TpT SALE!

Have you heard the news?! Teachers Pay Teachers hit the 3 million teacher mark and is throwing a huge site-wide sale!! Get 28% off in my store TOMORROW and FRIDAY! (Feb. 27th and 28th). Click on the thumbnails to head to my store. Search for what your class is working on or needs the most help with! (Fractions, ugh!!)

TpT has changed my life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's true. I can find a lesson or activity for exactly what I need and download it immediately. I also love knowing that I'm buying from another teacher who is using the money to support his or her family and class.

I love creating products for my class and then sharing them with other teachers on TpT. I love knowing that a lesson I made is helping other teachers and students. The feedback I get from other teachers makes my day! When I hear that students LOVED the activity, or something I made really ENGAGED a group of kids I get so excited! At my store you'll find 14 free activities and 147 products for sale. I've taught 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, so search my store for whatever your class is working on now. Math and reading centers, foldables for math, science, and reading notebooks, lessons on grammar, holiday activities and more. I hope you find something that your class will enjoy and benefit from! Thank you for shopping and supporting my family and my students. Remember to use code: TPT3 at check-out!

Valentine's Day Recap

Friday was a busy day! Our school celebrated Valentine's Day and participated in Jumprope for Heart, the fundraiser for the American Heart Association. Since it was Friday we also had a reading test and a spelling test. My students did so great, other than a few tummy aches!

In math, we finished our graphing unit with a test on Thursday, so on Friday we did M&M Graphing! The kids loved it. This freebie requires students to record their data in a tally chart, and then graph it in a bar graph and a pictograph. Then we ate M&Ms!

             

With my 4th graders it was a normal busy day of working on our writing (our state test is so soon!!!) and taking our Friday tests. At the end of the day we did get to enjoy our Valentine treats though. My students were so sweet to each other. Their Valentine bags were so full of treats they began falling off the board from where they were hanging, that I had to take them all down. One student made personalized wordles for everyone, another made rainbow loom bracelets for everyone. And as their teacher they spoiled me silly! My students make coming to work easy. One even made a Tagul for me since we learned all about them in writing. 

We have off tomorrow for President's Day and on Tuesday we have a field trip! Looking forward to another fun week with my students and our last week of prepping for our big writing test!

A Busy Monday

In writing, we've been working on holding peer conferences and then editing our essays. I've been paring up students randomly. Then they trade papers and read each other's essays. On post-its they have to write two compliments and two suggestions for improvement. After sharing their ideas with their partner they edit their own writing. Sometimes we do it again with different partners and only one compliment and one improvement. Then they finally turn them in to me and I check over and conference with students as well. It's taken a lot of practice, but now our peer conferences are running like a well-oiled machine! (See my post on figurative language below! Haha!) The conversations I'm overhearing are wonderful and I think they're really learning from each other. (Here's hoping!)

In science, we've been learning about measuring mass and volume. Students experimented using a balance to find the mass of a whole object. Then they broke the object apart and found the mass of the pieces. After finding the sum of the masses they compared it the mass of the whole and found that they were equal. Many had predicted that it would change, so it was good to find out the answer firsthand. Students also measured volume by measuring how much water was displaced in a graduated cylinder filled with 30 mL of water after adding an object.  

After lunch I walk down to the Kindergarten building and pull my first grade math students from their K/1 combo class. Lately, we've been working on reading and interpreting data from graphs. All my students agree their favorite kind is picture graphs... just because they like drawing smiley faces or "stars" for each vote. I was surprised by how quickly they caught on to tally charts and the group of 5. Today we looked at bar graphs though using the bar graph center from my TpT store. I didn't have time to print and laminate the graph cards, so I just printed the response sheet and we looked at the graphs on my laptop screen. I think my class liked it more this way and I saved on color ink! 

    

In reading, we finished our novel study on Stuart Little today. I don't think I'll be reading it with my class again next year... I wasn't in love with it. My students enjoyed it, but it didn't lead to the deep discussions I was hoping for. We're starting Island of the Blue Dolphins this week and I'm excited about this one! What novel studies have you tried?

We Heart Figurative Language

My 4th graders have been hard at work all year writing narrative and expository essays in preparation for our state assessment in writing (which is in 10 school days! EEEEK!) Every morning we begin writing class with an idiom of the day. We look at an example sentence and try to figure out the phrase from context clues. Then we discuss the meaning and they record it in their folders. Their knowledge of idioms is really growing and they love it! I'd say that as a class our top five favorite idioms (because these are the ones I read the most often in their writing) are:

1.  adding fuel to the fire
2.  chomping at the bit
3.  on pins and needles
4.  my cup of tea
5.  take the bull by the horns

Adding figurative language has really improved their writing. To encourage them to use more idioms and vivid vocabulary we created figurative language word clouds this week. It was also a nice break from our constant essay writing. I first learned about Tagul from seeing this picture on Pinterest that linked to The Polka-Dotted Teacher's blog.

I mean how cute is that?! I followed her instructions (she has a great video tutorial here) and did the same project at the end of last year with my students and here's how they turned out. I didn't frame mine, just laminated them. I laminate everything.

Go watch her tutorial, and then come back here and I'll explain what we did. I'll wait...

So before you get started you'll need to create a free account on Tagul, but then you'll be able to save your word clouds and access them from anywhere! I checked with Tagul's customer support and it's totally cool to create one account as a teacher and allow students to sign in. This is convenient because then every student's project is in one place and easy to print later. Here's a step by step to get you started creating your first cloud:

1. Log in

2. Click CREATE NEW CLOUD

3. Under the Table Tab, click clear all to erase the demo cloud. (The old preview will still show on the right until you click visualize)

4. Click add tag and type in each one separately.

5. Click Visualize to see the new tags you've added.

Once you've got your tags in, it's like the Polka-Dotted Teacher says, "just play around with it!" Next to each word you can pick certain weights, color, fonts, and angles for each tag or leave them all set to random. 

Since my class was creating "We love figurative language and vivid vocabulary" Taguls we made ours hearts by choosing the heart shape under Appearance. This seemed fitting for Valentine's Day as well! There are many shapes to choose from or you can even upload your own custom shape. 

After changing the shape, you can also change fonts and colors by clicking on the menus below and adding the ones you want. If your tags are still set to random your word cloud will change every time you click Visualize. Don't forget to save it (change the name at the top where it says cloud name). 

We went to the computer lab on Thursday and my students got to work typing in their favorite idioms and vocabulary words. They had a lot of fun playing around with color, fonts, and the weight of tags. Check out my student's awesome clouds below! This made for a great bulletin board once they were laminated. I loved seeing my students read and talk about each other's Taguls (and figurative language!!!) before school started yesterday.

Of course, now that they're laminated I see a few spelling errors (ahem...colassal right there in giant lettering), but that's alright... we can go over those in class on Monday. 

I can't wait to use Tagul for future projects. I've already been thinking of a few:

1.  These would make great posters for synonyms (different words for said, big, small, good, bad, etc.) 

2.  Motivational cards before the big state tests.

3.  A sign for classroom door with all students' names.

4.  And I'm definitely creating the end of year gifts like I did last year using The Polka Dotted Teacher's idea.  (The idea originated here using Wordle.)

And the best part about Tagul... it's all free!

Addition and Subtraction Superstars!

My first grade math class is rocking the addition and subtraction lately! They love practicing on Reflex Math when we have some extra computer time. I made this packet for them to practice solving their facts independently. Then I read the directions and they color according to the key. Lastly, we discuss the patterns that arise when colored. I love these pages because they provide practice with so many different skills and my students ENJOY them. So it's a win-win! These activities come from my Valentine's Day Math Practice for 1st-2nd grade. I also made a version for 3rd and 4th graders.

Last week we worked on these other addition and subtraction pages. They now hang as decoration on our walls. These pages take around 15 minutes each for my first graders to solve and color. Usually the coloring is done when they have finished other assignments. They keep them in their "fun folders" to work on later. We're going to use these pages to make valentine cards for family next week. If you teach little ones you'll be interested in this color by number freebie that's similar to the pictures below. This is always a fun time of year!

100th Day of School!

Today was a blast! Celebrating the 100th Day of School is typically reserved for the younger classrooms, but why not let the older kids have some fun too?! My 4th graders definitely enjoyed our 100th Day together.

We started the morning off with our 100th Day Trail Mix (click here for a freebie if you need some ideas for ingredients). Students thoroughly washed their hands and then filled their baggies with 10 pieces of 10 different snacks. I allowed them to munch on this treat throughout the day. And the award for best teacher goes to... ;)

When students entered the room they found a math activity on their desk. They had to solve 100 math problems and then color all the problems that equalled 100 one color and the rest of the problems a different color. Most of my 4th graders finished in the 15 minutes normally reserved for Calendar Math. The rest will finish up tomorrow. Maybe I'll add one more problem to make it 101! You can find this activity in my store by clicking here.

Last week during reading students wrote about what they think life will be like when they're 100 years old. Today I finally finished taking all their photos using the Aging Booth App (only 99 cents!). The app aged them to the year 2044 (not sure why...), but made them look super old so it worked! On my lunch break I sent them to print using the CVS app and picked them up after school. The photos are hilarious! Most of my boys made silly, grumpy old men faces. I can't wait to hang these with their writing.

Our last 100th Day activity was to decorate our "I am 100 days smarter!" bookmarks. My students are ferocious readers and are always in need of another bookmark. Some of them even have a few books going at a time. Click here to check out the bookmarks in my store. Looking forward to another busy day tomorrow!