Five For Friday: More Nonfiction!

We survived another week! Third trimester is no joke and I spend life feeling tired! ;) But I'm letting my dishes sit for another day and putting my feet up instead. And actually writing on this blog. It's a mini miracle! 

I used up a bunch of old broken crayons to make some fun Lego crayons for all of our valentines treats! I got the molds from Amazon. Alex was great at helping take off the crayon paper and he loved sorting the colors and adding them to the molds!  I was happy to find a non-food treat because we have some food allergies in our class!

Monday was the most gorgeous 70s day! It was a great way to start February! It's fun to be able to meet up with friends too. A couple of the other teachers from my school have kiddos my kids ages so they have fun playing together and it's a refreshing mommy break!

Back at school we are busy researching information about our nonfiction topics! After learning about several different graphic organizers, we used those to help organize our notes. The kids are working on a final copy at home, but then we will also collaborate together to turn it into a class encyclopedia!

We have also been looking at different nonfiction text structures over the last couple of weeks! Reading A to Z has some great reading passages! I enlarged one for us to look at together and then the kids worked in pairs to pull out information and put it on an organizer! Looking at these texts have reinforced keeping our writing organized too!

Do you all use oils? They are a recent discovery for me, but I love them! the boys and I had fun making some stuff with them today! Alex is a huge fan! He loves sleepy spray for his bed and thinks it's amazing that we can make soap and hand sanitizer! 😉

Click on the picture to head over to Kacey's blog and see what other teachers are up to!

Five For Friday: Preschool Fun!

My goal this year is to get back to blogging! ;) Since I spend a couple days with third graders and then the rest of the week at home with my preschooler and toddler, I will spend some time each week sharing about both! On Wednesday I wrote about how we wi started our unit on informational text in third grade. You can read about it here!

Fridays will be more focused on some fun things we are doing at home, and this week I am going to link up with Kacey's Five for Friday to share 5 fun things we did this week to build letter and number sense! :) 

Race to 100! Such a fun way to practice counting to ten and then changing out the ten ones for a ten stick! First one to 100 wins! This was his first time playing, but Alex caught on right away and we had fun "collecting treasure" as he called it! Alex is definitely a numbers boy and so we have a lot of fun playing games to keep building that number sense and to let him make connections between numbers!

We love to do crafts! A while back, we started making some of the animals from Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? It wasn't something I had planned, but Alex decided to make a blue horse because of the book and we happened to have a brown bear craft, so we decided to continue the crafts and we keep them in a special envelope! This week we made the red bird, and then did some exploration to figure out how to make another bird whose wings flapped... 

that was definitely a challenge! ;)

Liam sometimes joins our game time for fun, but Alex is a big time game player! We love playing Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, Uno, Candy Land! All are great for practicing numbers, colors, etc. We slowly added in the rules of the different numbers to Sorry, but this is a fun game to practice counting {and stopping at the right number!} Playing games is not only fun but a great way to build number sense! Its fun to realize all the different ways learning can take place without needing any worksheets or textbooks! ;) 

We've had fun playing some games to practice letters and sounds! I love watching Alex's eyes dart around the pictures as he thinks about which one matches the letter he rolled! 

You can find the above set of cards here. We kind of made up this version on the spot because Alex wanted to play with the dice, but didn't want to color! ;) 

We also like to play another version that goes a little faster. I just added this game to my store! Be sure to check it out!

I am trying to put a little more effort into some literacy activities because that is not at all what Alex gravitates towards. I had a friend who had her kids write at least one sentence every day in a journal, and I kind of tucked that away as an idea I wanted to try later too. He is not much of an artist either. So on Wednesday I pulled out a journal and we wrote a sentence about whatever he wanted. So he took his toy Mater and noticed that a light was missing. So we wrote the sentence "Mater lost a light." I stretched out the sounds and he wrote down the letters he heard. I was pretty excited with his effort! The picture was a group effort! ;) 

Today he drew a picture of himself eating a lollipop and I asked him some guiding questions to get him to add a little more detail to the picture. 

What does it look like outside? What are you standing on? Anything else you need to add to the background.

He was a little less enthusiastic about writing a sentence today, so I helped out with the word lollipop. But he is trying and that is what makes me happy! :)

These are just a couple of easy things that I try to add into our weekly activities. Most last 20 minutes or less and come out of interest that Alex expresses about playing with dice or making a craft. I think that activities at this level definitely need to be child driven, and we stop when he loses interest. Liam, who is 2, often joins in for a little bit and then gets back to playing or snacking. His turn will come soon, but for now he is learning and enjoying some playtime by himself! :)

I'm linking up with Kacey's Five for Friday! Be sure to check it out! 

Five For Friday: Regaining Routines

The last two weeks have been quite a whirlwind! School was canceled last week due to the flooding and road closures here in Columbia, SC. It was devastating to watch all the destruction happen around us. We were thankfully not affected by the flooding, but so many around us were. We emailed out assignments and homework to our students and then I took my boys to stay at my parents house for most of the week. So many roads were closed around us I wasn't sure if we would be able to find a way out of the city, but thankfully we did and got to spend some time with them and enjoying clean water!

We got back to Columbia on Sunday and have been getting back into the daily routines as best as we can!

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Monday afternoon we had to go out to run some errands. It usually takes less than 20 minutes to get home from target, but on this trip it took almost an hour to go the round about way to get home thanks to road closures! my venti coffee wasn't enough! 

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so the next morning I tried another way to get to school. We used to leave our house at 7:40, but now we have to leave at 7 because the road right before our exit is closed! so we take about a 45 minute detour to get to school now! and it is just 10 minutes in the opposite direction! In the midst of it all I try to pay attention to the reasons to be thankful... we still have a home and belongings, we only have to make this trip 2 days a week, the end is in sight... 

It is truly amazing how quickly the city came together to pick up the pieces after the flooding. Neighbors lending a hand, first responders working tirelessly, volunteers donating meals, goods, gift cards... 

With the road closures it has made it hard for us to be able to get out and help, so I am thankful for those who have given so much time and energy to help others!

{three}. 

Back at school we worked to get back into our routines for those two days, but we didn't get through all I had planned. Which was fine. The kids had to share their stories. We played a review game before we took our Literature Test. You can find it {here} in my Games Galore pack!

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At home we have been having lots of fun with apples! We went apple picking while we were at my parent's house. We had been planning on it for a while so I was relieved it still worked out! We have made too big batches of apple sauce. The boys love helping. Liam is obviously good at eating too! We love to hold up the peels when we are done and see how long they are! 

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I made some mini apple pies too! I followed the recipe {here}. They were fun to make and will be a fun treat over the weekend, especially to help me endure the pile of grading I still need to get done!

Hope you all had a great week! Be sure to check out Kacey's fun link up!

Five For Friday: Busy Week!

Here is what we have been up to this week!

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Over the weekend I shared about some of the things that Alex and I like to do at home to build number sense. All you need is a couple of basic materials and then have lots of fun! You can check out some of our activities and can't live without materials here.

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I also worked on a beginning letter sound sort for him. Its perfect for Pre K through Kindergarten to help them hear beginning sounds! I wanted to make sure it was useful all year long, so I also added long and short vowel sorts, and word cards so that the ones who are ready can start using their decoding skills to match the words and the pictures! You can find more information here!

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In writing this week we talked about adding sensory details to our writing. So I split the kids into groups and they had to feel an object in a bag and first describe it without looking at it. Then I let them look at it and add more descriptions. We then came back together as a group, looked at the different descriptions and i gave each group a different bag and they had to match the object to the list of discriptions! It was fun. I did notice that a lot of kids went back and added more detailed descriptions while we were revising so I thought that was a plus! :)

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This week we studied Michelangelo in history so that 3rd-5th graders got to experience what it was like to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! They found unique ways to make it work, but all commented on how tiring it was! I have been able to see the Sistine Chapel in person and I am so amazed by its beauty! The set up and clean up were quite involved, but the kids had a blast!

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To celebrate the ending of our first set of novels we had a fair with with our kids at a family's farm. We had elements from our three books, Because of Winn Dixie, Charlotte's Web, and Maniac Magee, present. The petting farm gave them a taste of Charlotte's Web's fair, Lots of food goodies from Winn Dixie's party at the end of the book, and a cobbler's know, pizza, and games from Maniac Magee... What we didn't anticipate is that true to the ending of Winn Dixie, our plans for a day of fun would be thrown for a loop by rain!! It slowed down at the start of our hay ride, but by the end the rain picked up and we were DRENCHED! Of course a lot of our plans changed, but the kids had a great time and made lots of memories! Since we did it on a non school day for us, parents and other siblings came along, so Alex and Liam got to come along too! They loved every minute and were troopers through the rain too!

Even though it rained I have to say I love the cooler fall weather that is rolling in! Can't wait for lots of fall activities to start!

Hope you all had a great week too!

Be sure to check out Kacey's Five for Friday Linky!

Five For Friday

I've been on a little hiatus the last couple weeks, mostly because we have been out of town a lot with family. There has been lots of times I have wanted to write, but it is hard to find the time! But I really do want to get back into the swing of it, so this is a good place to start. 

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This post is from a while back, but we had such a sweet beginning to our writing workshop and it has only gotten better! The kids love to write! Click on the picture for a link to the post!

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I have one bulletin board in my room to use! It's kind of crazy, but I'm trying to use it as our reference board to help keep track of what we are learning. 

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At home we also enjoy some preschool fun! Alex always likes to choose the numbers tub, so we go through it and I make up some games to help us practice counting! :) I plan on writing a full post about some fun numbers activities soon! Target had a fun container of all kinds of dice that I used at school last year, but it has been perfect for activities at home too!

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Labor day weekend was spent with my family! We all gathered in Georgia at my parents house to have one last hurrah before we said goodbye to my sister and her family! They flew to the other side of the world to minister to the people there! I am so thankful that we live in the age of iPhones and iMessages because we have been able to stay in contact so easily once she got there! I can't imagine what it was like when my parents took us to Japan when I was two and long distance calls were so expensive! These are all the grandkids minus 2! They didn't have enough swings! :)

{five}

This had been on my to do list for a while, but I finally made Alex and Liam a calendar yesterday! I wanted to make one that could fit in the little Target pocket charts! I had seen some calendar pieces at target, but they didn't have all the pieces left! I'm hoping this helps Alex figure out the days of the week a little better and helps cut down on some of the "how many days until..." I need to finish up a could of things but will eventually add it to my TPT store! ;)

Well, there is lots more to share, but hopefully I will start to get into a better routine of posting. The busyness of traveling is slowing down and I am finally caught up on laundry! ;) Be sure to check out what all the other teachers are up to at Kacey's Five for Friday link up!