Fall is in the Air!

As Heather mentioned in her last post, I headed to Tennessee this past weekend to cheer on the Tennessee Vols as they played the Akron Zips.  Remember back in this post?  I explained that I married an avid VOL fan which makes me now a fan by marriage.  Here we are before the game!

With college football brings tailgating, cooler weather, and FALL Activities in the classroom!!  It is also one of my favorite seasons!  So, I felt the need to start making some activities for my kids to use in my classroom.  We've covered both 2.NBT.2 and 2.OA.3 and I need for my students to be able to apply these strategies all the way to 1,000.  I decided to make these to be able to use in a station with a recording sheet for accuracy.  

You can click on the picture below to get the whole pack at my TPT store.  But since I love fall so much, I am also including a little freebie for you.  

Check out all the awesome stuff that you get in the pack!!! (There's much more, but I couldn't do a preview of ALL 51 pages that it includes)  The range is from 5-1,000.  It is a perfect pack to use to differentiate!!

And as I promised, click below to get yourself a fun little fall freebie!!

Happy Fall!

A Great Day and a Give Away

Tuesday is one of my favorite days.  It is a day when I get to teach my little violin students.  One of those sweeties is none other than Heather's son.  It is also one of  THE ONLY nights when my family and I have NO obligations.  We just get to hang out and be together as a family.  Tonight is a fun one because it is the season premier of New Girl.  Have you seen this show?

My husband and I got hooked on that show this summer.  It is hilarious and one of the only show we have seen in a long time where we laugh at loud!  So in honor of one of my favorite days, I want you to head over to my friend Natalie's blog.  When Heather and I went to our blogger meet up a couple of weeks ago, we met Natalie.  She just got a new job teaching first grade and she is having a give away!  Heather and I have donated things from our Teacher's Pay Teachers for her giveaway and there are tons of other great things being given away by great bloggers!  Head on over and check out her adorable blog and fun giveaways for the whole week!

Happy Tuesday!

Verb Garden

As you know Juli and I love our school garden. But this garden can be created without any dirt!  We have been learning about verbs so my kids created a verb garden. Each student drew a flower.  In the middle is a noun of their choice.  Each petal is a verb that noun can do. The students love this activity.  It is a great and easy way to quickly see who "gets it."  Plus it looks really cute outside on our wall in the hallway. Here is what it looks like out in the hallway:

I had two boys get really into it...go figure it would be my boys! They made their flowers look like the animal they had picked. I thought they were so cute I had to share:

Aren't they adorable!  As you can see the bottom one has an adjective on one petal. We are still working on it!  He is an ESL (English as Second Language) student so I was pretty impressed with spelling of everything - I only helped with "cheetah."

I hope everyone is having a good weekend. Juli is off cheering on Tennessee. I know - I don't get either! Have a good rest of the weekend and have a wonderful work week!

Boys, Boys, Boys!

It is the year of the boys in my classroom!  I have 13 boys and 8 girls.  This is possibly the most active class that I have ever had.  Even the girls are active!  On the first day of school when I had almost a fist fight break out because the boys were all fighting over my sports books, I knew I was in for it.  On the playground each day, you don't see many of my kids on the actual playground.  They are either shooting hoops, playing soccer, or throwing the football.  I've even see them just plain running old fashioned races around.  Amazing. So, I had to kick my brain in gear to keep these active kids from crawling out of their skin during the day.  I decided to strategically place brain breaks in my day so they are getting up and moving at least 3 times a day, if not more.  Most activities are a minute or so and none are more than 3.  I have found that these brain breaks have become a vital part of our day.  The kids are more engaged in the time before and after the brain breaks and are helping to keep my sanity as well as theirs.  I found Stephanie from Third Grade Thoughts had these adorable brain breaks cards.  I have also found lots of short video clips with fun activities to do.  I have created a "Brain Breaks" pin board on my Pinterest Page.  You can check them out here.

Happy Brain Breaking!

Carolina Blogger Meet Up

Yesterday, we left our hubbies at home with the kids and jumped in the car.  Not to make a quick escape, but to meet up with some fellow bloggers from North and South Carolina.  We have been waiting for this weekend for awhile and we were so excited.  We joked in the car ride down how silly it must have sounded to our husbands and non blogging friends that we were driving 2 hours to have lunch with a bunch of girls we didn't know and had never met!  But we are SO happy that we did.  We ate lunch, shared ideas, and laughed!  It was so great to meet people who were doing the same thing we were and loving it!  We were also excited to hear how most everyone has been too exhausted to blog because of the start of school.  We aren't alone!!  We were definitely a little "star struck" seeing so many of our favorite bloggers.  We can't wait for the next meet up and are so excited that we can follow even more blogs and get some more followers ourselves.  Below is a picture of all of us.  Be sure and stalk their blogs because they have fabulous blogs and ideas!!!  Thanks to Rebecca from Landing in K for putting the names and blog list together for us!

Autumn, Ashley, and Tammy from Fanatical in First Grade

Kim (starting her blog soon, right Kim?!?)

Ginger from Gingersnaps Treats for Teachers

Elizabeth from Fun in 4B

Gretchen from Always a Lesson

Hope from 2nd Grade Shenanigans

Dana from 3rd Grade Gridiron

Shasta from The Loop

Heather and Juli from Simple In Second

Amanda from Teaching Maddeness

Amber from Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher

Rachel from The Tattooed Teacher

Elisabeth from Twins, Teaching and Tacos

Rebecca from Landing in K

Natalie from Teachery Tidbits

Lacie from Polka Dots & Pencils

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Heather's Classroom

A few posts back Juli showed off her classroom. I thought I would show off my room. I don't have an exact theme. I use the Furry Friends by Carson Dellosa.  I am not wild about it cause it does limit my ability to create items for my room.  I have tried to accent my room with black and bright colors.  This is the outside of my room where I hang up work:

This is the bulletin board between my classroom and my officemate's classroom. She thought of this and I thought it was really cute!

This is a view of my classroom library:

I have a Book Hospital that I found on Pinterest. I would love to credit whatever creative teacher created it but I just remember printing it off Pinterest. I created a Books To Be Shelved container where students can return their books before picking out new ones. Once they know the system I let responsible students put the books back in the correct bins.

This is a view of my calendar. I use the schedule flipped cards from Ladybug's Teacher Files. I just love her stuff. I plan on redoing it to use all the subjects she gives in that file.

This is the view of the front of my classroom. The flipped alphabet is from Ladybug's Teacher Files as well.

This is the board I use to manage my reading and math workshop rotations:

This is on my office door in the back of my room:

I found it on Pinterest of course and don't remember what smart teacher to credit with for creating it and pinning it so I could copy it for my own room. I have these sayings in my back wall that I think are cute and remind students (hopefully) to make good choices:

They are the same ones Juli has in her room. Her post will link you to that sight if you are interested in getting some of your own. Below that I have my station tubs that I use to organize all the materials needed for workshops.  I used a file from Ladybug's Teacher Files (of course) to label the bins.

I hope you find my room interesting! I have worked so hard on it and still have so much I want to do. My walls are pretty bare as they await the anchor charts the students I will be creating together.  We studied nouns this last week so I have one lonely little anchor chart up so far:

Hope everyone has a good week!

Nouns and Verbs

The first two weeks of school has been chock full of procedures and rules, and a little fun thrown in there.  Does anyone else plan all kinds of things to do with their classes and then find they have just walked in the hallways, and practiced moving around the classroom and building, and little of the stuff planned gets done?  I was in that boat this week.  Then I realized that I needed to review nouns and verbs quickly.  So I searched my most beloved blogs and found one of my go to faves, Amy Lemons, with some fantastic noun activities and verb ones too!  My kids did great with all the activities she had in her packs so I wanted to put an activity for my kids to work on independently next week in their literacy rotations.  It isn't much but it will be a good little hands on activity for them to use in stations but it also includes a recording sheet that I can check understanding with too.  You can click on the picture below to pick up your copy of it.  Best of all...It's free!!!  Now, I've gotta get geared up for adjectives next week!
Happy Friday!!