Teacher Appreciation Sale

I am so excited for another site-wide TPT sale! I will have every item in my store on sale for this event so click and check out my store! And don't forget the code!!!!

Sale

Happy End-of-First-Quarter and more importantly Happy Easter to all of my blogging and teacher friends!

Enjoy 15% all items at my TPT store from now through Easter Sunday!

Have a HOPPY Easter :)

Witnessing papal history changes with digital age

Witnessing papal history changes with digital age

Even as ancient traditions remain the same, technology continues to change and enhance our experiences.

What a difference 8 years makes.

I can hardly wait for the next 8.

I am energized and excited by images like these... For the possibilities that are out there for my students. What an awesome era to be growing up and learning in!

RTI: Syllables

For the month of January my teammate and I decided to focus on the Foundational Skills standards for RTI. 

We planned four weeks of assessments and activities.

Week One: Syllables

Week Two: Homonyms

Week Three: Compound words and Contractions

Week Four: Synonyms and Antonyms

Reminder: RTI is reteaching...not initial teaching. So although we are only spending a week on each skill, we have directly taught each of these skills throughout the year already in our regular classrooms. 

So, last week went a little like this:

 

NOTE: We create the posters with the students sitting in front of us. This process helps their little brains better process the poster, engage with the poster, and understand the poster.  Adding sketches helps our ELL and lower readers, too!

A great website I used every day was Learning Games for Kids. They have a GREAT quick video we watched before we made the strategies poster, too!

What do you do in your classroom to teach and reinforce syllables??

On to Homonyms. We made a super handy booklet for our students to work through and keep track of their homonym learning! Can't wait to share with you!

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.