Five for Friday- Really late

 I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party to show you five things about my week.  Hey, it's Sunday night... but it's the first time I've sat down at my home computer in days! It's been a busy, but good week. Here's what we've been up to.

Last week we finished up our quick Jan Brett author study. I really enjoy her illustrations. The kids modeled their drawings after her illustrations.

It was way over due.  I finally updated my sub binder. I always leave detailed plans when I'm out, but the binder was really out of date. It was like a Throw Back Thursday opening up that sucker. Now I'm ready for my "site evaluation" at some point when my coordinator walks through my room and goes down her little check list.

I ordered some tadpoles this week for our life cycles unit. They arrived on Friday and are ginormous! I was not expecting such giant tadpoles. Nor that they would arrive dead.  I contacted the company and they are sending more tadpoles. Let's hope they make it this time.

Friday we had a site validation team tour our campus. Our school has been nominated for a California Distinguished School.  The team stopped by our room during our Friday afternoon tech time. They were impressed with our use of technology in my classroom and with our Computer Lapbooks we've been working on. We had a staff meeting after school and the team shared their thoughts about our school. It was nice to hear such positive things on a Friday afternoon!

Saturday our Deaf/hard of Hearing program hosted a fundraiser breakfast at Applebee's in order to raise money for our overnight field trip.  Every year we take our students (K-6) on a two night, three day adventure. My co-worker and I have planned and carried out 10 years of field trips and we are ready for our 11th. We actually haven't made a decision where we are going this year. But I do know it will be fun!

And here goes another week! We have three days of minimum days due to parent/teacher conferences. It will be a fast week!

Link Your Words

Everyone has a million little linky manipulatives in class, right? What are you going to do with them other than use them for math? Use them to link letters together to make words! Students spell their words by linking them together then recording them on the recording sheet.

Five for Friday- Valentine's Week

 Happy Valentine's Day! We all survived the week. Whew. I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party to show you five things about my week.  

We started our week with our 100th day of school. Since I teach 1st-6th, we don't go all out for this day. But in math we did work on counting to 100. I made 'gumballs' numbered 1-100 and the students had to put them onto the 100's chart. This was quite a difficult task for my little guys. We'll be doing some variations of the activity in the near future. We need more practice!

Then my younger students made their own gumball machines and included 100 gumballs. They really enjoyed our 100th day gumball activities.

We continued our little gum theme this week with a little filler activity for our short week of school. We described bubble gum and then tried blowing a bubble. Only one of my students was able to blow a bubble. Teaching kids how to blow a bubble is not an easy task! We graphed whether or not we could blow a bubble.

The kids did some informational writing on how you blow a bubble. Then we made this adorable little bubble gum craftivity. We used water balloons for the bubbles. I love how they turned out! Seriously cute!

My older group of kids are working on some dictionary skills right now. We can alphabetize, but we need work on using the dictionary to learn the meaning of new words. God bless Pinterest for the wealth of ideas for anchor charts. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

I've been working on creating some of my own centers to use with the kids. Using Power Point to create materials is getting easier and easier. I found these adorable mailboxes at the Target dollar spot and just had to find a use for them.

I found out this afternoon that my "Digital Citizenship for the 21st Century Learner" Teacher Innovation grant was funded through the county I work for! I am super excited about this! I have $500 to spend on wireless mice, flash drives, iPad keyboards and more! We are going to be totally Geeked out! How exciting!

It's another three day weekend for us which will be really nice. I love that extra day at home to relax. Have a great weekend everyone!

Sticky Words

Such a simple center. I took my old scrapbook stickers and brought them to the classroom. The kids write their sight words, then use the stickers to spell the words. This is an excellent fine motor task while practicing their sight words. Peeling off stickers is not as simple as it looks. I have several students that can use this fine motor skill practice.

Five....

I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party. I'm a bit late to the party... but better late than never, right? Here are a few random things from my classroom for the last two weeks.

We spent some time this week talking about kindness. It was a much needed review of what it looks like to be kind both at school and and home. The kids then created these Be Kind Mobiles to hang in the classroom. It was the perfect craftivity on kindness.

We finished up our Arthur's Computer Disaster unit. We've been talking about all things tech related, so this email to a character fit well.

My students have a new feelings binder thanks to our school psychologist. My students are learning the vocabulary for the feeling words and being able to tell why they are feeling the way they are. This is really tough for a few of my kids.

We are almost finished with our All About Computers Lapbooks. My student have really been enjoying learning about the computer. These computer skills are so important for this generation. Not very many of my students have computers at home, so they have to learn these skills somewhere. (Especially prior to our new SBAC test this spring that's all on the computer!)

Our Friday afternoon tech skills are going well. For the past two weeks the students have been practicing drag and drop, highlight and copy/paste skills. I created a few activities in a Word doc using the new computer vocabulary we've been learning. Then I saved them to the desktop on each laptop. The first week we went through the activities together step by step, one at a time. This week the students opened up the doc and showed me what they have learned so far. We still have plenty of work to do.

So that wraps up the past two weeks in my classroom. I don't know how I blinked and it's already February. Tuesday is the 100th day of school. Crazy. Not to mention two three day weekends in a row! I could totally get used to that schedule!

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!