see all the other fun projects on the linky!  

Mini Maryland Blogger Meet Up

Yesterday I had fun getting together with a few of my fellow Maryland bloggers and TPT sellers!!

OC Beach Teacher, Techie Turtle Teacher and I had a great time meeting and getting to know each other over a very long lunch!  It's always nice to chat with other teachers; comparing our school districts, students, technology and so much more!  

Check out their blogs and Facebook pages in the links above or hop over to their TPT stores…

Getting Ready to Get Ready for School

Ha!  How many of you guys know exactly what I mean?  School starts for me on August 28th and teachers go back on August 18th.  So, this week I am getting ready to get ready for August 18th.  I went into my classroom yesterday to check it out.  The room is shiny and clean but literally everything was crammed into the back of the room so that building services could wax the floors!  So my awesome 19 year old son came over and moved everything out of my cubbie area for me.  What a sweetie!!

This picture is after about 3 hours of moving and unpacking…

All morning I have been playing on pinterest and trying to come up with some new ways to arrange my 17 student desks this year.  Here are a few of the awesome tips and layouts that I found:

There is a cool website called Classroom Desk Arrangements.com that is fun to try.  You can pick how many desks you need in your room and it gives suggestions of how to lay them out. 

Rachel Lynette over at Minds in Bloom has a wonderful blog post with ideas and suggestions for using clusters, rows, circles, u-shapes and more.  Her blog is awesome and has tons of other great ideas for making your classroom set up functional and creative!

Randi over at Teaches Third in Georgia used some crates to add a bit of storage to her table groups!  I think I am going to see if that will work in my room.

So, how do you arrange your desks?  Are you like me?  Do you get ready to get ready this time of  year??  :)  Hopefully, after a few more days I will be finished moving and unpacking so that I can start tackling bulletin boards and decorations!  Yikes!

Please feel free to leave me comments and links to your blogs, I love peaking into other classrooms especially this time of year!

Made It Monday -My Cute Teacher Basket & Sneaker Designs

Once again I am linking up for another fun Made It Monday with Tara at Four Grade Frolics.

Since I still have some time before we start school, I am busy working on what feels like 100 different projects!  Hopefully I will get them all done in time…

This week I have 2 fun transformations to share and 1 total flop!!

My first Made it Monday project is a basket repaint.   My aunt gave me this basket that she picked up at a yard sale.  She bought it for a few bucks because it had a bunch of misc. items in that she wanted but didn’t want the basket.  How could I pass this cute little gem up?  It is a deep square and will be perfect for a turn in bin or a book browsing basket. 

I sprayed it white and added some zebra stripes, polka dots and hot glue gunned this cute black and white ribbon around the edge to bring all my cuteness together!  I am in love with this basket now!!!

  

My next project is a cheap sneaker make over.  I have a had this pair of sneakers for a few years but last year I stained them somehow and was going to throw them away.  Then I got the idea of turning them into theme sneakers to go with my school’s name (Strawberry Knoll).  So, I dyed them in red dye and got some fabric markers to transform them into strawberries!

They were so easy to make and turned out so cute that I got inspired to make another pair of fun Friday sneakers, which brings me to my TOTAL FLOP! Lol

I snagged some plain white sneakers from Walmart for $5.94 and thought that I would decorate them with smile faces.  I love smile face anything so I thought these sneakers would be super fun to make and even more fun to wear!!!

Ok, as you can see from my collage things were looking great at first and I was so excited!  I used the fabric makers to draw all different shaped yellow circles.  THEN, I started drawing the eyes, mouth and circle around the faces.  The first few faces seemed like they were going well then I looked back and saw that the fabric makers were bleeding and my cute smile faces were morphing into scary looking sloppy faces!  Yuck!  I was so sad.  I was really about to toss them and my awesome 16 year old daughter suggested that I color the failed faces black and add yellow dots all over and to add black dots to the other sneaker that I had not messed up yet.   The end result is kinda cute but I still consider them a fail because I WANT smile face sneakers now and am going to try again after I do some fabric paint research! 

Thanks for stopping by to check out the transformations!  I just love Made It Monday and can’t wait to go read and get inspired to finish my other 98 projects!