Telling Time to the Hour and 1/2 Hour Freebie

Hi!  I hope you are all having a fun, relaxing weekend.  As I write this, we are getting tons of snow.  It started with freezing rain and now the snow is coming down.  I am secretly hoping for a school delay.  It would be our first one in years!  We are allowed to dream right?  I had a fun weekend.  Being a mom of two boys, I never get to really enjoy girly shopping. On Friday night I went shopping with a girlfriend, her daughter and two of her daughters friends (all in second grade).  We started out by eating at Mozza Mia.  OMG!  This is my NEW favorite place.  I made reservations for my family to eat there on Valentine's Day.  After eating, we went to TJ MAXX.  It was so fun seeing how girls shop.  They tried on high heels, hats and scarves and we all had plenty of giggles.  I love my boys dearly but they hate to shop!!  We did go out Saturday to exchange some pants that I got Friday night for my youngest son.  My boys were troopers.  Today we've been pretty lazy.  My kids are into the show Fact or Fact.  So I have been watching it and working on school stuff.  One of the things I made today was a Telling Time freebie.  It's very simple.  You can use it as a center, class activity or as a matching game.  I hope the rest of your weekend is fantastic!
Sara

 

You can get it by clicking here...Telling Time Freebie

Super Bowl Sunday

Well it looks like the Ravens and the 49ers are going to the Super Bowl!  I just updated my Super Bowl unit so that it has a new graph in it with the 2 teams.  My son is pretty excited, as the team he played on in 5th grade this fall was called the Ravens!  He wants them to win so bad!

You can find it here....Super Bowl-Math-and-Literacy-Activities

Enjoy! 

Sara

 

 

 

 

We are working on short vowel chunks in my classroom.  The students are practicing listening to chunks at the end of words, identifying the vowels they hear and are rhyming words together.  I will be doing these puzzles with my class in February.   I will have 5 envelopes with 36 pieces in it.  The will sort the pieces out on the floor and form trains.  On the front engine there will be a short vowel chunk.  The cars behind it will have all the words that end with that chunk.  They will all be rhyming words.  They will record the words on the worksheets with the same chunks.  For each chunk, there are 5 cars and for each vowel there are 6 chunks totaling 30 trains in all (per vowel).

Chunks included are: ap, at, an, am, ar, ap, et, en, ell, ed, est, ess, it, ip, in, ig, ill, id, ot, og, ob, ock, op, om, ug, ut, ub, un, uck, um

 

 

 

 

You can find these in my TPT store by clicking here....Valentine Short Vowel Trains

I will be doing my first give-away!  I will select 2 people to receive this free.  All you have to do is become a follower of my blog AND of my Teachers Pay Teachers Store.  List your email address in the comments section and you may be one of 2 lucky winners selected!  They will be randomly chosen on Friday!  :)
Have a great week!!
Sara

New Looks

I am changing the look of my blog.  My question is...how do I grab buttons from other people's pages that I like and how do I create my own button?  Can anyone help me?  I would really appreciate it! :)
Thanks!
Sara

Today was a busy day...and I am doing my second post for the day!  We had a workshop day and did report cards.  I was looking ahead to what I will be assessing in Math the next time we do report cards.  Some of my kids seem to struggle with Skip Counting...so I created some fun things to do with them during the upcoming weeks.   I will be cutting out the Valentine's candies and will be having the kids skip count by 2's, 5's and 10's.  I included posters for practicing counting these numbers and an assessment sheet that we will use.

 

 

 

 These posters go up to 120.  

 This number cards go up to 120.  Kids will put the numbers in order from 2 - 120.

 

 This is one page of the poster....it goes up to 120...

 

 

You can find them here....

Skip-Counting

 

I hope you have a fantastic weekend!



Martin Luther King Jr.

This past week was a short (4 days) but busy week for us.  Today is a workshop day to do report cards.  Being that I got mine done over the weekend, I have been cleaning my classroom out.  I have so much stuff in my classroom that I have collected for years.  I just don't know where to begin.  For one, who uses borders anymore?  I would like to know because I have LOTS of them to get rid of!  With white boards and Smart boards in our classroom, I have NO bulletin board.  I have all these borders that I have collected for years and have tears rolling down my cheeks as I am packing them up and finding a new home for them.  BUT, I DON'T NEED them.  I have to keep reminding myself of that! 

This is just from one of the boxes, so many cute, seasonal borders. 

Anyway, this past week was one of my favorite weeks ever.  We talked about Martin Luther King Jr.  I started the week by giving all of the kids that were wearing pink in my class a piece of candy.  I let them eat it in front of their classmates.  The kids that didn't get candy had some pretty sad faces and said it wasn't fair.  They kept asking why they didn't get candy too.  I asked them how they felt and the kids that got candy said that they were happy they got some.  Some were sad and wanted to share theirs with their friends.  I asked if this reminded them of anything...or if they could make a connection to this activity.  Some of the kids said it reminded them of when they don't get to play on the computer and their siblings do or of when their siblings get to go to a birthday party and they don't get to go.  They asked why the kids in pink got candy again.  I said that it was because I liked pink better.  I said I might let them have extra playtime or candy everyday!  Finally one little girl said, "I get it!!  This is how black people used to be treated!"  YAY!!!  I am glad someone made the connection.  I asked if they knew who changed the laws and a little boy said that Martin Luther King Jr. had something to do with it!  YAY!  We then talked about how it felt to be left out because of a color that you are wearing.  They sad bad and they couldn't believe that ANYONE ever treated black people that way!  I am so glad they don't see colors in our class or treat each other differently because of skin color.   After our discussion we read a book about MLK. 

I then took out a brown egg and a white egg.  We talked about the colors of the shell.  I asked them which one they would eat or choose to eat.  Many of them chose the white egg.  They said the brown one looked different.  We talked about how you cannot judge someone or something by how they look on the outside.  I then said I was going to open the eggs. 

I cracked one open and we talked about what we noticed.  It looked like the eggs that they are familiar with. 
We opened the other egg.

We then discussed how they were the same on the inside.  I mixed them around and had them try to guess which was which.  They couldn't tell.  This led into the discussion of how we are all the same on the inside.  We just look different on the outside and it's okay...it makes us unique.  We read two more books.

I absolutely LOVE these books!  The pictures are incredible.  After reading these books we did an experiment with paint.  I told them that we all have different skin colors.  Our pigments are all different.  I told them that we all had a tint of brown in our skin.  I dumped some brown paint into a container and had them tell me when the color I had in the container matched their skin.  I added some white.  As the brown got lighter and it matched kids skin, I painted their hands and had them make a hand print.  It eventually turned into a peach color.  The kids were amazed that it started out brown.   After all hand prints were dry we cut them out, put our names on them and made this friendship circle.

We did some fun activities that I purchased from Susan at T.G.I.F..  You can find the packet here.
MLK packet on her TPT store. 

I also did a fun MLK art project that I got here.  MLK art project.  They turned out super cute!!!

We wrote about our dreams from Susan packet and did the fun art project!  They were so fun! 

We're suppose to have the coldest weather we've had in 5 years...which probably means indoor recess all next week!  What do you do for indoor recess?  I usually have my kids play games, but need some more ideas!

I hope you all have a great weekend!  I am off to throw out more stuff!
Sara