Oklahoma Support

My heart has been breaking for the families who have experienced great loss in Oklahoma.  My thoughts and prayers have been with them since I heard about the tornados.  Every night I've hugged my babies a little tighter and have been so thankful for the blessings I have.

Ashley at Teacher's Treasure organized an amazing fundraiser, and it's blown me away to see the generosity of our little blogging world.  For a $25 donation, you will receive well over $200 worth of teacher materials and all proceeds will go the Oklahoma City Red Cross.  I've donated my Poetry Pizzazz unit, and there are many great resources available.

Survival Mode

Last week was an incredibly hard week at school.  One of my student's house burned down, and her family lost everything.  My heart just breaks for the family, but I'm thankful that everyone is okay.  Then, we found out about all kinds of district wide cuts that will impact many of my close friends and incredible teachers.  I wish I could fix everything for everyone.  I'm going to try to totally forget about school this weekend and enjoy time home with my family.

I do want to take a minute to let you know about something I just posted to TpT.  I made it, because I'm running low on end of the year activities.  I still have three weeks left of school, but I only have two weeks left of my Culminating Math Activities, and we'll soon finish my Great Explorations project.  This leaves me with the last week of school wide open.  We're swamped this time of year with DIBELS, DRA, portfolios, inventory lists, etc. so I want as many easy prep activities as possible!

The only three of the 15 activities require extra preparation: Summer Fun task cards, Top Five List, and the ABC Book.

Everything else is super quick and easy!  Sometimes you need some things that require nothing other than printing.  You can grab a full copy of this one on my preview, so check it out here!  I've warned my students to be nice!

Happy Mother's Day!

Summer Themed Reading & Writing Review

So how many days do you have left?  I'm down to 19 more days, which seems like an eternity right now.  I'm beyond ready for summer vacation, but I am trying to make the most of the days I have left with my class.  This week we're working on the fractions portion of my Culminating Activities.  Most of my students have finished the culminating task and are now working on the fractions choice board.

My students have really enjoyed the activities, and I feel good about the fact that they're still learning and reviewing the math skills we've learned throughout the year.

I've also spent some time reviewing our reading and writing standards with some new activities that I've been working on for awhile now. I've centered the lessons around five different picture books that I enjoy using as mentor texts:

• Fireflies!
• Brothers at Bat
• The Raft
• Bats at the Beach
• The Seashore Book

For each book I made one graphic organizer, one writing activity, and one simple art project.  We normally wouldn't have time to squeeze in the art, but I think my class deserves the fun these last few days!

I used Fireflies! to allow my students to practice inferencing and writing memoirs.

After reading Brothers at Bat, I had students practice synthesizing, and they made character cards for their top five favorite book characters.  I was also able to tie in some opinion writing on whether or not girls should play sports~talk about a hot topic!  My kids definitely had a lot to say!

Many of my students had never read or heard The Raft before, and they were completely mesmerized by the story.  I used that book to allow my students to practice asking and answering thick questions.  I also used this book to springboard into RAFT writing, which I am so excited about.  I cannot wait to share more with you about that writing technique.

Bats at the Beach is cute little book that worked well for reviewing comparing and contrasting.  I let my students choose what two things they wanted to compare, as well as the graphic organizer of their choice (Double Bubble, H-chart, or Venn-diagram).  We also made these cute little kites that were so easy to make!

The Seashore Book is packed full of beautiful figurative language, which makes it a great book for practicing visualizing and descriptive writing.  After my students wrote their narrative, I had them use this little sheet to encourage them to add figurative language to their writing.

I just finished and posted the activities to my TpT store if you're interested.  I wanted to share about with you, so you'd be able to check it out during the big sale.  Just click {here} or on the picture for a link!

Teacher Appreciation

As Teacher Appreciation Day nears, I'd like to take a minute to express my genuine appreciation for all that you do.  I'm finishing my tenth year, and I know just how exhausting, frustrating, and thankless the job can be.  But, I also know that you are making a difference in children's lives, so I just want to say thank you for your hard work and dedication.

I'm also excited to share that I've joined a group of terrific bloggers, and to show our appreciation for all you do, we are each making one of our TpT items FREE for the duration of the upcoming Teacher Appreciation Sale on May 7th and 8th.  I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to show you just a small piece of my appreciation with our Teacher Appreciation Gift Bag.


My Teacher Appreciation Gift
I will be giving away my new Simplifying the Scientific Process as my free item!  You can go to my TpT store on the 7th or 8th and download it for free.  You can click {here} or on the picture below to find the product!

If you're like me and enjoy browsing around before the sale, you'll definitely want to check out these bloggers and TpT sellers. In fact, each of them will also have a FREE gift for teachers during the Teacher Appreciation Day sale, so be sure to visit their stores.  You'll also want to check out their blogs, because you can find a wealth of relevant information, fun ideas, and of course freebies!

Teaching Resources
Laura Candler has many products and activities that are perfect for cooperative learning and high student engagement.  Her products are often interactive and hands-on.  I've found that all of Laura's resources are extremely organized with easy to follow step-by-step directions.  Laura is giving away her best selling product Sentence Go Round.  It's a fun activity where students learn to write more interesting and complex sentences, as well as practice identifying run-on sentences and sentence fragments.  It's a great way to make learning about sentence structure fun for students!

Teaching in Room 6
I own and love Teaching in Room 6's Paragraph of the week, and it's perfect!  I'm also crazy about Stephanie's reading logs, because they actually require students to think!  All of Stephanie's products are rigorous, yet standards based, and classroom tested!  Stephanie is giving away her Time for Math: Math Clock Creativity which is a great way to have students use multiple representations in a creative way.  I love that this activity can be differentiated for a wide variety of ability levels.  I can't wait to blog about some of the clocks my students made!

Runde's Room
Let me just say that Runde's Room's interactive math notebook is awesome!  I bought it, and I just don't see how she was able to think of that many interactive activities!  Jennifer's lessons are hands-on for kinesthetic learns and require a high level of student involvement.  Jennifer is giving away her End of the Year Drama Circle that is so much fun!  It is such a creative activity, and my students absolutely loved it!  It really is a great way to get students up and moving during an incredibly difficult time of year!

Minds in Bloom
Rachel Lynette constantly amazes me, because she is able to present topics in a unique way that inspires critical thinking.  I love her creative approach, and of course her task cards are hard to resist!  Her task cards and worksheets are all fun, yet challenging, and Common Core aligned!  Rachel is giving away her Vocabulary Task Cards, which are incredible useful, because they can be adapted to any vocabulary list.  This is a great way to make practicing vocabulary fun, and you can use these cards all year long!

Wait there's more!  There will be a TpT Teacher Appreciation Day sale on Tuesday, May 7th and Wednesday, May 8th. I will be joining the site wide sale and discounting everything in my store an additional 20% off. Be sure to add the promo code of TAD13 when you check out.

Five for Friday

I've been reading everyone's Five for Friday posts from Doodle Bugs Teaching and have started feeling like I was missing the fun, so I had to plan ahead this week, so I could be ready.

I think my mind is getting fuzzier and fuzzier the closer to the end of the year that I get, and I'm getting worse and worse about forgetting to take pictures, so I apologize in advance for the poor quality!

It's silly, but the first thing that popped to my mind was my biggest end of the year need... caffeine.  I know it's bad, but it's getting harder and harder to get up in the morning.  If it weren't for my coffee, coke, and chocolate I don't know how I'd be functioning right now.  It looks like it's time for me to make a run to the store for one last bag of chocolate to last the of the year.

Then, just when I think my nerves can take anymore, I get the sweetest little note from a second grader who just can't wait to be in my class next year.  She asks me everyday if I get to pick my students, {I don't}, but it's just what I needed to stay motived.

We're also getting ready to get our state research projects going!  Everyone has chosen a state to research, and you can see on the map below what states we'll be studying.  Let me just say that I lvoe that map.  I can write on it with a dry erase marker, and it comes right, and it is so simple yet huge.  We use it all year long.  Students also sent an email to the Department of Tourism for the state they chose and explained their project and politely requested any available publications or materials.  I've gotten a pretty good response, and everyday I get a huge stack of mail full of resources.  

We're currently having our end of the year book fair, so I've gotten excited about summer themed books.  I've read gobs, and I've finally narrowed it down to my top five favorite summer themed books {for entertainment and reading & writing instruction). I'm working on an end of the unit that incorporates all five of these books.  I've already been using these books with my students, and we're having a lot of fun with it!

  

Of course the thing that's been on my mind more than anything this week, is the fact that my baby girl is having her 4th birthday this weekend.  I just don't see how it's possible for me to have a four year old.  I my eyes she's still toddling around the house, not getting ready for preK.  The picture below is from a month or so ago, but I'll soon be sharing the end result of our little project.

Instagram

I've been feeling a little behind on the whole Instagram thing, because to be honest, I had no idea what it was about.   I've been playing around with it a little and think I'm ready to really get into it.  I'm not going to like though, it's a little embarrassing for my only follower to be my husband, so when I saw What the Teacher Want's Instagram linky party, I knew it was just what I needed.  Plus, I've been looking around for other teachers to follow!

So here's what you'll do:

 If you have a blog, share your instagram username on your blog and use this image to tell your followers about #teachertalktuesday.  Link up at the bottom: with a blog post, sharing this image, your user name, and a couple of your favorite Instagram photos, if you want!

You can find me at ashleigheducationjourney.  I don't have many photos yet, but I'm working on it:)

 

Great Explorations

Is this the longest week ever, or what?  I have been dragging all week long, and it feels like the week will never end.  I'm excited about {and sort of dread} our first field trip of the year tomorrow.  We're going to the Tellus Science Museum, and I've heard wonderful things about it, so I can't wait to see it.  But, there is nothing more stressful to me than a field trip.  I like the feeling of being in control of things in my classroom, so it's hard for me because I'm terrified of losing someone.

I like to incorporate my students' names and events going on in our area into our lessons and worksheets, so I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "Hey that's my name" or "How did they know that". Now that it's almost May, I think my students have finally figured out that I'm the one who makes everything.  Now that the mystery is solved, they've started putting in their requests.  I've got a couple of boys who desperately want me to make something centered around different baseball and football stadiums.  I actually think that it's a good idea, and I'm pretty sure I could come up with something, but I won't be able to do it before school is out.  By far the most popular request was for a state or country research project.  That may sound a little strange, but there's a reason for the request.

Whenever it's cold or raining we have inside recess.  Just for fun on one of those days, I pulled up Google Earth on my projector, and we just played around with it.  Well from that day on, that is all my students want to do during inside recess.  I've learned two things doing this.

1.  Most of my students have a very limited background knowledge with geography.  They really had no prior knowledge of major landmarks, famous cities, different countries, or really other states.

2.  It is easy to get kids REALLY excited about geography.  I still can't get over how much they enjoy learning about other places.

They have asked and asked all year long to research different countries, so now that testing is over, and I have a little more flexibility, they are getting just what they asked for!  However, we're going to start with states, and then we'll research countries.  I think states will be a little easier, and this will be my students first experience doing anything like this, so I want to keep it manageable.  I wanted to do something a little different from a traditional research project, so I made one with a twist.  It is a 100 point project, where students try to earn 100 points by completing activities that have a different point value based on the difficulty of the project.

Great Explorations

I've created 10 point, 25 point, 50 point, and 75 point activities, with a total of 17 potential projects that students can choose from.

I've also created more thorough direction cards for each of the activities.  I'll print and laminate a few copies of each card, so that I can use them year after year.  I think the cards will help students work a little more independently.

I've included any printable that may be needed, and I've made both a state version and a country version.

I've also included a fun little passport activity that can be used while students share their projects.

 I cannot wait to start sharing some of our completed projects!