Thank you to all of you that helped me celebrate one fantastic, successful, and enjoyable year of blogging by entering...

I would now like to say congratulations to...

 

Jaime won the big prize!  (Jaime check your email!)

 

But since I had such wonderful response (THANK YOU AGAIN!), I pulled four more names to receive a free product from my store.  So congratulations to...

Check your email to find out if you are the Doreen, Monique, Julie, or Sarah that won!

 

Thank you everyone again for participating, and I look forward to another fabulous year of blogging!

I have another activity that I created to give my students more practice using and identify prepositions.  My students needed a little more practice with picking out preposition from sentences they write, so I created...

 

I made preposition cards and noun cards and printed them on two different colored papers.  I placed these cards into two different buckets.

 

A student pulls a card from the preposition bucket and a card from the noun bucket.  On his or her recording sheet, the student writes a sentence using the preposition and noun on the cards.  The noun must be used as the object of the preposition.

 

I would like share this activity with you.  Click on the picture of the recording sheet below to download a copy of the recording sheet, the preposition cards, and the noun cards that you can use with your students!

Enjoy!

 

P.S.  Don't forget to enter my 1-year blog-iversary giveaway!  Click on the picture below to go enter!  Only a few hours left!

 

Have you seen the Organized Classroom Blog has a new digital magazine????

Charity has worked hard to include helpful information that all teachers can use including organizing tips (of course) for home and school, humor, books, and even a horoscope just for teachers! :)

You can preview The Organized Classroom Magazine below...

Then head over to The Organized Classroom Blog to subscribe!

Enjoy!

Ok...just I finished teaching a new topic from Common Core...prepositions! 

Each year I have taught prepositions since this part of speech seems to always be one that comes up as we examine sentences during the year, but, since they are not one that had been required for my students to know and understand, I have always pushed them until later in the school year. 

But this year, prepositions are now a part of speech we MUST know...therefore, I kind of felt like my instruction needed to be a wee bit stronger on this topic.  So I made my way over to TeachersPayTeachers to see what others had already come up with...and I found the perfect item for my boy heavy writing class!

Smart Chick Teaching Resources has created the cutest activity to help students explore prepositions...

(click on the picture above to go to TeachersPayTeachers to take a closer look!)  It is a simple concept...students build a paper airplane and fly it.  Then they must write a sentence using a prepositional phrase about where the airplane lands.

I added a step.  We took pictures of where our airplanes landed.  I got out the 6 iPod Touches I have and each student worked in pairs to record the flights of their airplane through photos and prepositons.  And we got down to business...

Some of us got creative too...

Then off to the computer lab we went.  We typed them up our sentence, added the pictures we took, and created little books!  We had lots of fun, integrated technology, and learned a new part of speech...all in one activity!  Whoo hoo!



I cannot believe it has been one year since I began my blogging adventure. This blog was a birthday gift to me. I thought I would have a place to send my thoughts, ideas, and discoveries about teaching into the inter-webs. I never imagined that anyone else would actually venture to this spot...but I feel blessed that others actually read and enjoy what I have to say! I didn’t think I would make it to 333 followers. I didn’t think my blog would get 175,000+ views. I never imagined that my blog would make any “must read” lists. I get so excited to see my stuff pinned out there by others when I am killing time on Pinterest. I certainly never imagined that I would be contacted to use and review products. Thank you for valuing my opinion, responding to my ramblings, and liking my ideas enough to purchase or download products that I put out.

To celebrate and thank you for being with me this year, I am having a big ol’ giveaway.

If you win this giveaway, first, I am going to let you chose your prize of any product from my TeachersPayTeachers store.

Then to sweeten the pot, some my fellow bloggers generously donated products to giveaway as well...

Catherine from The Brown-Bag Teacher has donated...

Check out The Brown-Bag Teacher  and her Catherine’s TPT store.

Amanda and Stacia at Collaboration cuties are also letting you chose your own prize...

Check them out at Collaboration Cuties and their TPT store 

Amy at Eclectic Educating has donated her Winter Animals Reading Comprehension activity...

Check out Eclectic Educating and her TPT store

Lynn at Fun in the Fours has donated her Problems with Pets math word problems...

Check out Fun in the Fours and her TPT store

Jessica of Idea by Jivey is letting you chose your prize from her store (and she has some great products)...

Check out Ideas by Jivey and her TPT store

Caitlin from Learning Ahoy has donated her new Oh No! game...

Check out Learning Ahoy and her TPT store 

Anne from Looking from Third to Fourth was extra special generous to donate TWO of her products...

Check out Looking from Third to Fourth  and her TPT store 

Now to enter to win this fantastic prize pack simply follow the directions in the Rafflecopter below... a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for making it a great year!

So I have gotten a lot of questions about how I make these name clouds...

And I happened to have a moment to respond tonight...but for some reason I can't respond to the comments that I have gotten...so instead I made a little video for you...

I hope this helps you out!

UPDATED- -
I just finished mine for this year’s class! This is how I fixed the size issues…
In the “Appearance” section click to make a rectangle shape.
Where it says aspect ratio change to 1.35.
I saved changes then under “Grab and Share” I click save as a graphic image.
I insert that graphic into Word or Publisher and resize to make it fit properly on the page.

A Happy Belated Valentine's Day everybody!

 

I wanted to show you some pictures of the little Valentine's celebration we had in our classroom.  It was a mustache theme!

 

First, here are the valentines I gave my students...

 

 

Yes the mustaches were pulled off and put on faces (which was not my intention at all so they were not sticky thus the shortage of tape in the classroom today!)  And do not worry my peanut allergy student got heart shaped Gobstoppers instead of M&Ms.

 

I do Valentine's Day a little bigger than most other holidays since it is also my birthday! I set up a kind of large treat spread...

Not my best table set-up...but the students just wanted the food!  Here are the treats in the box...

Petit fours from a yummy bakery in town...so much better than cupcakes...melt in your mouth delicious...and less messy too!

 

We enjoyed reading our cards and our Sweet Secret Messages and each student left feeling full, special, and loved!

 

The best gift of the day...sending the students off to a four day weekend...yippee!

 

I hope your Valentine's day was as sweet with your students as it was with mine!





This month for our Random Acts of Kindness, my mom (also a teacher) brought me a great idea, and she told me I could share it with you. She does a Valentine Exchange in her classroom, but she wanted to also have her fifth graders complete an activity that involves a little more than writing their name and a lot more implementing writing strategies. So she created...

 

You know what is perfect about this activity??? The secret part! You know how our upper elementary/middle school students start to get a little squirrelly about Valentine’s Day.

Students spend a week creating their messages to their classmates. They can’t use the overused words of nice, pretty, sweet, cool, or awesome. And the messages aren’t very long...only about a sentence! Then students turn them in for “review.” This allows us to catch and correct any possibly unkind messages (not that my sweet kiddos would intentionally be unkind...but just in case!). On Valentine’s Day, students will cut apart their messages and stealthily distribute them. My mom says her students spend more time enjoying these messages than the other cards they get.

Not allowed to do a Valentine Exchange? Then this may just be a perfect way to get around that by incorporating these messages into your writing class! Add the requirement of a certain number of similes, metaphors, and other figurative language that need to be included in the messages your students create. You could even take a grade on these if you needed one!  

To get your download your copy, click on the banner below...

Prep is easy. Simply print...write your students’ names on the lines...copy (make sure to copy only single sided--this is a reminder for myself too! I just know I will press that duplex button!) Your students will do the majority of the work!

I can’t wait to show you the Valentine’s I am distributing to my students...I just have to make them first!

Oh my goodness...just got my internet back up!  Who knew I was so addicted and felt so lost without it?  Going involuntarily off the grid this weekend really threw me for a loop!

February is going to bring lots of fun including a blog-iversary celebration, a guest blogger, a giveaway (or maybe two!).  But let's start the month off right with my Currently from...

 

Ever had one of those weeks?  That was my week last week...I'm not going to go into details, but I am ever glad that Monday will bring a fresh start.

 

Pet Peeves- -

My biggest pet peeve would be a noisy line!  It grates on my nerves to have my students talking in a line and can be downright embarassing to have classroom doors close as your class walks by because of noise.  I also can't stand traveling around the building with my class in a line that looks closer to a snake eating its dinner than a line.

 

My other pet peeve would being impolite...interrupting, getting up while someone is talking, not saying please, thank you, or excuse me.  Grrr!

 

I am off to enjoy some Super Bowl commerials!  Have a great week!