Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, I'm starting my kiddos at home off with a Thanksgiving Turkey Hunt! I have hidden 18 turkeys around the house with a word on each turkey for what I am thankful for. They have to find all 18 turkeys and record down the words on their recording sheet. I am so excited to read over the words together at the end and talk about what they are each thankful for this year.

Hop on over to my TPT store for this Thanksgiving Freebie! 

Math Manipulatives Labels 2.0!

I was going through some old posts and noticed that a popular favorite was my Math Manipulatives labels. I also noticed that a lot of people were having a hard time downloading it and getting the pictures to show up, so I have recreated a NEWER and BETTER version!

Meet Math Manipulatives Labels 2.0!  You can find this freebie at my Teachers Pay Teachers site HERE.

I've included a pdf version as well as an editable PowerPoint version. If you are interested in using the same fonts, please download KG Sorry Not Sorry, and KG Always a Good Time. My only request is that you rate this product and my store! Thank you in advance!

The 5 pages of labels include:

- pattern blocks

- unifix cubes

- snap cubes

- tangrams

- links

- counting bears

- attribute blocks

- geoboards

- geoblocks

- dice

- dominoes

- colored tiles

- money

- cards

- ten frames

- counters

- counting chips

- geometric shapes

- base 10 blocks

- Cuisenaire rods

- number tiles

- number lines

- hundreds charts

- magnetic numbers

- mini clocks

- legos

- color cubes

- fractions

- rekenreks

- spinners

Thank you for your support!

New Literacy Station Idea: Clip It, Flip It, Check It!

Happy Spring Break, everyone! I wanted to share with you some literacy station games I made that I am currently using with my sons at home, and it is a big hit!

Meet the Clip It, Flip It, Check It games:

 

I introduced the "Blends" game cards to my son (Noah) today and he was able to pick it up fairly quickly. It took me a while to settle on what to focus on with blends, and I finally decided on the total number of sounds.

 

After going through each picture with Noah, he had to say each word out loud, count on his fingers the number of sounds he hears while saying the word slowly (ex: /b/ /e/ /n/ /d/ -- 4!), and place a clip on all the pictures with 4 sounds. The first card took a bit of practice, but by the time he went on to the second card, he was getting most of it independently.

My favorite part of this game is the self-checking piece on the back. When Noah finished placing all the clips on the game card, he flipped the card over and his eyes lit up when he saw that he was correct on all of them!

In the classroom, I would highly recommend having a buddy check the back for them so they can still make corrections without already knowing the right answer.

All the Clip It, Flip It, Check It! games come with worksheets to reinforce the learning and to hold students accountable at each station.

Come check out my TPT site for Clip It, Flip It, Check It! games for initial sounds, CVC medial vowels, and blends/h digraphs.

I also bundled them all together for one convenient download so that this station can be easily differentiated!

Phonics Games Bundle

Thanks everyone! :)

I'm back!

Hello everyone! It's only been a short 4 and a half years 😂 but i'm back! During that time, I had 2 more boys and journeyed out of the classroom to become an Instructional Coach.

It's been a hectic few years, but everything is starting to settle back down and I'm excited to be back in the blogging world. I've also decided to revamp my TPT page along with a few products that I have. All the freebies listed on my blog will still be freebies, but I've cleaned up some of the products and am offering them on my new TPT page. You can check it out here!

To celebrate this, I made Partnership Wheels to share with everyone!

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Wheel-of-Partnerships-3692498

This was what I used in the classroom to "randomly" partner students up for activities. I say "random" because it was actually quite intentional and strategic. Students who did NOT pair well together were placed on the same circle so they would never wind up as partners, and I also ability grouped them -- students who were at/above grade level placed on one circle, students who were below grade level were on a different circle. The students LOVED it when I spun the wheel - especially when I said it in my best gameshow host voice: "It's time to spin the wheeeeel of paaaaartnershiiips!!" 

The rules were simple: I spin the wheel (sometimes a student did), I call out the 2 names that were paired, they make eye contact, smile, and stand together quietly while I call out the rest of the names.

This partnership wheel comes in circles of eighths, ninths, tenths, elevenths, and twelfths (perfect to fit class sizes of 16 - 24 students). It is a powerpoint document, so completely editable, and I've also included blank templates if you wanted to write in their names instead. 

Check out this freebie HERE and let me know what you think about the other products I've listed! A few of them are highlighted below:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Initial-Sounds-Clip-it-Flip-it-3685458

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fry-Words-BINGO-1-100-3685414

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sight-Word-Journal-Fry-Words-1-25-3685492

Thank you guys for supporting me ever since I started blogging 7 years ago. As always, please feel free to leave comments and feedback! 

Classroom Library and Accelerated Reader

I am a huge fan of Accelerated Reader. After debating back and forth whether to arrange my classroom books by genre or by AR level, I decided on the latter. It made it much easier on the students to put the books back where they actually belong. I bought a lot of tubs from the Dollar Spot at Target a few years back and they have come in really handy for organizing the books. I just started at the 2s and kept filling each tub with books until there wasn't any more room. I looked to see what level was in each tub, and created a label according to that level:

I have uploaded these labels to my TPT store for free as a word document so you can change the numbers around to fit your tubs. All you need are the fonts Wish I Were Taller, and Pea Hollee (both free downloads from Kevin and Amanda)!

It is much easier if you have labels on each book that tell you what the book's level/Quiz#/Points are. Fortunately, AR has made it extremely easy for you to print those out! I just slap the label on the front of the book and highlight the AR level to make it easier to see. Here are step-by-step directions on printing out labels from AR after you have logged on to Renaissance Place:

Click on Accelerated Reader Enterprise
Reports
School Management
Labels - Book

and all you have to do is look up the book title to find all the information on that book. Unfortunately, it only gives you the title and Quiz number, so if there are different books with the same title, there is no way to view it until you look at the whole report. Fortunately for a website called AR BookFinder! All you need to do is look up your book on that website (gives you a nice picture of the book cover as well) and copy the quiz number to find the label for it on Ren Place. When it comes time to print the labels, make sure that the borders/margins are set to "None" when you view the printer options, or else it might be misaligned on your labels sheet.

Hopefully you found this helpful! Let me know how your classroom libraries are turning out!

Wow - A year of changes

I'm sorry I've been MIA for so long! I've been meaning to blog but life got in the way. Not only did I change from Kindergarten to 3rd grade last year, I also gave birth to my second boy.  I'm excited to share everything I've learned. I have been collaborating with my sister (an incredible graphic designer) and she has helped me completely revamp my classroom to become a detective academy. Be on the lookout for some goodies!

Light 'em Up again!

Last year, I posted about a random act of kindness idea I found from the blog, Lil Light O' Mine. I created a classroom version and each day we drew an act of kindness idea from the jar. The kiddos LOVED it and reminded me about it daily. This is the time of year where the students are getting a little too familiar with each other and no longer in the generally-friendly-towards-everyone phase. It was the perfect reminder on how to be kind! I especially loved how they carried some of the ideas on even though we were on a different day (some kids ended up throwing away a friend's trash from the cafeteria every day).
Anyway, after collaborating with the genius behind all of this, Lil Light O' Mine, we came up with the following: (click on the picture to download this document with all the classroom ideas our classroom worked on last year)

These are ideas for Kindergarten, but I would love to hear how you implemented your own version of this in your classroom! 

For more information on the Light 'em Up program (and many, many more ideas) please go visit Courtney over at her blog, Lil Light O' Mine.  She is amazing and has a LOT of resources (freebies and printables) on how to get this program started with your family within your community. 

All it takes is one classroom to make a huge difference at your school! HAVE FUN!