The Magical Product Swap

I am so excited to be participating in the Magical Product Swap, hosted by Jessica Stanford from Mrs. Stanford's Class. I was partnered up with Samantha over at Ms. Smarty Pants. If you haven't checked out her blog before, go now!! She has some amazing ideas!


I chose to check out Samantha's Penguin Literacy Unit and Math Unit because I just love teaching about penguins! I think they are the cutest birds ever! And kids just love learning about them. Click the pictures below to check out Samantha's units at her TpT store. They're only $5 each!

Look at all this penguin goodness I printed out!! I can't wait until January to add this to my penguin unit.

Here are some of the fun activities from the Penguins Fiction & Non-fiction unit:

Love the pocket chart poems! Super cute! And here's a few of the math centres I plan to use with my firsties:

The unit comes with a few more centres, about double-digit addition/subtraction, greater/less than, and even & odd. My firsties are not quite at that level though, but the centres look great! I might use them for some advanced students/differentiation though!

I'm super excited that I got to test out these products for Samantha. Make sure you stop by her blog to check out her review of my Non-Fiction Writing Unit!

Happy Thanksgiving, eh?

So excited the long weekend is finally here! Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian followers and fellow bloggers! Can't wait to eat some turkey this weekend! We have been talking about turkeys all week, so I can't wait to enjoy some! I just realized that I use a lot of exclamation marks. I'm going to have to work on that. Not today though, because it's Friday!!! Woo hoo!!

I don't know what it was today, but my kids were just in a silly, giggling mood right from the get-go. Maybe it was the snow? Maybe it was the fact that it was the Friday before a long weekend? Maybe it was a full moon? Something in the water? I don't know, but we had fits of laughter going on throughout the day. Well, silly me... I decided to read the book, "10 Fat Turkeys". Now, usually I pre-read books that I am going to read to the class just to be prepared, but I kind of skipped that with this book. Right after I read the title and the class exploded with laughter, I knew this was going to get interesting. My favourite line was, "Looky!' said one floofy turkey.... even I burst into laughter. Floofy?? Is that even a real word? I almost couldn't read the page. I kept cracking up at floofy. But we made it to the end and the kids really enjoyed this silly, counting down book.

We finished up our paper bag turkeys and they turned out so cute!! I love when one student comes up with a silly idea though, and everyone thinks their turkey should look like that too. That is why about 7 kids are going home with turkeys wearing pirate hats and eye patches. There were a few bikini wearing turkeys too. And one in a tutu. Gotta love their creativity!

Here's a few turkey freebies for ya... Heather over at Heather's Heart had an adorable ten frame cover up game that I just loved! Unfortunately, the school I am at does not celebrate Halloween, so I will have to save her games for another year. I decided to make one similar to hers though, featuring turkeys! It's called Turkey Trouble. Students roll two dice, add the dots, and cover up (or colour in) the turkey with the matching ten frame. First one to cover (or colour) all the turkeys is the winner! I have included a colour and black/white version for you. Clipart is from the ever fabulous KPM Doodles. Click the picture to download yours! (Font looks a little funny in Google Docs, but it's fine when you download the pdf!) And check out Heather's blog to get her adorable Halloween ones too!

So I am in love with Mr. Harry's Kindergarten videos on YouTube. We use a bunch during our calendar time. We also starting practicing counting by 10s, so we love Climbing Up this Mountain to practice! We actually stand up and climb as we sing. Lots of fun. Anywho, we also enjoyed the 5 Little Turkey song. I typed up the words so that we could glue it into our poetry notebook. We add a new poem every Friday and the kids can read their poetry journals during Read to Self or Read with Someone time. Click the picture below to get your own copy of the poem (half page or full page sizes included). Words by Mr. Harry, clipart by KPM Doodles.

Well, enjoy your weekend or long weekend. In celebration of Thanksgiving, I decided to have a little sale! Everything in my TpT store is 20% off from now until Monday! Click to picture below to check it out! :)

October Currently, Snow, and Listen to Reading

I feel like such a bad blogger... So many things to do, never enough time, right? This school year has been kicking my butt! I can't seem to get caught up with anything. It's hard being in someone else's classroom, too. I'm such an organizational freak and I just can't get everything organized. There's just too much stuff everywhere! Can't wait to find a permanent spot... Cross my fingers for next year!!

So first up: October Currently from the lovely Farley over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade. I can't believe that it's October already. Scary! Report cards next month :S Eek!

Yes, you heard me right. It snowed here today. The snow didn't stick at my house, but my school is 30 mins. away and there must have been around 2 inches of snow there when I left at 4:30! I was not prepared for winter this early... I didn't even wear boots to school! Just flats. Not even socks! What was I thinking? Look at this picture I found on CTV News:

Isn't that crazy? It's only October 4th! Poor geese just didn't know what to think. It was +27°C last weekend! What a jump. The poor kids just wanted to go outside and play in the snow, but we had inside recesses all day. Boo!

I wanted to share with you how I do "Listen to Reading" in my class. It is always such a favourite with the kids. Here's what my listening station looks like. I have one basket of books and 6 little baskets with headphones/mp3 players. The poster I created to help the students become independent with turning the mp3 players on. These are just cheap $15 players from Walmart. Definitely high quality and kind of finicky too. I hope to upgrade one year.

I have a collection of about 40 books/CDs that I have collected over the last couple of years. I get them all from the Scholastic Book Orders. They always have great deals! Each book has a sticker label with a number on the back. I keep them all in one basket. The kids can choose whatever book they want to read, and if they have time, go back and choose a second book. I don't do any recording sheets or anything. They are just happy (and quiet) to be listening to a book.

To make it easier for the kids to find the book on the mp3 player, I change all the file names to numbers (to match the stickers on the books). Then I go into the properties of each file and remove any text (title, author, genre, etc.) and just put the title as the file number. That way the kids just have to scroll through the numbers on the mp3 player and find the matching number, instead of worrying about reading all the titles. It makes things a lot easier!

Here's what we're up to tomorrow. Paper bag turkeys! We went for a walk yesterday to collect some dry leaves to fill up our paper bags. Good thing we did that before the snow today or we'd have some wet turkeys!! :)

Well, I will be back on Saturday to participate in Jessica's Product Swap! Very excited! Have a happy Friday everybody! Oh, and don't forget to stop by Barbara's blog at Grade ONEderful (if you haven't already) to say congrats on 500 followers and checkout her awesome giveaway! Some fabulous bloggers donated some awesome prizes!

Winner!

Thank you to everyone who entered my little giveaway. Congratulations to the winner.... Cecelia P.! You will be receiving an email from me shortly....

Weekly Update & Giveaway!!!

Here's a peak at some of the things we did this week... Hold tight, it's a long one!! In math I have slowly been introducing the math by myself and math with someone activities. We have just about gotten through all of them. I used some of the centres I posted about last year {here} and some from my Intro to Guided Math Centres that you can buy {here}. We've also been working on the numbers 1-5. I made this "All About the Number Chart" inspired by Kim Adsit's chart from her All About Numbers pack. We complete the chart together then work on a little number book. This year I am using Kathleen's mini books from her Fun with Numbers! pack.

When we worked on the number 5, we read/sang the book "Five Green and Speckled Frogs". Then we did a little activity on the Mimio. I chose a student to move some frogs onto the log and some into the pool. Then we wrote the addition sentence together. We did this a few times to get all the ways to make 5! If you have a Mimio, you can download my file from MimioConnect {here}.

The next day we sang the song again. This time I had five students wear froggy neclaces and "act out" the song for us. Then we made our own froggy craft! We glued a log and pool down, then they could glue some frogs on the log and some in the pool. Then we filled in the numbers. You can download all the pieces here.

We have been chugging along with our Daily 5 practice. We are still building stamina with our Read to Self. Next week we will start Read to Someone. I love using my Mimio to organize Daily 5 things. I made this chart to keep track of our reading buddies.

I have 10 word work stations that I want to teach the class. So for this week, I put the class into five groups and each group will get the chance to do 2 stations each day. That way, by the end of the week they will have tried them all and when we get into our rotations (hopefully by Oct. 1) they can start to choose which activity they would like to do during Word Work.

Our theme this week was family. We read a few different books about families and talked about how families are alike and different. We brainstormed all the people (and animals) that are part of our family. Then we practiced our family words by drawing some pictures of family members in the boxes. Click here to download your copy of family words.

We did a venn diagram of our brothers and sisters on the Mimio. I have no only children in my class! After the graph we drew a picture of our family--just the family that lives in our house. We practiced writing our last name at the top and wrote how many people in our family at the bottom. The pictures turned out really cute! Click here to download your own copy of the family portrait page.

And lastly, we made a family glyph (idea from Shari Sloane). You can download the words for the key here. The letter clipart is from KPM Doodles.

If you made it to the end of this post, you deserve a prize. So here it is--giveaway time! I am celebrating over 500 followers! 517 to be exact.

One lucky reader will win themselves these three prizes:

{1.} Any three items from my TpT store.

{2.} $20 Amazon gift certificate (.ca or .com)

{3.} A one-year classroom subscription to Samson's Classroom ($80 value)

This giveaway will run for one week. 

I will announce the winner on Sunday, September 30th. 

Samson's Classroom is a paid website, for students in grades K-5, that helps students work on their sight words, spelling, and reading. It has some really fun activities! I am going to use the sight word section with my students this year. Click here to watch a video of how the site works.

I'm using RaffleCopter for the first time, so here goes it! Hope it works!

a Rafflecopter giveaway