Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Silly Gravestone Epitaphs


Every year for Halloween, I have my students create their own gravestones to hang in the hallway.  It is a fun mini writing project.  Rather than making a gravestone for themselves, we make silly gravestones.  Students have to pick one thing that is not actually alive.  It should be something that they can lose or break.  Then we write our epitaph for that item.  Students are encouraged to be creative and silly. Check out some of our work from this year:


Here lies my lost cupcake!! It got eaten at a party!! Boo!
Here lies my lost sock. It is lost in my mom's dryer.

Here lies my sock.  I washed it then I had to use my Daddy's big sock.
Here lies my ball. It bounced away when I was changing my shoe and it went in my mom's cat's litter box.
Here lies my crayon. It broke. It was in my box. It fell out and someone stepped on it.

And my favorite!
Here lies recess. It is lost. I had to do my work.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

My new FAV Halloween Craft!!


Every year, our school hosts a huge Halloween even the Friday before Halloween.  We open the school up at night, the kids get decked out in their costumes, and they come to school and play games and win candy.  So in order to prepare, we spend nearly an entire week creating and hanging decorations throughout the entire school!  Each year, I like to find a new craft for my kids to make (although, I always use some of my old favorites too!).  This year, you have to see my new Halloween craft!  I am not going to lie, the idea came to me in the shower before school one morning.  Does that happen to you?  I get the best ideas in the strangest times! =)

We started by making glittery spider webs.
The kids used a ruler to trace out their spider webs in pencil.  (This one is mine!)



 
We outlined our pencil lines in glue


 and added LOTS of glitter!!

Then I took pictures of each of my students.  I had them stand against a wall as if they were stuck to it.  I printed the pictures, cut them out, and glued them to our spider webs! They are adorable!  The kids look like they are stuck to their spider web.  When parents came to our Halloween event, I saw some of them taking pictures of our creations!!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

It's a FRENZY!


Are you read for the Frenzy?  It is coming this weekend!  There will be 3 different hops going on, K-1, 2-3, 4-5.  All three will be full of autumn and Halloween themed freebies.  I am participating in the K-1 hop, but you can go to my page on Friday and pick up a map of all three so that you can start wherever you like!

Here is a little sneak peek of my freebie:

Be sure to check it out this weekend, Friday - Monday!

Saturday, October 12, 2013

It's FRIDAAAAYY!!.... errr, Saturday


This is one Friday....err, Saturday, that I am glad has arrived!  Whew, what a week!  We have been so busy and I have so much to share with you!  I started writing this post last night and FELL ASLEEP right there at my computer! haha

It's Five for Friday time!
fiveforfriday2

1.  I spent all of last week with my little sister.  I have not seen her in about 3 years as she lives in Houston and I live in Virginia.  She is now a mommy and I have a chunky little nephew that I got to adore and spoil for the entire week.  We went to the pumpkin patch and celebrated my grandmother's 80th birthday!!  It was perfect.



2. I have a ton of new and exciting things coming up for you guys!  You are NOT going to want to miss this.  Next weekend kicks off our October Facebook Frenzy hosted by Creation Castle.  The weekend after that is a Super Sleuth blog hop, hosted by Comprehension Connection.  And soon after that will be an AMAZING giveaway and blog hop weekend hosted by none other than....me!  YAY!  It will be my first big giveaway and blog hop.  Lots of more details to come.


 


3.  I have been working on phoneme segmentation with a group of students and I came up with this crazy, fun game today.  Do you ever have those spur of the moment ideas that you just have to try?  I had to scrap my planned lesson for the day, because this was just too good not to do.

So here is what we did.  We have tiled hallways so when we walk in the hall we teach our kids to follow the track of tiles like a train.  I took the kids into the hallway and had 5 of them each stand in a square on the floor.  Then I had 5 other students stand on their path several tiles away.  The students should be facing each other.  The game became a version of red light, green light.  I would call a word for the first student and they had to segment the word, stepping into a tile for every sound (their own physical push and say boxes). We would go through each student having a turn.  The students would be moving toward each other.  The first set of students to meet in the middle were the winners!


After playing our game several times, we lined up into our "train" on our "track" to go back to the classroom.  Since we were in line on a tiled floor, I had the students continue to segment words as they walked back to the classroom.  We went all the way back to the classroom, by segmenting sounds for every tile on the floor!



 4. I have a student in my class that just moved here from Mexico and does not understand any English.  We have been working for about two weeks on some English words and she now knows how to say hello, good morning, bye, bus, thank you, drink, cat, dog, and nearly all of her colors!  What a success!  So proud!

5. I am putting together some new fluency folders for my kiddos.  I am really excited about it.  I will be posting about it soon!!

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

This HUMP day deserves a Freebie!!


Wow, so much has happened since I last wrote to you guys!  I am now up to 25 students and I am up next for any new students that may come our way.  Needless to say, I have been super busy!

Let me tell you about some fun things that we have been doing. We held a hibernation day.  We have been learning about migration and hibernation.  On hibernation day, all of our kiddos got to wear their pajamas to school and bring in a stuffed animal that either hibernates or migrates.  Then we practiced hibernating and migrating with our animals.  It was so much fun!!  I am sorry that I forgot to take pictures to share with you.

We also have been working on patterning and graphing.  I set up some fun centers for these.  I will take some pictures tomorrow and see if I can share!

Did I mention that they also made me chair of our reading committee?  Maybe I need to appear to be busier! haha No, not really.  I actually don't mind it at all.  My only thing is that I am a bit of a perfectionist and I want to get everyone involved.  Everything I do is full force and I am afraid that I may be a little much for some of my colleagues!  I hope not.  I hope they find me inspiring and not overwhelming! LOL

Our first goal as a committee is to implement a uniform set of sight words for the school.  We have decided on Fry's words and have divided them among each of the grade levels.  Now we have to find ways to implement them.  One fun idea that we will do is to place sight words throughout the hallway for students to read as they travel the halls.  Each grade level is going to choose a different color paper that we will print our words on to post around the school.  I will post pictures as I see the teachers getting their words up!

Since I am focusing on sight words, I would love to see what some of your favorite ideas are for sight words.  Let's do a linky party.  Link up your favorite sight word activities!  It can be a pin, a blog post, a TPT activity...whatever you have!




And now for my freebie!  We all deserve a freebie don't we?  I have just posted a new freebie in my TPT store.  It is a pattern sort.  I hope that you will all check it out! 
And by the way, if you are not already following my Facebook page, be sure to hop over there!  I have a fan freebie up exclusive to Facebook fans.  And I will be changing it this weekend so you don't have long to grab it before the new one goes up!  And next weekend I will be participating in the October Facebook Frenzy with a TON of freebies that you don't want to miss!