Word Building...Using Big Words!

I'm very lucky to work with a plethora of phenomenal women and a man or two!  Earlier this year one of the women on my grade-level used our latest test results to split our students up into tiered groups for our tutoring time...formerly RTI...now MTSS, I think...they sure love switching up those acronyms on us every couple years and I can't figure out if I have a hard time keeping up or I just don't really care about all those shenanigans enough to keep up :).  Getting back to what does matter...students were grouped according to their needs as identified by the test and I got the opportunity to work with the word building group.  I checked Making Words out of our professional library and started putting together word building activities and then created a worksheet as a special activity for Groundhogs Day.  My tutoring students enjoyed it so much that I introduced it to my class.  It was a hit with them as well so I developed a little unit of word building worksheet for every holiday that I could think of that occurs during the school year.

Click here to check this book out on Amazon!

Using big words to build smaller ones is not only a fun activity but this book taught me to extend on that by listing the words we build and then separating them into groups like words that begin with 's' or have 'th'.  These skills are meaningful for children in grades K-3 and beyond!  I just posted the Word Building: School Holidays packet on TpT!  Please stop by and check it out!

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Sometimes I like to test things out before I invest so I wanted to provide you with a Back to School freebie to try out with your students!

Click here to download this freebie!

I hope you find this activity useful in your classrooms, I saw a big improvement in my word building group after doing many similar activities with them last year and I'll definitely be using this with my incoming kiddo's starting this August!

Summer bloggin'

I've logged in to blog three times since summer break started for me last Wednesday but got too carried away reading other peoples blogs to post anything on my own :)  It's nice to not feel rushed to skim through a few blogs before I start working on an impossibly long to do list or rush to or from one place or another.  This is my first real summer off since high school...12 years ago.  Last summer I had knee surgery and half of my summer was a percocet/loratab induced haze then I started physical therapy, which is a painful job in itself, to get up and running before I had 20 first graders up and running around me.  I've been so busy catching up with all the friends I neglected this year working 2 jobs (to pay off that knee surgery!) that I haven't worked on any new materials yet.  I'm hoping to start editing some things I created earlier this year to start posting.  In the mean time I thought I'd tell you about 2 exciting-ish things that have been going on!  My cat Wrigley went missing about 3.5 weeks ago.

This is Wrigley!

Which is definitely not the exciting part, I'm still devastated and miss her dearly.  It's amazing how attached you can become to a pet.  She was a real talker, especially every morning at 5:30 when she woke me up to feed her because she thought she was wasting away...can you believe I actually miss that?!

While I was trolling Craigslist hoping for a glimpse of her on the 'lost and found' page and the 'pets' section I came across ads for our local animal shelter.  Animal Care and Protective Services is an incredible place at the moment they are overrun with kittens and are offering an adoption special...2 kittens spayed/neutered and microchipped for $25.  I went by ACPS to see if they had happened to pick up Wrigley and couldn't walk out alone.  Meet my new buddy Meela!

Getting her 'pin' on :)

Such a lady...

Words can't describe how much I miss Wrigley but this little sweetie definitely brought some joy back into this house and is an awful lot of fun!

Exciting tid-bit #2 is from the parent of a former student!  We became friends on Facebook and I follow her blog http://katiehigg.wordpress.com/ .  A while back she posted about Overnight Oats and I like oatmeal...sometimes.  I've been trying to track my calories and get back in shape so I did a little research and found this site with TONS of recipes http://www.katheats.com/favorite-foods/overnightoats.  I decided to give it a try and of course I got a little ahead of myself and tried the pumpkin pie recipe first, it didn't turn out so well :/  I'm no quitter so last night I tried the basic recipe which looks a little like this...........

........and it is, well, amazing!  You don't have to cook it, just mix the ingredients together, put it in the fridge overnight, and eat it for breakfast the next morning.  I'm pretty excited about it, check it out if you want to try something new, easy, and delicious for breakfast!

I hope you're all having a great summer whether you're working or taking it "easy" (as easy as any teacher can really take it???)  Stay tuned for some word building activities later this week!

Camp Ehlinger

Camp Ehlinger is now in session!  Each year I LOVE to end the year with a couple days of Camping with Books, a thematic unit developed and shared with me by Cheryl Saoud!  It's great because I can tear down my classroom, throw up a tent and put out some camping themed centers and call it a day!  On day 1 we learn about bee's and their impact on our daily life including the pollination of some of our favorite crops.  Day 2 focuses on ladybugs, their life cycle and comparing it to other life cycles we learned about earlier this year.  While my students are working in centers I have a chance to clean my classroom for the summer.  Our centers this year include:

-Book Assembly (a camp journal on day 1 and a lady bug life cycle book on day 2)
-Crossword and coloring
-Reading tent
-Computers (http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/games/all/)
-Math fishing games *day 1-Domino Fishing http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Domino-Fishing
                    *day 2-Fact Family Fishing http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fact-Family-Fishing
-Craft (day 1-binoculars, using toilet paper rolls and day 2-popsicle stick framed pictures)

Reading in the tent!

Inspecting sticks, pine cones, and leaves with a hand lens!

Sporting some insect masks :)

What I Learned in First Grade!

Every year I ask my students to reflect on everything we've done this year and to recall everything we learned together.  This year I developed a little writing activity with a planning sheet and writing papers which I'd love to share with you below!  We started out discussing and listing all the things we did and then they started telling me things they learned to do this year.  I attended a math workshop this year and really beefed up my math instruction so I was really excited that a lot of the things my students called out were math related!  My workshop instructors would be so proud :).  I like to hang these up in the hall all summer and then read them at the beginning of the school year with my new students so they get a little peek at what's in store for them in first grade.

They put check marks over each fact as they use them in their story/report.

Work in progress, I love how she spells echolocation!