We LOVE Maryland Blog Hop

We love Maryland for many reasons!  You probably already know that Maryland has some pretty awesome things; crabs, beaches, history and of course our TPT sellers rock too  

I grew up in Virginia and met my hubby at college (WVU), he is from Maryland and we moved here right after we got married!  I can't believe that I have lived here now for almost 25 years and am happy to call Maryland my home!  It's true that home is where your heart is because what I love best about Maryland is all the wonderful friends I have made and memories that I had while raising my family here!  What do you love about your home state?
Thanks for stopping by our fun blog hop!  

Click below for your Freebie of my $4 Winter Word Work Unit with over 20 pages of fun word work activities for your students!!!  

Click below and enter the Rafflecopter to win my giveaway for my Snowman Shades of Meaning pack!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure to check out these Maryland sellers…

Thanks for entering the fun and good luck!!!

Dollar Store Clipboards & Pebble Go Freebie

I LOVE the dollar store - really The Dollar Tree!!  I know most teachers do too - so I just had to share my latest dollar store creations with you all!

We use our computers everyday in the classroom and I love students to be able to do research using the computers and listen to stories online during our Daily 5!  I often give them follow up worksheets or note taking sheets for them to use while on the computers.

It is hard for them to manage the keyboard and paper with our limited space and even more challenging for some of them with the larger clipboards.  So I headed to the dollar store in search of mini clipboards.  They didn't have any at the time but I found 6"x8" chalkboards and these cute colorful metal clips.

So I pulled out my trusty hot glue gun and glued the clips on the chalkboards to create my mini clipboards!!  The best best best thing about these clipboards is that they have a handy little handle for hanging them.  So while I had my glue gun fired up I hot glued some hooks to the edge of my computer tables and hung those suckers up!!  It makes me so happy to see them all hanging there all neat and tidy!

We are fortunate enough to have access to Pebble Go so I made some note taking sheets that work perfectly with my mini clipboards.  

Click below to grab the freebie for yourself and there is also a larger version for you in case you don't want them to have more room to write! 

Enjoy and happy dollar store shopping!!

Rewarding good listeners...

If you are like me and my little ones you know that we work so hard at the beginning of the year on becoming good listeners!  We practice and practice sitting on the carpet and I have even started teaching using Erica Bohrer's cute Whole Body Listening posters!  Thank you Erica - click picture to grab some for yourself!

They are great visuals and teaching points for getting us all ready for school!  Well, after winter break or a bunch of snow days ;) we seem to have forgotten and need some new reinforcements!  

About this time last year I was teaching a whole group lesson and after redirecting a bunch of friends several times I just had a spark of inspiration that instead of constantly redirecting some friends I should give some reinforcements to those kids who were always doing a great job.   My hope was to inspire the distracted ones to try harder in order to get the "reward."  So I walked over to my closet and stuck my head in looking for something to use as a reward and I spotted my container of stuffed animals. I grabbed all my care bears and put them all on my lap (I have 5 or 6 of them).  I continued the lesson and didn't even mention the bears - I am sure they thought I was a little crazy for a few minutes!  

As soon as I spotted someone who was one of those great whole body listeners, I leaned down and handed them a bear and simply said, "great listening" and kept on teaching.  It was awesome and the kids really responded.  

This year I made some blue star stuffed animals to go with my behavior chart.  

You don't have to drag out your sewing machine like I did because the care bears were just as effective!  Give it a try and let me know how you like using them or better yet let me know what little tricks you are using in your room to keep your sweetie pies on track!

Blizzard inspired Measurement Freebie

Wow - we just had ourselves a Blizzard in Maryland and all over the east coast!!  School was closed on Friday in preparation and has been closed already for Monday and Tuesday!

I was inspired during the snow day on Friday and came up with a fun way to track how much snow we were getting using some non-standard measurements!  So, naturally I ran up to the dollar store to gather some supplies!

I grabbed an old board from the garage and my trusty hot glue gun and glued down all sorts of things that I thought might be fun ways to measure our snow!  Legos, markers, straws, bugs and of course some rulers!  I used some sharpies to mark the measurements and wrote a cute little title on my board and bam!  I was ready for the snow to come!

I moved the sign today and got our final measurement right in the middle of my unplowed street!  

So now I know how deep the snow was...

The blizzard of 2016 was 3 1/2 straws deep 

7 bugs deep

16 dominos deep

55 Legos deep

4 1/2 markers deep

22 inches deep

Whenever we get back to school I am going to share the pictures with my students and hopefully my principal will let me take them outside so we can measure the snow ourselves!  

Click here or the images above to grab a freebie for your class!  I hope everyone in this blizzards path will be dug out soon!  :)

Fun Giveaway!

Check out this fun giveaway from Laura at Discovering Hidden Potential!

The prize packs are pretty substantial and you can enter to win all 3 prize packs!  Woot Woot!!

I have donated my Superhero Sentences unit which  is a super cute and super fun way to focus on punctuation!

Super cute ★ Superhero ★ themed reading language arts punctuation pack for K-2nd grade! 

This pack includes:

Period Poster
Question Mark Poster
Exclamation Poster
Comma Poster
Apostrophe Poster
Punctuation Practice Worksheets
2 different period assessments
2 different question mark assessments
1 comma assessment

Click the giveaway pic above to enter!  The giveaway ends on Saturday so go quick and GOOD LUCK!!

Back to School Linky & Class Decorations

U My classroom is finally ready!  In my guided reading and small group math area, I created a fun beach theme using a palm tree that was created from an old carpet roll (Home Depot give away), brown lunch bags and an old umbrella covered with green fleece.  MeaningfulMama has a nice blog post with step by step pictures showing how to make your own tree here.  I also added a small kid sized beach umbrella and a paper lantern sun to my beach area! 

Tip -  In order to stand the umbrella and palm tree I used 5 gallon buckets from Home Depot that I filled with water bottles to weigh it down.  I bought PVC pipes from HD and they cut a hole in the top of the bucket lid so the PVC pipe would fit perfectly.  

Here is my new writing center!  I am really excited for this area and I am trying something new by having my writing center menu fully displayed this year.   I love having my writing center activities already set for each day of the week - it gives my student a schedule and they look forward to different days of the week and once they get into the routine they always know what to do at the writing center.  Check it out here for more details.

In my county, school starts on Monday and all across Maryland kids and teachers will all finally be back to school!  As a way to celebrate Techie Turtle Teacher, OC Beach Teacher and I have set up a Back to School linky party to gather some fantastic resources for everyone!  Please feel free to link up your back to school post, resource or freebie and make sure to visit each other's sites and leave some BTS love!! 

Classroom decorations Day 1...

Today was my first day back at school and even though I went in last week to sort out supplies for my team it was still a lot of work and dang I am tired tonight!

So here is what my class looked like last week:

It was all shiny and clean and in the corner where you can't see there are boxes and boxes of supplies for the whole first grade team!

So last Friday I went in and with the help of 5 awesome helpers, we got all the supplies sorted and delivered to each of my teammates classrooms!  

Over the weekend I chalk painted a table in my room that turned out so cute!  I used cream colored chalk paint from Jo Ann Fabric (Lace) and mixed  and in my own acrylic paints to create some bright colors!  Mixing the paint was pretty low key, I poured some chalk paint into a plastic ziplock storage container and then added just enough acrylic paint to get the color I wanted.  For my table, I mixed 3 different colors and still had some left over!  Gotta love chalk paint! If you have not tried it yet you need to!!!  I am going to chalk paint an old night stand that I have sitting in front of my classroom, it holds books for kids to read while they are waiting for school to start!  I will post a few pictures later this week...

I also managed to move all my books and set up the library.  This year I added a few new Seuss Turffula trees and moved my palm tree to my reading table (more on that later this week)!  They were super easy to make and Bombshell Bling has a great blog post with lots of pictures to help you make your own!  Since the trees are made of pool noodles they are super light and I was able to simply tie them to my class library using pretty ribbon!

More to come later this week...