I am so excited for 2013...those four little numbers are the visual reminder that it is my wedding year! 

YIPPEE!  

To celebrate the New Year and my wedding year I am throwing a sale. 

Click the image above, or here, to link to my store and enjoy 10% off!

Happy New Year, my friends!

t-minus 1/2 day until Christmas Break!!

Yes! We made it! The 2012 part of the 2012-2013 school year is nearly complete!  This week has been so super busy, too!

We talked more about Verbs... specifically Verb Tenses

 This is a freebie available for download at my TPT store.

We started talking more in depth about Author's Message

We watched books online at Storylineonline.com. My students LOVE this site! The books are read by famous actors and actresses. The books are also slightly animated. It is similar to Tumblebooks if you are familiar with those!

Next, we made a chart (a non-fiction feature we have been learning about!) in our ELA journals to help us track the Author's Message from different books we read and listen to.

We made our parent-gifts

 

Christmas Tree Ornaments. Super simple and wonderfully cute! I passed out sandpaper to my students to round off the edges of their popsicle sticks that had to be broken and you would have thought I handed them $100!!! :) I will for sure think of something to use sandpaper with again this year!

And today my students got their gifts from me

I went a little book-crazy with our last book order. Well, it was partially my intent but I over ordered by about 15 books. Oh well! 

When my students came back in from recess and found their shiny new books on their desks, they were so excited! To be honest I was really REALLY nervous that they would roll their eyes at me and hate the gift. But they had JUST THE OPPOSITE reaction. I told them that I thought long and hard about which books to give each student, which I totally did! It took me entirely too long to make my decisions :) Which is part of the reason that I over ordered... I just couldn't make up my mind!

Whelp! Tomorrow is the last day. Polar express day! 

Every Wednesday is a late start, so kids come at 10:05....

We have a book club in the morning with popcorn, then we will watch the movie and enjoy hot cocoa.

Then we will do some sequencing...

Then we will clean our classroom (the fire marshall comes over the break!)

Then it will most likely be time to head to the buses!

My teammate and I went back and forth about Christmas Homework. We decided to only send home a Winter Break Journal and encourage students to continue reading and practicing IXL (online math).

What do you assign for homework over breaks? 

Sandy Hook School {day of silence}

Tomorrow, Sunday, December 16th, I will honor and remember the children and adults from Sandy Hook School, who lost their lives on Friday. I will be participating in a Day of Silence. I hope you join me.

My dad called me on my lunch break Friday to see if I had heard the awful news. I hadn't. I immediately got on the Internet and as my heart melted, goosebumps spread across my body and I thought of my 27 students outside at recess. I was instantly thankful to be in Washington State, far, far away from this tragedy. My thankfulness was quickly followed by heartbreak...then guilt for feeling thankful.

I wanted to call my students inside from recess early, close the blinds, and just talk with them. I didn't want to talk about what had happened, but I just wanted time to connect with them, to remember that they are children of parents who are at home and at work right now also hearing about Sandy Hook with their hearts breaking, thanking a higher power that their child is safe and unaware of the tragedy. They are most likely also imagining what those families in CT are going through and the feelings they were experiencing as they waited anxiously to be reunited with their children...or to learn that their child would not be coming home tonight. 


We are all thinking about you. We are all praying for you. Your children will not be forgotten. 

This will never make sense. But I am hopeful that something good will come out of this, we will learn something... I was reminded to take more time to get to know my students as the children that they are. The poem below says it all.

12 days of Christmas

My sister and I have been planning a 12-days of Christmas Countdown for her husband and my fiancé. This has turned out to be quite the process!  Last night we got together and make our envelopes which will hold a ticket-like piece of paper that tells our guy what he gets for that day. 

For example, on Day 4: 

The front of the envelope says: 

On the 4th day of Christmas

 my true love gave to me... 

The ticket-like paper on the inside says:

...4 scoops of ice-cream, 

two for you and two for your sweetie (that's me!)!

And inside the envelope will be a gift certificate to Baskin Robbins!

I was not liking how my envelopes were turning out... my handwriting just doesn't cut it! So I made some labels to be cut out and pasted to the front of each envelope!

I made three different sets. You can use the same set for all of your envelopes or you can mix it up!  To get download a copy go here!

I would love to hear some of your ideas for this!!!  We are stuck on days 8, 10, 11... thankfully we have 10 days until this all starts! 

Canned Food Drive & Fire Safety

Every year, right around this time, my school puts on a Food Drive. This year our local Food Bank is unusually low on canned food items so we are having a Canned Food Drive. We brought in 1,400 food items last year as a school, so our principal and Student Council Mayor have challenged us to beat that number this year! 

I have a slight competitive-ness in me...

Slight...

I wish it were a contest between grade levels! We did competition fundraisers ALL THE TIME when I was in elementary and I LOVED IT!!  Probably because my class won most of them ;)

so I talked with my teammate about it and we decided to team up and make a 2nd grade goal. We started pretty conservatively with a goal of 250 cans. We have 52 2nd graders, so that would be about 5 cans per student.

We wanted to make a visual statement for everyone in our school to see...we hope students will feel inspired to start their own classroom goals, or even better, try to beat us!

Because we have been spending so much time on tens and ones in 1st trimester and answering questions about data, we created a picture/bar graph.

It is hanging in our common area right at the door where students go in and out of for recess :) 

Across the bottom of the chart are the dates of our Food Drive. 

Each day we add the total number of cans brought in by our 2nd graders.

Here is a close up of the images we are using to track our data. 

A single soup can is the ones... a bundle of soup cans is the tens...

 

 The cans my class brought in today... 24 :)

 Yesterday we had one lonely can. Today as a grade level we had 43!!

We are already up to 44 and we still have 10 days to go!!

I am pretty sure we will need to up our goal next week sometime!

When we add the soup can images to the chart we count by ten and one, then we count by ten and one again to figure out our total so far!

We can practice adding double digit numbers now, and subtracting from a three digit number, too!

I just love the visual, the math, and the little bit of "bring-it-on" we are displaying!

I am working on a tracking sheet for individual students to use throughout our Canned Food Drive, too. Then we can discuss how the data changes, compare dates & information, add, subtract, discuss tens and ones... I love this activity! My students love it too! I think they love how huge we made the chart :) That was the first thing they all said "That chart is so big it covers the whole window!"


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We also had our Primary Fire Safety Assembly this week. Our local Fire Department was AMAZING! They were so engaging with a wonderful skit, songs, movements, sounds, puppets... We all learned so much! Check out our Fire Safety poster we created to capture all of our learning!

Did you know STOP, DROP & ROLL has changed to STOP, DROP, COVER & ROLL! That was a new one for me!

Next, we took our learning and practiced writing complete sentences with matching pictures. We shared these with our principal who loved them! How can you not?! Look at those great pictures!

 I love the fire colors in this one!

Happy Weekend, friends!

Anyone else having a Food Drive at school right now??

Cyber SALE Extension

Cyber Monday and Tuesday were good to me... you all were good to me! Thank you so much for choosing to put my products in your shopping cart this year!

As a little thank you I am extending my Cyber Sale through today, Wednesday 11/28. You will be able to get the 20% off from me, but the 10% from TPT was a Monday & Tuesday only thing!

Be sure to check out my earlier post which highlights all of my most popular items, and FREEBIES! 

Thank you so much for all of your support!

Liebster Blog Award {EEEEKKKK!}

A few days ago my email "dinged" to let me know Caitlyn Delaney, from Fourth Grade Lemonade, posted a comment on one of my blog posts. I love getting comments so I opened the email right away to see what she had to say and to my surprise, she nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award!! 

The Liebster Blog Award is given to up and coming bloggers by established bloggers (less than 200 followers), in order to recognize them, let them know that they are appreciated, and to spread the word about new blogs. The rules are:

• You must post 11 random things about yourself.

• Answer the questions that the nominators set for you.

• Create 11 questions for the people you nominate.

• Choose 11 blogs you love (with less than 200 followers) and link them in your post.

• No tag back, (but please leave me a comment on this post with the URL to your Liebster post so that I can learn more about you!)

So here are 11 random things about me:
1. I am getting married April 6th on a cruise ship in Seattle.
2. I am going on my honeymoon April 7th to THIS PLACE
3. I may be one of the only people left on planet earth that religiously watches a Soap Opera. I can't stop tuning into General Hospital (ps. my fiance knows all of the story lines, too...hehehehe)
4. I carry a water bottle with me wherever I go. A reusable water bottle! I even keep a brita in my classroom for fresh water!
5. Every time I dream of "home" I dream of being at my childhood home. We lived there until I was 19. I have yet to dream about my parent's new house (they have lived there almost 10 years, and I live there for 8 years before moving in with my fiancé).
6. I have to set a monthly spending limit for myself at Scholastic.com--I have a book-buying addiction!
7. I have a Great Dane. He weighs more than I do, he can rest his chin on my chest WHEN I AM STANDING UP (granted I am only 5' 0'' tall...), and he loves to snuggle in the morning after my fiancé has left for work.
8. My middle name is June. And no, I was not born in June :) I was named after my grandmother on my dad's side.
9. A woman offered my parents 50K to buy me when I was still inside my mom! She was taking a Stained Glass class from my parents and had been trying to have a baby for years. She didn't care if I was a boy or girl, or what I looked like, she just really wanted a baby! I hope her dream eventually came true. I am thankful that my parents wanted me more than they wanted the money!
10. I love Apple products! All of them! I especially love the FaceTime feature. Perfect for when either my fiancé or myself is out of the area. He actually helped walk me through getting the TV back to the right "input" feature or whatever by me holding the remote up to the camera, and he saying "push that one on the right, then the one on the third row down..." YEESH! Thank goodness for technology!
11. I am the Technology Leader for my school! This is a super fun Teacher Leader committee that I get to be a part of and be the first to know and learn all about the newest technology out there! I also get to push the district to invest in new technology. 



Questions from Caitlyn:
1. Do you own any pets?
Yep! One Great Dane, Malone...and two cats, Gus and Porter.
2. If you could travel anywhere, where would would you go?
CABO!!!  Going in April 2013.
3. What is your favorite thing about being a teacher?
Working one on one with students. I wish I could have more time in my day to do this. When I work one on one with them not only do I learn more about their needs as students, but I learn more about their wonderfulness as kiddos!
4. In the spirit of Black Friday, what is your favorite store?
Target. But the line was WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too long! The $35 door buster 600 thread count sheets were NOT worth the wait. My sister and I unloaded our arms (no carts were left by the time we finally got in the store) and walked out the door!
5. What is your favorite book to read aloud to your students?
Anything about friendship or family or being bully free! I love the Bucketfiller books! If you have not heard of these, please check them out!
6. If you won the megamillions lottery, what would your first purchase be?
Oh wow. I would totally pay off all of my student loans. I hate making those payments every month. Then I would take my whole family on a vacation somewhere relaxing... like Cabo :) 
7. What is your favorite thing to do in your spare time?
Recently my fiancé and I have been spending all of our free time at Lowes and Home Depot (home renovation stores). The second phase of our big remodel starts this week. EEEEKKKK!
8. What is your favorite sport?
Growing up it was soccer. But since meeting Josh, he is slowly converting me to being an Ice Hockey fan. GO CANUCKS!
9. What are your favorite blogs in your blogroll (they don't have to be teacher-related)?
Christina Bainbridge was the very first blog I happened across! I didn't realize this world was out here until finding her blog one day. And even then, it took me over a year to realize "wait...maybe there are other blogs out here like hers?!"
10. If you could time travel to one year for the whole year, what year would you go to?
Honestly I would go somewhere where I could relax all day. I am not into touring places and being on the go go go! I love learning about the history of a place for a day or two, then I just want to relax.
11. Why did you start blogging?
I love being inspired by the amazing people out there that I would otherwise never meet or know existed. I love getting to know people this way and I love being able to share my ideas, too!

Here are 11 questions for my nominees.
1. Where did you go on your honeymoon, or where would you like to go for your honeymoon?
2. You're leaving work late, again, and you are just too tired to make dinner. Where do you stop to get a quick bite on the way home?
3. Do you sit down and eat your lunch? Or do you have a "working lunch"?
4. What is your go-to thing to do when you need to get away from it all (work out...call up a friend for a coffee date...)?
5. When did you know you were meant to be a teacher?
6. If you hadn't become a teacher, what would you have been?
7. Do you have siblings?
8. Do you have pets?
9. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
10. If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be? Why?
11. What color pen do you correct student work with? 


The 11 blogs I am nominating:
1. Mrs. Kelly's Class
2. Blooming in 1st
3. Hoot Hoot Hooray!
4. I Love TWEK, Tasty Technology Treats for Teachers
5. Learn to teach and teach to learn
6. Learning in the Little Apple
7. Lighting a Fire in 3rd Grade
8. Second Grade Chatter
9. Sensational Seconds
10. Simple in Second
11. Smiles and Sunshine

It's going on sale tomorrow!!!

I started getting together a reading fluency center for my kiddos over this wonderful Thanksgiving Break and I just kept adding, and adding, and adding to it!  

I ended up with a product I am so proud of! Check it out! I think you will love it...especially because it is 28% off Monday and Tuesday (11/26 & 11/27)!!!

The cover + a Table of Contents (NF text features!)

Example of one slide (fold in half for student's booklet)

10 popular and funny songs and poems included!

I added 5 ELA activity pages, too!

Here is the example of ELA activity #1: Tune into Interesting Words.

I will be printing, copying, and stapling my books together tomorrow at school. I think I will wait until the first December day of school to introduce them to my students though :)  Kind of like radio stations switching over to Christmas music before Thanksgiving... I just can't start with Christmas-themed stuff in my classroom until our calendar reads DECEMBER. 

When do you start with Christmas-themed activities in your classroom??

It's a CYBER sale!!!

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Take a quick look at some of my best sellers!

Year Long Calendar Math Workbook

10 Easy-to-set-up Math Stations

I have math assessments for 1st and 2nd grade 

based on the new CCSS

Teacher Checklists are included

2nd grade example

I can statements for Kindergarten, 

1st and 2nd grade math 

(insect and pirate themes available)

Plus lots of FREEBIES

SAVE THIS FOR NEXT YEAR!!!

A fact-filled craft all about the Liberty Bell!

SAVE THIS FOR NEXT YEAR!!!

Thanksgiving placemat + addition practice!

Editable newsletter templates

Editable CC Teacher Binder Covers 

(insect and pirate themed)

And my newest items

Arrays 

CCSS ELA Guiding Questions

Place Value Puzzles

Take advantage of this awesome sale while you can!!!