My Pet Reindeer

Hi Friends!

Are you counting down the days until winter break? Me too #about15togo

As much as I cannot wait for a solid two weeks at home, where getting dressed is purely optional, I really do love this time of year at school. It's like holidays 24/7 for all of December for teachers. I mean there's books upon books dedicated to the holidays and we get to decorate our homes and our rooms! Okay, that's not always the funnest for some of us :)

I'm here today with a sweet little creativity unit I whipped up just in time for winter. It's all about adopting a pet reindeer, so it's tons of fun for Christmas, but it's also a lot of fun if holidays are a no-no in your school, but you still want to sprinkle a little cheer in your room!

In this unit, students adopt a pet reindeer and write all about it! There are tons of different writing papers and prompts to appeal to students of all ages, but the funnest writing activity comes in the form of a pet manual. You have to love the activities where students don't even realize they're doing work because they're having so much fun.

And if they get to use their imagination? Well, I'm ALL OVER THAT!

We're just getting this little unit started in my pull-out groups. Because I only have them for small periods of time a few times a week. I have to really break up the lessons.

We started by adopting a class reindeer we named Bernie. We talked about all the ways we could describe the way Bernie looked on the outside. Then, we read "Olive, the Other Reindeer". We talked about what skills and characteristics Olive had that made her a good reindeer.

We went back to our chart and added personality traits. I also asked them to think about their pets at home. How would they describe their personalities? We added a few of those suggestions to our cart as well.

{{Sorry our chart is a little wrinkly. I had an overzealous volunteer grab it for me!}}

That's as far as we got last week. This week we will use our characteristic planning sheet to plan out our own reindeer's personality and appearance. We'll use them to make our reindeer and finally to fill out our pet manual.

Lastly, my students will receive adoption certificates and they will officially be reindeer parents!

Here's a closer look at most of the components of "My Pet Reindeer"

This unit includes tracers for the pet reindeer. I plan on only giving my students tracers for the reindeer heads and possibly antlers because they need help with scale, but I want each students' reindeer to look different and be reflective of the characteristics I gave them.

I will post pictures once we finish them! I'm so excited to see the final result!

You can grab this little unit from my TpT store by clicking the cover image below:

Happy Holidays :)

Halloween Round-Up: Freebies & Favorites

Hi Friends!

Just stopping in to share a few of my favorite Halloween activities for the Halloween week ahead (aka SURVIVAL WEEK)

The good news: they're all fun & educational
The great news: many of them are free!

First up: a freebie of my own made to accompany everyone's favorite Halloween book (okay, at least one of your favorite Halloween books): Room on the Broom.

This freebie features comprehension cards, sequencing, and cause and effect activities. Read more about what's included and grab it here.

Practicing dialogue with your kiddos? I have this fun freebie for a ghostly greeting bulletin board:

Okay, this one isn't free, but it's HANDS DOWN my students' favorite Halloween center that we do...and I do Halloween BIG in my room. Costume Clues is so much fun that your students don't even realize they're practicing their inferring skills (unless you tell them...in which case they'll still have so much fun).

Honestly. I wouldn't lead you astray...grab it here.

This fun activity from Jamie at 2nd Grade Stuff is also a crowd favorite:

Wanting some Halloween math activities?

I have a freebie or two for you:

This ghost bump is too cute. I seriously love this ghost clipart and look for a reason to use it every year:

And this freebie is fabulous for building number sense. So many options for how to use it:

I hope I was able to help you stock-up for this week of craziness! And remember, drop lots of hints about your favorite candy to your students...they'll bring them in to share with you. You deserve them for getting through this week :)

This Funny Thing Happened...I Finally Blogged!!

So I’m a teensy bit embarrassed to say it has been just over a month since I blogged! Seriously, I almost made it through the entire month of September without a blog post!!
Isn’t it crazy how life just sometimes gets in the way?

We’ve been back in school for 3 1/2 weeks but with PLC mornings every other Wednesday {2 hours of me outside of my classroom with a sub in my room} and MAPS testing, my students aren’t as familiar with routines and procedures as they have been in years past. We’re heading into our 5th week of school {4th full week} tomorrow and it will be the first week that I will have 5 uninterrupted days with my students. Is that crazy or is that crazy?

My new group is very cute but very exhausting, and I know it has a lot to do with how out of whack our schedule has been ever since school started. I am really hoping this week helps them get our routines down. I know for my sanity that I need it to!

While fall has officially taken over my house {there is something pumpkin or cinnamon scented in just about every room of our house}, we’ve yet to get too into fall at school. We’re just getting out of Back to School mode, actually. We just had Back to School Night this past Thursday and barely got into Johnny Appleseed and apples. I’m looking forward to settling in and doing some of my favorite fall projects and activities with my kiddos.

Since it’s been so long since I posted I’d figure I’d just do a picture smorgasbord for you…



We started off the year with activities from my Back to School Books MEGA Pack.  One of the activities we completed was the Bystander activity from The Juice Box Bully. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  Most students in schools are neither the bully nor the victim in most bullying situations, they are bystanders.  Bystanders are students {or people} or who see bullying behavior and do nothing to stop it or report it. 

We did roll playing activities in class with bystander situations and wrote and signed a class pledge.  Then, each student made their own juice box and a more specific bystander pledge.  Our pledges are hanging in the hallway which is a great location for me to refer to them when we’re heading to the lunchroom and recess.
We also read The Recess Queen and talked about positive and appropriate recess behavior. I turned the center activity from my MEGA/Bully Book Pack into a “Read the Room” activity and the students recorded whether or not different situations were positive or negative playground behavior.

Then we sorted them on the board to check our answers and talk in depth about each situation.

{I’m not one to pass up an opportunity to review making tallies!}

We’ve been reviewing types of sentences and incomplete sentences, mostly pulling from Amy’s “Strengthen Your Sentences” pack.  I whipped up a power point to use with our interactive projector.  My kiddos are loving the “markers” and we’re getting really good at using them {they’re pretty tough at first!}

We’re also knee-deep in character descriptions.  We’ve been focusing on the appearance of a character before we dive into character traits.  I’ve been loving Lindsey’s “You’re Quite a Character” unit which is superb. Amazingly, I don’t have any pictures of it in action but I promise it’s an awesome buy if you do any sort of character analysis with your little readers!



Part of our morning work one morning was to describe the appearance of this adorable pup I posted to the white board.  This is about 3 days into our appearance of characters unit and I was really impressed with their progress.  Using printables from Lindsey’s pack we also analyzed Miss Nelson and Miss Viola Swamp from “Miss Nelson is Missing” and Tina from “Smelly Socks”.

We took character description a step further with our first story from our basal, “Arthur’s Reading Race”:

The “inside” description took some guidance but we’re getting there!

We’ve also been reviewing common nouns before we head into their more specific forms.  I learned early on that it makes my life a little easier {and their day a lot more fun} if I get these kiddos up and moving.  I taped pictures of various nouns around the room and they wrote the word on the picture in the correct category.





In math, we’ve been working on Part/Part/Part Whole in addition and subtraction facts. Lots of hands-on practice with connecting cubes and mats.





We got in a little Johnny Appleseed with the help from BrainPop Jr. and one of my faves, Alisha. You know, Miss Bubbly Blonde herself.  We did lots of fun activities from her Johnny Appleseed unit, and we even used her apple themed noun freebie.







And finally, we got our room ready for Back to School Night…





We do torn paper portraits every year and they always turn out adorable.  Everyone stops in our classroom to tell the students how much they love them! For Back to School Night we added clues and the parents had to guess which portrait was their child.






We also signed this freebie I made for Owlways Be Inspired and then I posted their pictures all around this. This display is on a bulleting board along our doorway so it’s the first thing students see every morning. What a sweet reminder!

So that’s what we’ve been up to our first few weeks of 2nd Grade! Hopefully now that the Back to School rush has died down a little while, I might actually have some time to get some posts up!

I hope you’re all having a fabulous school year so far. And if you’re just getting by like I a currently am..you’re not alone…keep on trucking. It’ll get easier!

Our First Few Days {and a FREEBIE}

Hello there!
We’ve been in school a little over a week now.  My kiddos are still learning our routines, but have come such a long way since this time last week. 

My grade partners and I have been assessing our little guys and gals in fluency and comprehension, as well as writing and math so we know how to place them.  For reading, we’ve been giving the Storytown assessments {our basal}, as well as fluency passages, and comprehension sheets to round out our results. {Those Storytown Benchmarks are a doozy for them}.  In math, we’ve used both the end of year first grade Benchmark, as well as the beginning of the year 2nd grade Benchmark in EnVisions. I {heart} EnVisions.

We’ve also been reviewing a few addition/subtraction strategies.  These are purely supplemental.  How much do you supplement your math/reading programs?  I feel like we do a lot, especially in the “memorization of facts” department.

So far, we’ve done the Flip-Flop rule as well as Best Friends {Numbers that make 10}.  I can’t believe how much practice my students still need with these strategies, so I’ll continue to hammer review them well into the first quarter, along with our EnVisions program.



What’s pictured?  Our Flip-Flop facts on, well, Flip Flops. Best Friends Musical Chairs on Post-Its. {I meant to use the cards from my Best Friends unit on TpT, but the laminator ate them instead}, our Stripes pictures from my Stripes unit, our Monster Behavior sort, and draw and write craftivity, Best Friends bulletin board from my Best Friends unit, our Playground Promise from my Bully Packet. {Yes, I know…I spelled nicely wrong :(}

Needless to say, we’ve been busy!  Next week we’ll start with our regular curriculum, and I am anxious to really get our routines down.  “I’m Done!!!” needs to be an extinct phrase in my room by September 21st!!

As promised, I have a freebie for you!!!  And, can you believe, I’ve already had a little one out sick?  I needed a last minute “While You Were Out” folder because all of mine from last year didn’t make it through the summer.  I uploaded it to TpT, and you can find it here :)



*While You Were Out Folder

Have a good one!

Halle

New Classroom Labels by ME, means a Give Away for YOU!

Hi Friends!


Happy Monday!  {Our superintendent would be so proud of me for saying that}


I've been perusing your blogs all morning, and it made me feel pretty lazy with all of your "Monday Made Its".  I'm gonna have to get on that train.  But, at least you inspired me to get my butt in gear and finish my classroom labels...finally.  They've been a work in progress for months, I keep neglecting them to work on something else.


There are so many cute classroom labels out there, and I want to buy them all and label everything in my classroom times 10. I especially need them this year because I will have 5 ELL students, most of them from Burma.  Creating a print rich environment is one of the best things I can do for them, as well as the rest of my kiddos.


  BUT....Dave is gonna kill me if I walk in the door one more time with another colored ink cartridge.  So, to avoid any pre-wedding throw downs, I designed some cute, cute, cute labels I can print in black and white, or more specifically: grayscale :)

Then, after I made the "Dave Approved" labels, I thought to myself, "These would look cute with a POP of color".  So that's what I did, I added Jessica Weible's cutsie-patootsie doodle kids {don't tell Dave}!!!

Both options are up in my TpT store if you wanna check 'em out!  There are labels for all the items in your classroom as well as days, months, and years.  Plus, there are blank labels if you want to use them for binders or anything I may have forgotten.


 Andddd, since we have so many new followers from Casey's Super-Spectacular, Second-Grade Give-Away, I am going to give a set of your choice away to 3 followers who comment on this post.  All you have to do is give me one piece of marriage advice...since my wedding is LESS THAN 3 WEEKS AWAY!!!!  And if you're not yet married, give your favorite piece of teacher advice.  Or style advice.  or advice in general.  Oh, and, don't forget your email!!!


I'll pick the winners via one of those random number generator thingies by tomorrow night!


Oh, and PS...go check out Casey's Giveaway.  We're participating, and you can win my Back to School {MEGA} Book Pack as well as lots of other goodies.  Target gift card, anyone?



-Halle

Going Back Into My {Pinterest} Closet

With school winding down...slowly...I'm already thinking ahead to next year, like most of you.


This may also have something to do with the fact that I am starting in a new room next year for the 5th time in 5 years. Yes. Gulp.  That's another rant post.


In anticipation of next year, I've been going through my closet.  My Pinterest closet that is.  I pin so frequently and fervently that I totally forget what I pin. {This may be the reason I have pinned about 26 different recipes for baked zucchini, or the same writing activity 3 times}.


Here are some favorites {educational and not} from the back of my Pinterest closet {meaning I pinned them a long time ago}


Teacher Stuff:


1} I totally meant to do this to my boring, old, rocker last year, but we'll see if I can make it work this year. This teacher is super-crafty.

2} I love this magazine display.  It's super-organized, and displays the magazines so that the students can easily find the one they want.  It might be a cool way to show their writing portfolios as well.

3} This picture is just pure inspiration for how organized I'd like my classroom to be.

4} I love this as a bonus bulletin board {something I'll need moving to a smaller room}

These are just a few of sooooo many!


Recipes:


1} These just look delicious.

2} I pinned these corn cakes 3 times. Oops.  I love Annie's Eats.  Her recipes always turn out tasty.

3} I have a whole board dedicated to the sweet stuff, like this blueberry cake.

4} These "cookies" were one of my very first pins... forever ago. Haven't made them...yet.

I'll be back later this week with wedding, home, and style pins from the back of my Pinterest closet.  In the meantime you can follow me on Pinterest if any of these pins tickled your fancy :)




Halle