Literacy Centers for Bigger Kids and Bud!

I am so excited because I am pretty sure that I just finished my new favorite product! 

It is a total of six Literacy Stations for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade classroom that can be used during the month of December. Head to my store to check out the description and to also download the preview that shows you exactly what is included. I promise you will not be disappointed!

We also have a new friend in my classroom, Bud. I noticed him while I was doing some planning today. 

My kids are at the age where some still do the Santa thing and others do not, so I knew I had to do mine a little differently. I know my kids will not be sure about it at first, but I am excited for it. Hopefully their behavior will improve...especially my 7th period class.

I've Been Booed!

The sweet Sara from Miss Elementary has shared some Halloween love with me!

Tori from Tori's Teacher Tips is the one who has actually organized this entire linky party. Thanks, Tori!

Last year, we played this same game in my neighborhood and it was so much fun. I am thinking I might make it happen at school too! I think it would be something fun to take our minds off of the stress for just a bit. 

So here is how it works. Be sure that you post the rules on your post too!

1. Give a shout out to the blogger who booed you and link back to their blog.

2. Share 3-5 October activities, books, products (yours or someone else), or freebies that you love.

3. Share the Boo love with 5 bloggers- make sure you check this link to make sure you do not boo someone again. Don't forget to make sure that you let the bloggers know that you booed them! 

4. Link up here so that others can find you and read about your wonderful October ideas!

Some of my favorite Halloween books would have to be:

I am also loving the Persuasive Writing Activity from Young Teacher Love.

Source: youngteacherlove.blogspot.com via Katie on Pinterest

What are some of your favorite Halloween activities and books that you use in your classroom?

I am booing some of my favorite bloggers:

Lindsay from My Life as a Third Grade Teacher

Jennifer from Runde's Room

Lisa from Fourth and Ten

Kristine from YoungTeacherLove

Kristen from Ladybug's Teacher Files

SB 2012

That's right. I am officially on Spring Break since 3:35 p.m. yesterday afternoon. It feels so good. My sweet 6th graders and I were in desperate need of a break from each other.

The best part might be though that I am going to be spending the coming week in Ireland! Yes, that's right...I said Ireland. That also includes St. Patrick's Day in Dublin. Due to this fact, I am going to be MIA for the next week or a little longer. 

I hope that everyone has a fabulous week!

President's Day and Donor's Choose

I almost totally forgot about President's Day, but I am not ready for a great day tomorrow with my students in the computer lab. I have quite a few picture books that I considered using for this, but then I decided that I wanted to integrate technology for the lesson. I started searching the web and came across some great videos on YouTube. I hope my kids will enjoy them as much as I did. 

I actually ended up creating a new blog post on my classroom blog that my students will open and then go to the videos through it. We might actually end up doing this part altogether, and then I will allow them to visit the websites that I listed as well. I did make two pages that we are going to glue into their reading and writing notebooks that they will use during the course of the lesson. You can find them in my Teacher's Notebook store listed as a freebie.

I also made my first Donor's Choose project donation this evening and was so excited to support Ms. Noren's project from My Life as a Fifth Grade Teacher!

She is "Enticing Reluctant Readers with Nonfiction Books." If you are looking for a project to give to, this is a great choice! Lindsay has been such an inspiration to me during my first year of teaching, and it is the least that I could do to thank her for her support! 

Happy Friday!

Conversation Heart Writing

Today in class we did a writing activity using Conversation Hearts. My 6th graders loved it and I was very pleased with their writing. Here are some pictures from our day today!

Merry Christmas!!!

Since I am just a single girl right now, I do not have a Christmas Card to share with you all, but I do have a beautiful tree at my house.

I hope and pray that you and your family have a wonderful holiday and enjoy the time with each other! I hope that 2012 is amazing for you as well!

What We Are Learning in Room 117...

 I have been so excited by the learning that has been taking place in my classroom these past few days. We ended our 2nd six weeks this past Friday and I cannot believe that we have already began the 3rd six weeks. The year is absolutely flying by!

On Monday I introduced the week's vocabulary words and also read part of our class read aloud, The Sixth-Grade Nickname Game to my kids. We also went to the computer lab to pick out our books for our first set of book clubs. I set up a Weebly website with a blog for each of my classes where they commented on a post that I made. They loved it and I loved that it was paperless. The kids seem to be really excited about using technology to learn with. Now if only I could get the other 6th grade ELA teachers on board with me. 

Yesterday I got to school and was not really sure what I was going to do. I knew that I was going to have my students act out their vocabulary words and review with them about main idea, but I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to review with them. I started to look at my stash of picture books which is quite extensive and found Duck for President. Since it was election day, I thought it would be perfect and a great way to tie in some Social Studies into our LA lesson too. I ended up reading the book to them and we talked about what a main idea is and then worked together to come up with a main idea for the book. It was perfect and the kids loved it! In my 1st and 2nd period class, we even got into supporting details. I have also become an anchor chart junkie. I am going to have to be sure and budget for some of the giant sticky pads for next school year. Here are the ones we made yesterday in my 3 classes. 

I also invested in some Sharpie Flip Chart markers and I love them! If you have never used them and you use anchor charts in your classroom, you are so missing out! 

I fell bad because I have just been throwing away my anchor charts because I do not have anywhere to store them. What do you all do with yours? I have been taking pictures of them and I am hoping to put them all in a binder that I can reference each year.

Today I assigned my kids to their book clubs and they are all asking me when we are going to start. I am so excited that they are wanting to do them. I am hoping to get a whole unit together and will be posting to my Teacher's Notebook store.

I am in search of a great writing activity for my middle schoolers that has something to do with Thanksgiving. If anyone has a great suggestion for me I would love to hear it!

What a Week!

I made it through the week but it sure was a crazy one! 

I introduced our Spooky Story mini unit to my 2 regular classes on Monday and they were so excited about it! We brainstormed lots of Halloween words and did a graphic organizer to help us get started. I also read them a few picture books that were spooky stories. We worked on them some every day and most of the students wrapped them up on Friday. I wrote one too which was lots of fun. I modeled with my own story each day with them. We are going to publish our stories on Monday on some fun Halloween paper and watch Halloweentown while we are doing so. I cannot wait to read all of their stories. 

On Thursday I had my evaluation for PDAS. I was not too nervous about it because the observations that my professors used in Student Teaching were basically the same thing. My AP walks in because he was the one doing my observation and I had already started my lesson. He is in there for about 10 minutes, and calls me over. Of course my first thought is that he hates it, but instead he tells me that there is a parole officer sitting in his office right now and he is the only admin on campus. He asked if I minded if her just used what he saw for my observation because he was very pleased with it. I said of course and was actually kind of excited about it. He told me that I rock and they have received so many compliments about me from parents and he was very pleased with what I was doing for a first year teacher.During my conference period I went and hung out in the counseling for a few minutes while I waited for the laminator to heat up. While I was in there, the secretary in the counseling center told me she needed to talk to me. Once again I was freaking out. She told me that the principal was bragging about me the other day. She told her that I had far exceeded her expectations that she had for me especially for a first year teacher. That made me feel pretty good inside.

Then yesterday, we had our Sheltered Instruction lady come observe in our rooms again. This is the same lady who I blogged about a few weeks ago who made me feel like a complete idiot and that I was a sorry teacher. Well, she did not come to my classroom until about 3pm. Yes, 3pm on a Friday, last period, and the kids were crazy because we had gotten a cold front the evening before. I had the windows open in my classroom because it was warm. As she walks into my room, I notice one of my kids throw something out of the window. I was so mad!!! He just wanted to climb through the window to go and pick it up, but I told him that he must walk out the door to go and get it. While he is walking around to get it, one of my other students climbs through the window to go and get it. I was so frustrated with them. On the bright side though, the observer thought it was pretty funny and could totally relate to it because she once taught 6th grade. Her and I talked for about 10 minutes and she told me that I was the best on the campus at using the sheltered instruction strategies in my classroom. She also mentioned that she has never seen a first year teacher that is as together as I am. I took those both as huge compliments and realized that maybe last time she only came across rude because she wanted me to excel.

I will be back later this weekend to share what I have planned for next week. Well, that is if my computer does not die. My laptop charger broke this morning. :(

Anchor Charts and Spooky Stories

I have been inspired by all of the anchor charts that I have found on Pinterest and have made a few of my own these past few weeks.

We made one last week about predicting and made predictions about our novel The Best School Year Ever by Barbra Robinson. My kids love using sticky notes and having the opportunity to stick them on the chart. 

We also did a character one about Jonas in The Giver, but it is not nearly as cute.

Today we made two about adjectives. I started by reading a book to my kids about adjectives and then we thought of as many adjectives as we could to describe the pumpkin and ghost. I was also trying to interest the students because after this we began our Spooky Story brainstorming. 

I have also decided to do a fun writing assignment with my students. We are writing our own Spooky Stories. Today we began by thinking of Halloween related words and we wrote them on our interactive board together and the students filled them in on their own chart. We then made a web for our stories that gave us a skeleton for what we wanted to write about. Tomorrow we will begin with our introduction paragraph, a body paragraph on Wednesday, 2 bod paragraphs on Thursday, and the conclusion paragraph on Friday. We will then publish our stories on Halloween while watching a Halloween movie. I am so excited to see my kids creativity with this project. I am getting it together to put in my Teachers Notebook Store. 

Are you doing any fun writing activities for Halloween?

It is going to be a busy one!

This coming week is going to be a crazy one for me because I have...

Progress Reports due on Monday at noon

a Manifest ARD Monday during conference period

a meeting with a potential student and parent Monday after school who want to hear about the Pre AP classes

working the middle school volleyball games at 5 and 6 Monday evening

sign painting practice for cheerleading Tuesday afternoon

my PDAS observation Thursday during 2nd period

middle school football game Thursday night

Grad school class homework

but I think that is all. :)

Teaching sure is crazy, but that is exactly what I signed up for. Even as busy as I am every day of the week, I cannot imagine doing anything else with my life.

 I am super excited about the things that my students are doing in class this week. My Pre AP kids are going to begin filming their news casts for their mini research projects that correspond with our book The Giver that we just completed in class this 6 weeks. I knew I wanted to do something different with them, and the kids have loved it so far. The had to have a rough draft of their scripts to me on Friday and they were amazing! I cannot wait to see all of the finished projects next week! My 2 regular classes are going to be doing a fun spooky writing assignment this week that I cannot wait to do with them. I hope that their stories will turn out as great as I am picturing in my mind. We are also going to have several mini-lessons this week to prepare them for our book clubs that we will hopefully be starting on Halloween.

 I also got an e-mail from our school librarian about a teacher in Michigan who she worked with last year. She is wanting to do some type of project together with us and Mrs. Z picked my students and I to partner with this teacher. I am so excited about it and cannot wait to see how it turns out. Have you ever done something like this before with a teacher in another state? Any good tips for me?

This past week I also got my first donation for my Donors Choose Project. I am so excited, but I still have a long way to go. Fingers crossed that I am able to get it funded. You can find my project here.  Have you ever done a Donors Choose Project? 

Who knows when I will make it back to the blog this week, but hopefully I will be able to. I am planning on taking my camera to school this week to get some pictures of a few of the anchor charts that we have made as well as my revamped classroom library.