Five for Friday - Student Gifts and More

Happy New Year!

My first post of 2016 is for the Five for Friday Linky hosted by Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching!

I'm including some Christmas ideas even though the holiday is in the rear-view mirror.

We had school on Monday and Tuesday of Christmas week so I never had a chance to share some of our holiday happenings.

These ornaments were inspired by a project done by Kristin (The Teeny Tiny Teacher).

I printed student pictures in color, and then took them to Staples to have them run on transparency paper.

I cut the pictures, rolled them up, and inserted them into the glass ornaments I bought at Michaels.

Then I added blue sequins, small white snowballs, and tied ribbon I got a Target a few years ago on top.

I got each student in my class a book from Scholastic (I have over 20,000 points saved!).

Also, I bought the clear plastic pencil cases last summer when they were on sale, and decorated them with some holiday Washi tape.

I put some candy, a pencil, and a homework pass inside the pencil case.

My students were thrilled!

For our class holiday celebration we played this giant game of Kerplunk!

The game was actually purchased by our PBIS committee, and one of my students won it for the month at our last school-wide celebration.

They also use it when we have indoor recess.

I've so enjoyed being off this week.

On the day after Christmas my sister-in-law, niece, and I took the train into the city of Chicago 

for shopping and lunch.

It was raining but we still had fun looking at the decorations around the city, 

especially the windows in Macy's.

We got our first snowstorm on Monday.

And it was a whopper!

We got almost a foot of snow in 24 hours.

The house looks so pretty dressed in white!

If you are like us, and got a lot of snow, then perhaps you'd like to have your students try my 

Snow Science Inquiry Investigation!

In this product students measure how dirty or clean snow might be.

Ugh - I think they will be surprised!

This product is only $2.00!

Thanks for visiting my blog!

I hope 2016 is very good to you!

Five for Friday - I Made the TpT Newsletter!

Hello All!

Happy Weekend!

I'm back for this week's edition of Five for Friday hosted by Doodle Bugs Teaching.

The week started with an appearance by one of my products in the Teachers Pay Teachers newsletter!

I was, and continue to be, thrilled by this recognition.

I've been on TpT for about 3 years, and had sporadically submitted free items for the newsletter.

I have never been in the newsletter before.

The timing was right for the freebie I submitted:  my Candy Cane Science product.  

Check out that product HERE.

That's my item on the left, and it even got a good promo in the opening tag line of the email!

This past week has been amazing -

I've gained over a hundred followers on TpT

The product has been downloaded over 15,000 times!

I have already met my sales goal for December.

Over 75 people have left positive reviews of this product!

I am so thankful!

My students do small group review stations during our intervention time.

This week one of the stations was word building with letter tiles.

I put different types of letter tiles (magnets, foam, dice,and cardboard puzzle tiles) in holiday bags, and the students had to record words they made in the boxes on the tree sheet.

 We wrote thank you letters to our many parent volunteers.

We used Microsoft Word, and if you go the the "Design" tab in the home page of Word, there is a Page Borders option on the far right that allows you to easily insert a variety fun page borders.

 Do you use Plickers?

It's a fun way to do formative assessments with only one device, like an iPad or iPhone.

I used this app during an observation about two weeks ago, and my principal liked it so much he asked me to do a demonstration at a staff meeting this week.

So we did a fun 3-question quiz about The Grinch.

I made some fun wrapping paper with a coupon I got from Shutterfly!

That's my dog's picture in the midst of all that holiday color.

I think my gift recipients will love it!

We still have 2 days of school left this week.  Pray for me.....

Thanks for checking out this post!

Five For Friday - A Pilgrim Came to School!

Hallelujah!  It's Friday!

Here's a peek at my week.

 We had an actual Pilgrim visit our third graders this week!

You should have seen the looks on my students' faces - they were priceless.

They were so confused that "Elizabeth Hopkins" could still be alive.

As one boy explained it, a Pilgrim could have a baby, and that Pilgrim has a baby, and so on....

That's how we could actually have a Pilgrim visitor.  :)

She was so gooooood!  

She was actually from a nearby historical society.

She was worth every cent of the $175 we paid for her.

To review all that we've learned about Pilgrims we have done these Pilgrim I Have~Who Has cards.

They connect so well with our reading of the book If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620.

These cards are available in my TpT store with my Pilgrim Bingo cards.

Check them out here.

 This study of Pilgrims coincides with our non-fiction literature unit.

We started the unit by searching for text features in Big Books.

 Later the students had to search for, and take photos of, text features in Pilgrim non-fiction books.

Pictured below is the checklist of text features they searched for.

We used the Seesaw Learning Journal app to store the photos that students had taken of the text features.

This app provides a digital storage file for each student. 

It's fantastic!

We use it to store math work, recorded readings, and more!

Hope you had a great week!

Head over to Kacey's site to join in on Five for Friday.

Swap Meet - A Product Swap Blog Hop and Giveaway

Hi!

I am happy to be a part of really fun product swap and giveaway!

As a part of this product swap I was lucky to try out the Digital Book Report created by Nicole at Primary Teaching Resources.

Click on the product cover below to go right to Nicole's TpT store to see this product!

 I love to incorporate the use of technology in my teaching, and this was the perfect project to do that, as well as support writing and reading instruction.

And added bonus was that my third graders got a wide variety of book suggestions from their classmates.

First, my students colored the included templates to look like themselves.

Two girl and two boy templates are available.

My students chose the one they most resembled.

Next, we wrote the title and author of a book they had read onto the display sheet.

Also, we gave a brief explanation of a favorite event from the story that might attract a 

new reader to the story.

I don't have a picture of the next step, but after coloring the display sheets, students used Google Drive to write a more detailed book review.  

Then we copied the book review, and pasted it into a box on the site called qrstuff.com to generate a 

qr code of that text.  Since the writing had been in Drive, the students were able to share it with me so I could create the code if they had a problem doing it.

Nicole provided very clear instructions on how to do everything!

This past week I posted the completed projects all around my classroom.

During small group station time, the students used iPads to scan and read each of the book reviews.

I have 7 iPads in my room, and 5-6 students were in the small group that did this activity each day.

A really cool result of this project was that one of the assistant superintendents in my district and my principal happened to visit my room while the students were doing this activity.

They both remarked about how unique the projects were, and how engaged the students were while scanning and reading!

You can win this fantastic project, as well as the others listed in the graphic below by entering our giveaway!

Just follow the entry guidelines in the rafflecopter below.....

a Rafflecopter giveaway