Clip Your Words

I don't know about you, but I have a million clothes pins in the classroom. This Clip Your Words center just takes word cards and clothes pins. I bought a simple set of sight word cards from the Dollar Tree. I simply add word cards by writing them on sentence strips. I wrote the letters on top of the clothes pins with a sharpie marker. It does take a few minutes to go through your previous clothes pins to match up the letters and write a few new ones. It's a simple center that targets reading, spelling and those fine motor skills!

With All My Heart

I finally posted my first product in my TpT store! I don't know about you, but my students need lots of practice counting 50-120. In fact 99-101 gets them every time!

So when I came across these little plastic hearts from Dollar Tree, I knew they would be perfect for a counting activity. So I made these counting mats and number cards for lots of practice. You can use the little plastic hearts or the heart counters that are in the activity. In fact, I think we'll use the strips of 10 to get to at least 50... because that might take us all day. We'll have to see how it goes.

With All My Heart Counting 1-120 is Common Core aligned to meet the 1st grade NBT.A.1 standard. Just in time for Valentine's Day!

Featured Center of the Week

We spend a big chunk of our day doing our Fairview Rotations. Fairview Learning is specially designed reading/language activities for Deaf/Hard of Hearing students. One of those rotations is centers. My language arts centers are meaningful activities that the students should be able to do independently while I am working one to one with a student on Guided Reading. Since I love seeing simple, low-prep centers that other teachers are using, I thought it might be fun to feature a center a week here on the blog.

I am in the process of re-vamping my centers binder. The recording pages are waaaaaaaaay out of date, ugly and boring. Here's a little proof. It's kind of embarrassing to even show you. The top is my old centers binder. The bottom is my new, in progress, centers binder. I was able to update 13 of my centers this weekend, so that was a productive weekend

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Since I have kinder through 6th grade in my class during rotations, I have to have a wide variety of centers to use. Most of the centers use simple Dollar Tree finds, or basic supplies that most teachers already own.

This week's feature: Gumball Words. Students press on the gumball dispenser and a "gumball" or two falls out. They read their word (or in our case, they sign all three ways to sign "do"), then they record their word on a gumball on their recording sheet. At then end of the activity, they read all their words to an adult before the center can be signed off.

I found the little gumball dispenser at Dollar Tree. I filled it with little flat glass marbles that I found at Micheal's. I typed up the Adapted Dolch sight word list on sticker paper. I punched them out with a little circle punch, and adhered them to the bottom of the marble. So far, they seem to be sticking really well. I have a set for each list, pre-primer through third grade.

Five for Friday, January 17th

Happy Friday! I survived the first week back from winter break. I couldn't be more excited that Monday is a holiday! I am exhausted! But, in an attempt to blog more often, I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party. Here are a few random things from our week.

I am working on getting my very first products for my TpT store ready to upload. Now that I have read all the forums at TpT and tried and LOVED Power Point to create things, I am excited to get some products in my store! I have a bunch of ideas swirling in my head.... if only there was more time in the day to sit down and create!

My older group is learning about informational writing. This week we studied about diagrams and the students created their own. I always love their drawings.... they are so much better than mine. I am NOT an artist!

My new laptops arrived this week! I am SO excited about them! I created this Tech Check out chart so we know who has what device. I found the perfect circle magnets at Target that I covered with paper added the students initials. They worked out really well today.

This afternoon we created our classroom tech rules and learned the procedure for checking out the laptops and how to take care of them. The students were beyond excited that they had computer time! We started with a simple lesson on turning on the computer, plugging in the mouse, starting up Word, typing some simple information, saving, and shutting down the computer. Friday afternoons will be the perfect time for some computer training.

In math, my younger students are learning about telling time. We used this simple telling time scavenger hunt I found on TpT. The students love to get up and move around the classroom!

Have a great three day weekend everyone!

Tech Savvy

We're starting the new year with a computer unit. We are set to take the new Smarter Balanced Assessment this spring and my students are NOT ready with the tech component of taking the test on the computer. We visit the computer lab once a week and practice our typing skills and do other activities, but we are not ready.

So over break I searched high and low for some simple computer units and activities to do with my students. I honestly couldn't find very much. So what's a girl to do? Create her own!

We started our computer lapbooks today, and put up our first tech vocabulary words up onto our computers word wall. One of my kiddos called the mouse a "remote". Yup, we've got lots of work to do here. We'll do an Arthur's Computer Disaster read-aloud later in the week using all the new activities I've created.

By the end of the week my FOUR new laptops should be arriving. We are going to be 21st Century learners for sure!

Math Manipulative Storage

Happy 2014 everyone! I cannot believe it's a new year already! Winter break flew by and now it's back to work. My new year's goal is to blog more often. Now if I could find an extra hour in the day, that would be ideal.

I spent a little bit of time browsing the Dollar Store this weekend. I found some fun things to use in the classroom.

A while back I pinned this bright idea about storing base ten blocks. I have looked everywhere for these containers. Apparently I finally hit the Dollar Store jackpot and found them! The matching labels make my little type A heart happy. No more open baskets that fall off of shelves or little ripped up ziploc bags. I'm already in love.