Spring Themed Freebie

Whew! Spring break is over. Back to the early morning wake-up call from my cell phone. Mr. Spouse says to change the song. It currently is Let it Snow (could be hoping for snow days from school). Any suggestions for a new song?

This week we will be learning all about Insects. I have lots of ideas from a FREE TPT set you can find here: Insect Gone Buggy.   

Lots of great ideas and center stations for my firsties to use. I am going to be reviewing fiction and non-fiction. I plan on giving each small group a tub of books and have them sort them into the correct category. Since I have lots of both fiction and non-fiction about insects I feel this will be a great hands-on activity for tomorrow. Then we can place the fiction in one book rack and the non-fiction in the other one.

I made a little partner activity to do on Tuesday. 

Fiction and Non Fiction Sentences 

I hope that your first day back from Spring break goes well.

Weather Stamina

January has been a little un-predictable. We haven't had a five day week. We have had holidays, floods, snow, and now ice. It's hard to keep our stamina going for reading and writing workshop. It is even harder to make sure place value is understood in Math.

But, I did have time to work a little more on my home office.

I wanted these little shelves. They were a great buy at TJ Maxx. But, oh they gave us a run when we tried to hang them. Let's just say swiss cheese walls. Which meant some dry wall patch and that gave me the dreaded task an opportunity to paint the walls a little lighter color. I used SW Versatile Gray--mixed at Lowes in their brand. This paint is eggshell finish and much more durable. See--the shelves are now hung (minus decorations) and no spackling staring at me when I work on the computer. And I changed the room arrangement a bit.

I made the bookcase a different direction. That;s what it deserved after having to empty several shelves again in order to paint the walls. I got a $10 table cloth at Wal-Mart to cover the table top. I know...it's a dining room table. But it has memories!

And I removed the blanket hangar from this shelf and painted it black. (I tried sawing that pole until I realized that there were screws in the outside that held it on. 10 seconds and a power drill and that baby was gone! 

I've already purchased a nine-cube bookcase to go below this shelf. That should give me extra storage so I won't have so many piles!

Now, on to school. Our theme this week is Stormy Weather, Seems appropriate! I made a powerpoint to use with Learn360 and PebbleGo lessons. It allows us to use fewer paper copies and use the whiteboard to work together. I plan on the kids using their reader response journals to work on this also.

Weather powerpoint by Jean

We are going to brainstorm types of weather. There is a great video on Learn360 about the Alphabet of Weather. I plan on the kids watching and listing on slide 3. I'll probably print that one off for us to use. Slide 3 will follow along with our basal story: Stormy Weather. We will compare and contrast extreme weather according to moisture or sunny days. The kids love to work with the Tornado in the bottle. Since we are writing "how to" this will work out great!
Since we are all into assessment the last slide will serve as our formative assessment on the study. So, lots of research, lots of visuals, and hopefully nice weather to actually go five days!

Fast forward or Rewind???

I am confused. Where do I go from here?

It all began on a Monday. A Monday in which I wanted to finish our research on Penguins that we had been working on last week. The common core, researched based, writing workshop, reading Penguins book that they wrote. We did the final page and made the Table of Contents.

All About Research booklet by

So we finished it. Since I had taken stolen some minutes from our normal Monday introduce our spelling pattern, work on high frequency words from our basal text, etc. = we were behind.

Fast forward to Tuesday. Rainy day Tuesday. Flooding roads Tuesday. We got to school to gasp hear that we were going home before lunch, Do you know how teachers and kids react to this? Well.  out minds wander to those free from school hours that are coming soon.

I crammed spelling introduction, vocabulary with new dictionary skills introduced for the first time, and quickly reading our basal stories.

We left at 10:30 a.m. Well, car riders left then. Bus riders not so soon. We sent home three buses (those that don't serve the high school) at 10:30. The remaining kids sat...in the front hallway areas of our round space shaped school,,,for about a hour. Some were still waiting at NOON.

So now the problem. We are out of school today for flooding. Tomorrow is not decided yet but I won't be at school since my mom is having surgery. Anyway you look at this is the earliest I will be back at school is Friday. What would you do? Just start anew next week? Forget this week happened? Oh, and by the way--next week is a four day week.

I think I'll think about all this...another...day!

Family adjectives

My theme this week (along with Grinch and Random Acts of Kindness) is family. Also Common Core adjectives. And...is this going somewhere?

I made a little quick way to let the kids label their family with adjectives.

Click here to download.