freebie Archives - Page 7 of 7

Earth Day Freebie!

April 1, 2013

For once, I’m AHEAD of the game when it comes to monthly themed activities!!

I realized the other day that my kiddos still need some practice with ABC order. YIKES.

So here is a cutie Earth Day ABC Order activity I created! 🙂 Hope you’ll get some use out of it, too!

For those of you who aren’t making me totally jealous on Spring Break right now, how did April Fool’s Day go for y’all? Did you get in any good pranks? (And hopefully, didn’t get tricked too badly by the kids?) I played a fun one on my kids. I downloaded a quiz from Slide Share and gave it to my kiddos. The first direction says to read ALL of the directions. There are 18 items, numbered. The last direction says don’t do anything except #1 and #2 and sit quietly. I told them it was a timed pop quiz. They had 15 minutes- we got the privacy folders out and everything! I only had ONE student actually read all the way through and see that she didn’t need to do anything! Everyone else was frantically working. I stopped them after 9 minutes and let them in on the secret. 😛 They all thought it was hilarious!

We started reading Wonder today.

I am so excited after all the rave reviews I’ve heard! And the kids are already soooo into it. 🙂

Don’t forget, this Wednesday, link up with Workshop Wednesday for Math Websites! Let’s share our favorite websites that are our “go-to sources” for math. It can be to show what the kids use, or for you as a resource! And I’m hoping to be unveiling a NEW Workshop Wednesday Linky Button! Yippee!! 🙂 Stay tuned!!

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Five For Friday, Flashback, & Freebie!

March 22, 2013

Hello my BBBs! (That’s Best Bloggy Buddies, of course!)

You are gonna feel some SERIOUS love in this Friday post. Watch out! 😉

1) Ok, clearly we all have bad days and need to whine a little. I have really tried to keep all my blog posts positive because I know we don’t all want to hear complaining all the time. But yesterday, I had a little pity party, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of love and support I received from you all, my BBBs!!! It makes me so glad to be a blogger- this really is such a special community we form here in bloggy land. You people are awesome. 🙂 Thank you so much to Julie, Jessica, Tamra and Sarah, Christy, Elizabeth, Amy, Molly, Theresa, Jess, Ashley, Angie, Melissa, and Caralee for really lifting my spirits yesterday!! 🙂 (Sorry for not linking, Angie- if you read this and you have a blog, shoot me your link so I can make sure I’m following you!)

2) I interviewed yesterday for literacy coach here at my school. Sorry for the vagueness yesterday- I was back and forth on whether to announce it, but I decided it would be ok. 🙂 I REEEEEEEALLY am hoping and praying I get the job because it has been a dream of mine since I became a teacher. Fingers and toes crossed!! Thanks so much to those of you who have also been saying some prayers with me! 🙂 Again, BBBs!!! 🙂 🙂

3) Three women we learn about in 4th grade are Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. SADLY, they are at the end of our year because we go through our Social Studies chronologically, so we don’t have enough time to really get excited about them before THE TEST! But this year, I changed that. I decided for our biography unit, we would read about these fabulous women, research about them, and write about them! We started off reading about them on PebbleGo.

If you haven’t checked out this amazing site- DO IT! It is fabulous at giving “basic important information” just right for elementary schoolers AND it reads it to them if they need that accommodation (my ESOL kids and lower readers used this feature).

We also read these books:

This way, I’m able to integrate all that Social Studies content into my Language Arts time, and not ever have to physically teach it in isolation during “Social Studies!” I love doing that- especially now with Common Core and the huge push for nonfiction- integration is HUGE! Elizabeth Leads the Way is a GREAT book to use to teach strong leads. Moses is wonderful for context clues and imagery. Step-Stomp Stride is awesome for teaching vivid/powerful language. So as we learn the information taught through the biographies, we are learning reading and writing skills, too!

4) I’m so excited to say that the Workshop Wednesday Linky is successful! 17 AWESOME bloggers linked up this week!! Check them out by clicking the button below if you haven’t already! There were some GREAT resources shared!

(And don’t forget, you can always link up late- the linky stays open until the next Wednesday!) So I’m going to go ahead and get a paid subscription to inlinkz so we can have our cute thumbnails on the linky each week. I will post the week’s topic on Sunday and/or Monday so you can be prepared if you want to join in!

5) You know I can’t leave a Friday post freebie-less.

So here’s a cute one I hope you will find useful! 🙂 Enjoy! Graphics are from Ashley Hughes!

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Flashback, Five, and Freebie!

March 16, 2013

Linking up…

Here we go!!

1) We had a great week! First, Joanne at Head over Heels for Teaching posted her amazing bulletin board last week and I HAD to copy it. 🙂 Check hers out here.
Here’s mine!!

I had them choose a “food” figurative language phrase to “show” (not tell!) the meaning through their writing. They drew the food from their figurative language phrase:

And inside their “napkin” they wrote their paragraph to show the meaning:

My kids had so much fun with it!! The list they picked from can be downloaded as a freebie below or here. We talked about the meanings of course, before they chose. Then they are keeping this in their writing folders to use later in their writing!

2) Yesterday, we did another bloggy inspired display on the door. Amanda over at Collaboration Cuties posted a great self-esteem and community-building activity with a St. Pat’s theme. Check hers out here! It seems this time of year, the kiddos always start getting a little aggravated with each other and get what I call “sibling syndrome.” So I gave all my kiddos this list of positive character traits – which was GREAT because we talked about the words they didn’t know the meaning of and they wrote the synonyms for them… hoping this list helps add to their vocabulary!! Then we did a form of “SCOOT” -they went around with their list to every student’s desk and wrote a trait on their coin. You should have seen their faces as they read their own coins when they made it back! You could tell this really made them feel good. 🙂 I posted them on the door…

…and at the end of the month I’m going to tape them on their desk to help give them a boost when they need it. 🙂

3) Today officially started my birthday celebration weekend!! We have birthday recognitions on our morning news show, so I went up to get mine! 🙂

4) The kids had a blast playing our St. Patrick’s Day games/activities during language arts time! In fact, so much that we didn’t get through all the rotations today, so we’ll finish on Monday. They didn’t want to stop so I gave them more time than I anticipated.

Figurative Language Memory Game from My Life as a Third Grade Teacher

Simple and Compound Subjects from 3rd Grade Grapevine

Erin Go Bragh Editing from My Life as a Third Grade Teacher

Parts of Speech Coins from Collaboration Cuties

5) Don’t forget to enter my 200 follower giveaway! It’s hard to believe I’m over 250 now!! The giveaway will end Sat night and winners will be announced on Sunday!!

Happy Friday! Enjoy your weekend! I know I will! 🙂 🙂 🙂

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Workshop Wednesday: Math Games!

March 13, 2013

I’m so excited about this week’s Workshop Wednesday!

I absolutely LOVE finding and/or creating new math games for my kiddos to play, so today’s topic is: What math games do you and your kiddos love to play? Share and promote! 🙂

The first game I will share with you is called Witzzle Pro. I adapt it for my classroom, but the actual directions that come with the game are really fun, too!! The way I play in my room: no dice are needed…each set of partners gets a card (see above). I give them a range of numbers that I want them to find equations for (like 10-20). They must use order of operations to create at least one problem that will have an answer for each number in that range. All of the numbers must stay in order either forwards, backwards, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal! For example, the card standing up by itself in the picture above… the top row could be used this way:

5+6-1=10

5+(6×1)=11

1+6+5=12

but NOT: 5-1+6=10 because the numbers would be out of order.

The kids have a lot of fun with it and it’s a GREAT way to practice order of operations!

I’ve also created some math games for use in my room. All of these are FREE in my TPT store, so feel free to click on the pictures of them to download them. These games are also included in my Common Core Math Units that I’ve created- along with other games, lessons, and fun activities of course. 🙂

Place Value Game

Simplify Fractions Game

Partial Product Multiplication Game

Division With Remainders Game

Make One Whole With Decimals Game

Can’t wait to see the games you all share! Please link up to your blog ONLY (links within your blog can go to stores, of course). Make sure to also grab the banner and link back to my blog, please! Let’s follow Farley’s Rule of 3! 🙂

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Monday Math Freebie!

March 11, 2013

We are about to start our measurement “stuff” in Math, so I thought it would be appropriate to create a time activity for Daylight Savings Time!

Click the picture or click here for the download! As usual, if you download it, please let me know what you think! You can comment below! :o)

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Snowy Show and Tell Tuesday!

January 15, 2013

I’m linking up with Sunny Days in Second Grade for Winter Show and Tell Tuesday! It’s ironic because I saw Emily’s idea over at I Love My Classroom for big kid snow globe stories. I was so excited to do them this week, and then saw that Denise’s (the creator of this linky) Show and Tell was for the snow globes, too! Apparently, I’ve been out of the loop on this awesome idea for writing! 😛

We started our writing time with the cartoon, Knick Knack by Pixar. It is so cute! If you’ve never seen it, you can watch it below but DISCLAIMER!!! The one on youtube is not as kid-friendly. It was originally created back in the late 80’s, and the bikini clad girl and the mermaid CLEARLY have had some work done. 😉 You can find the kid-appropriate version at the beginning of the Finding Nemo DVD. They changed the girls, but everything else is the same…
So for YOUR viewing pleasure:

So back to the lesson… after watching the short, I had them turn and talk with a partner about what it would be like if they were trapped in a snow globe… or maybe they weren’t “trapped!” Maybe they just live there, but they encounter ANOTHER problem inside the snow globe. Some ideas they thought of were: it’s always cold, I have no friends because I’m in there by myself, someone put a spell on me and put me in a snow globe, and my favorite: people keep looking in at me with their big eyes! Once they got some ideas rolling around, I gave them this graphic organizer to begin brainstorming:
(you can download for yourself, too, by clicking on the picture!)

I want these stories to have “action!” I don’t want to read 25 stories about what their snowglobe looks like and who lives there and they play together and THE END. 🙂 So, I created this graphic organizer for that purpose. We’ve talked about how usually the problem or the conflict happens around the “middle” of a shorter narrative (in other words, not a chapter book) and the solution happens towards the end, so instead of putting beginning/middle/end on the graphic organizer, I used introduction/problem/solution to remind them they NEED to have a conflict and a resolution in their story. For “setting” they should draw what they want it to look like and label with important words to include in their story.

When my kids have finished, I think I am going to borrow Denise’s idea and take pictures of them and have them make their snowglobes they described in their story to put with their published writing!

I hope you can use these ideas! If you have some great winter ideas of your own, make sure to share them in the comments! I love getting new ideas to do in the classroom! 🙂

Earth Day Freebie!

Five For Friday, Flashback, & Freebie!

Flashback, Five, and Freebie!

Workshop Wednesday: Math Games!

Monday Math Freebie!

Snowy Show and Tell Tuesday!

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