Pinspiration

One of my new favorite pastimes is spending time on Pinterest.  Over the last few years I feel my creativity has waned with the stress and responsibilities of teaching and everything that comes in that mixed bag, we have all read the lists of teacher responsibilities, no need to rehash them here.

Curling up with an iced coffee and my laptop to peruse Pinterest on a rainy Sunday morning is the perfect way to reignite the creativity of even the least creative :).  This summer I've had the opportunity to delve into a few pinteresting projects!

In fact, this morning I tried the "baked" hard boiled eggs available on my YUM board, I baked the eggs at 325 for 25 minutes then plunged directly into ice water.  They were very easy to peel and the yoke was bright yellow.  Somehow I always manage to get a greenish tint when I boil them.  The only difference was that there were small brown spots on the whites where the egg touched the pan.

Last week I started working on the "no name" and "how we go home" boards during a craft day at my teaching buddy Karen's house.  Getting creative with friends (and maybe a mojito or two) is even more fun!

Used to hang papers with no names on, students are responsible for checking for their own paper and resubmitting properly.

I plan to use clothes pins with students names on them.  Parents will clip them to the board at orientation to let me know how their child will go home all year.  No more outdated lists for this girl.

Magnetic fishing pole!

The magnetic fishing pole was my own creation.  If you know anything about me or the activities I create they are almost all fishing games.  Up until recently, the Dollar Tree was selling plastic magnetic fishing poles.  This year they released poles with hooks on the end, not magnets.  I was at the craft store and came across dowels, hemp, round magnets, and knobs.  I made a huge batch of these magnetic poles, gave a few pairs away as gifts, and have spares for my own class (you know, since students take such good care of our things).  I'm considering making more and trying to sell them on TpT.

Pinterest inspires me to find/make/create new ways for my classroom to look more adorable and run more efficiently.  I find new teaching ideas, lessons, units, and activities to use to supplement my curriculum.  You can find new and sometimes better ways to organize yourself, monitor student growth, and generally create more engaging activities for your students!

How did you get creative this summer?

Fun Friday

I spent this week in a workshop on Common Core Standards provided by my school district.  Subpar (adj.)-not measuring up to the standard of performance....yes, that sounds like the correct word to describe that experience.  The upside was that some of my awesome teaching buddies were there and we went to the beach after the last workshop and had quite an after party.  Does anyone else out there just love their work friends?

Today is all about the trip I took this summer and I stumbled upon mini-hundred charts I made last year, they aren't pretty but they get the job done.  You can find them below....for free :).

A few weeks ago my mom and I took a little drive (12 hours...just picture a cross-eyed emoticon here) up to my cousins house in Maryland just outside of Annapolis.  We hung out there for a few days, hit up the Amish store (my favorite!), and played with all my cousins kiddo's.

If you've driven I95 anywhere between Georgia and Virginia you know a little something about South of the Border!

That weekend we drove up to Pennsylvania for a memorial service.  Over the last year and a half we've bid farewell to my grandmother, aunt, cousin, and great aunt.  We had a big memorial service to reconnect as a family and remember a whole lot of AMAZING women.  It was very cathartic.

Top left: Church my Nana and Pop-pop were married in
Bottom left: House my Nana grew up in, just down the hill from the church
Right side: Brush Valley Cemetery, also down the hill from the church, where many of my family members have been laid to rest.

My cousins daughter, Elizabeth, had to go to the Holocaust museum for a school report so we took the Metro into D.C. for a day.  I LOVE D.C., love, love, love it!  The Holocaust museum was...well, I don't even know if I have the words to describe it.  It's definitely one of the best museums I've ever been to, you could spend the whole day walking through and learning, discussing, and drawing interesting parallels between the past and present.  After the museum we had lunch and went to check out American History, the First Ladies dresses and china were as spectacular as usual, Nancy Reagan's red china is so sassy :).  I learned 2 of the first ladies were only 21 when their husbands took office, can you imagine?!? 

My mom, myself, Elizabeth, and Megan

We drove home a few days later and it was hard to leave so many of my extended family members behind.  Take advantage of the time you have with your people, time passes so quickly and it's easy to let life carry you away.  Over the last year I've lost people I love without warning, with a fleeting moment to say goodbye, and after watching cancer eat away at them for 8 years.  No matter how someone goes out, no matter how much time you have to say goodbye and come to grips with the inevitable, the loss is still devastating.  Make the most of all your minutes.

Now onto a much lighter subject, it's a fun Friday freebie!  I created these for my students to glue onto their papers to use to show their work when they are counting on.  They circle the number they start with, count forward or back using a light crayon or highlighter, and circle their answer.

Click here to get mini-hundred charts!

Happy Friday!

Up, Up, and Away!

Oh my, where to begin!  This summer got off to a lazy start and by lazy I mean I kicked it for one whole week before I put myself into overdrive.  I've created 14 activities that I CAN'T WAIT to try with my class next year/in just a couple of weeks!  I've uploaded them to my TpT store, all for under $2.50!  More about those in later posts.  I also just uploaded pictures of all the things I want to share with you, however, I'm sure you don't want to spend the next hour starting a novel comparable to a George R. R. Martin book so I will try to contain myself!

Today we'll talk a little about superheros!  Our school theme next year.  If you're looking for some superhero inspiration feel free to check out my superhero theme board on Pinterest.  I've gotten basically all of my idea's from there, where did I ever find inspiration before I stumbled onto that web site!?

Here are a few pictures of my pinspirations...

Blow pop superhero's!

I maybe got a little ahead of myself and made shoe wings to give my students for Christmas...ridiculous, but cute!

Wonder Woman socks (with CAPES!) and Shoe Wings!

I wonder how wearing this outfit on the first day  would affect my class size :)

I got the blow pop cape and goggles template @ zakkalife!

The Wonder Woman caped socks are from Wacky Planet!

Silver Shoe Wings are from Shwings!  I made a template using my Shwings and traced them on stiff felt to make shoe wings for my whole class.

Finally, I found this awesome Superhero Identity Packet at Family Fun!  I'm going to use it on the first day as an ice breaker for students to work on together while I sort their supplies and take their first day pictures.  Since they will be working somewhat independently I needed to simplify it.  I used some of the Family Fun packet in mine and provided a little more space for pictures.  I'm going to post mine below if you'd like to use it, however if you have older students who are capable of more writing definitely use the Family Fun packet, it's totally adorable and light-years better than mine!

Click here to get your Superhero Identity packet!

I hope you all enjoy your last few weeks of vacation!

Math Fishing Games

At the end of this past school year I spent a couple weeks pulling out all the math games we'd played all year and let students have a lot of "choice time."  I wrote myself a little note that said "Find/make more games for place value, fractions, addition, and subtraction."  I happened across it this past week and went ahead and created those games.

Click on the picture to check out this unit!

 All four games are available in a 35 page packet on my TPT page!  There are recording pages and sorting mats for various activities as well as directions for 2 different ways to use the addition game.  

Stay posted for more literacy fishing games.  Right now I'm working on antonyms, synonyms, homophones, contractions, and compound words!  I will also be working on a fishing and sorting game for long and short vowels as well as for word families.

On a more exciting note, Target and the Dollar Tree have started putting out their back to school and teaching materials!  Who doesn't love the dollar spot?!  I've been stockpiling Pinterest ideas all summer to try next school year!

What new ideas (from Pinterest or your own creative mind) are you planning on trying out this year???

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!

Click here to go to my TpT store!

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 :)