Five for Friday-What a busy week!

It's Friday! I'm excited to link up with Doddle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday this week.

It's been a busy week. What is it about this time of year that makes life crazy?

On Monday we celebrated the 50th Day of School.

We also started building our electric circuits. I'll blog more about this tomorrow.

We made some fun new foldables to help us practice contractions.

I also received my Slant Box yesterday!

Marcy from Searching for Teacher Balance gave me the sweetest box. I am so excited to read Thanksgiving is... to my kids next week!

She has a wonderful 1st grade blog. Be sure to check it out!

Finally, I signed up for a post card exchange a few months ago. We received our first post card this week, (thank you Washington!) It's up on our United States bulletin board. My kiddos are so excited to receive the others!

What have you been up to this week?

Flashback to the 1950s? Oh, it's just the 50th day of school

It's Tuesday, and I am excited to have my act together enough to link up with Holly for her Tried it Tuesday linky!

We celebrated our 50th day of school yesterday. The 50th day normally passes by without any acknowledgement from me, until this year. Our kindergarten teacher came up with a fabulous idea that the rest of the classes jumped in on. We dressed like 1950s!

My boys came in with slicked back hair, rolled up jeans and t-shirts on. A few of them had leather jackets or button up sweaters. A few of my girls wore poodle skirts, the rest had rolled jeans and cute shirts with scarves on their necks.

My kiddos are so cute, don't you agree? (I do know I am totally biased!)

I also created a little 50th Day of School question page that my kiddos filled out while they ate 50 M&Ms. You can grab it by clicking the link or the picture below.

 

Do you do anything to celebrate the 50th day? What activities do you do?

All Things Upper Elementary-Guest Post

Happy Monday everyone! Just a quick post to share that I am the guest blogger at All Things Upper Elementary today.

If you haven't checked out their blog, I highly recommend it.  It is a wonderful place to get practical tips and ideas that you can use in your classroom. Head over there and check out my post on synthesizing.

Fraction Mentor Text-The Hershey's Fractions Book

Happy Sunday everyone! I am triple dipping today in linky parties today in a hope to catch up from this busy week! First I'm linking up with Collaboration Cuties to share a Math mentor text with you and with Ideas by Jivey to share how I introduce fractions in my classroom.

 

The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Fractions Book by Jerry Pallotta. This is a book that I know many have shared before, but I am looking forward to starting this unit with my kiddos soon.

I love using this book when I introduce fractions to my kiddos. I purchase a large pack of Hershey bars so that each student can have their own bar to work with. I put the book on our Elmo and we go through making each of the fractions with our candy bars.

Once we finish using the candy bars we are able to eat them. Anytime I use food in my classroom my kiddos are highly motivated. We have math in the morning, and I don't allow my students to eat candy before lunch-so the fact that they can eat part of the chocolate bar during math is a really big deal for them.

 

This year I am excited to use Jessica's Chocolate Bar Fraction Activity Packet with my kiddos as well.

 

I also give my students a paper set of fraction bars to keep in their notebook. I updated my set of fraction bars so they only include the denominators (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12) required by the Common Core. You can grab them here for free.

What do you do to introduce fractions to your students? Do you ever use food to motivate them?

KWL Chart Carousel Style-Thursday Throw Down

Happy Thursday everyone! This week is flying by...I am way behind in my blogging, but I am excited to quickly link up with Erin at I'm Lovin Lit for her Thursday Throw Down.

This week we started science...finally! My school alternates science and social studies each marking period. My kiddos have anxiously been awaiting all of the exciting science activities, and to be honest I've been waiting for it too.

Our first unit is electricity. There are a ton of fun hands-on experiments that my students are able to do in this unit, but that is after I spend the first lesson laying the groundwork.

To make the first lesson a little more interactive I have my kiddos complete the KW of a KWL chart in a carousel activity. To do this, I write "What I know about electricity" and "What I want to know about electricity" on pieces of chart paper. I hang the chart paper around my room. (I write each question twice, so I hang the chart paper in the four corners of my room.)

The students are each given a marker and they rotate with their group to each chart paper. This means they hit the "what I know" and "want to know" twice.

As they rotate they add to the chart. Each person takes a turn adding their thoughts to the chart.

If someone already wrote their idea/question they put a tally mark by it. They can add more than one.

After every group has had a turn at each chart the students come back and jot down two things they know and two things they want to know about electricity into their notebook to keep as a record of the activity. It's a fun and easy way for me to preassess them. It lets me see what they know, as well as any misconceptions they have about electricity (like Ben Franklin "made" it.)

What do you do to make your lessons more interactive? Have any of you done a "carousel" before in your classroom?

'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving-Mentor Text and Flash Freebie

It is a nice chilly fall day here in Pennsylvania. The cooler weather makes me begin to think about the upcoming holidays...I just loved this time of year and the mentor texts I use in class during the next few months tend to reflect my love of the upcoming holidays.

I'm linking up with the lovely ladies at Collaboration Cuties to share one of my favorite Thanksgiving/language arts mentor texts:  'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey.

During this month I like to spend a week working on the reading skill Making Connections. My students are great at making text to self connections...but they struggle with making text to world and text to text connections. I love using 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving to introduce the idea of text to text connections. Most, if not all of my students have heard or read "Twas the Night Before Christmas" so the night before Thanksgiving is a perfect way to make text to text connections. I love the ending of this story...it's a cute book to have your kiddos practice predicting as well.

During the week that we are working on making connections I have my kiddos practice using a bookmark and graphic organizer that I created. You can pick it up for free tonight here. When I wake up in the morning, this will become a paid item-so grab it while you can. If you do grab it and plan to use it with your class please leave feedback.

What are your favorite books to teach making connections? What are your favorite Thanksgiving books?

Currently November with a yummy pin!

Happy November everyone! I'm linking up with Farley at Oh' Boy 4th Grade for November Currently!

Most of my currently is self explanatory, but I've become hooked on Revenge. I just finished watching season one on Netflix and started season two this morning. Anyone else watch this show?

My yummy pin is something I've made a few times...and it is easy, healthy, and yummy: Skinny Chicken Cordon Bleu! 

Enjoy your Saturday everyone!