Digital Holiday Story Books

Today I'm here to share with you a favorite holiday project in my classroom. During the holidays, it's really difficult to keep the kids engaged/focused…but this project is always a hit! Kids beg to work on it -- and are dead silent and hard at work while doing so.  Here's a sample of a completed project! To begin, students worked with a partner to fill out their story map. 

They brainstormed ideas and had to come to an agreement before filling out their story map. From there, they went on to the actual writing of their stories. The kids knew what their end product would be--so while they work on their writing, they are also planning out which sentences will go on what page. Students were so excited about this part and couldn't wait to get into the lab! 

Click here to download the story map. Once students were done with the writing, we went into the lab so they could begin creating their digital story books. For this project, we used the program Pixie.  This is an awesome program because students were able to link up computer screens with their partners--so that they could both work on the illustrations at the same time. There are also many different clip art pieces the kids can use.

It took awhile for the kids to learn to work together on this program. Since most of them chose to work on the same page at the same time, they would often go and change out little images their partner had placed…or change the color of the text, etc. After awhile though, they figured out how to work together to compromise. 

Since we could only work on this program in the computer lab, and that we had a limited number of days to work on it, this was incentive enough to get the kids to not argue and finish up their work in the given amount of time. 

During the last week of school, we popped popcorn and watched all of the holiday movies! The kiddos LOVED it. Here's one more: This was a great activity to do to keep the kids engaged during the holidays, but really, this could be enjoyed at any time throughout the year!  I'd love to know if you end up doing this with your kiddos :)  Happy Teaching!

Super Sentence Flash Freebie!

Hi All!

I've been busy at work all day today working on putting together this Super Sentence Pack.

This week my students will be working on learning the 4 different types of sentences. On top of that, I need them to be writing 'quality' sentences. It drives me crazy when they turn in simple sentences. SO, they will be working on learning how to write Super Sentences using nouns, adjectives and verbs in EVERY sentence they write. 

Check this product out at my TPT store. It'll be FREE for the next hour. 

Publishing Party and Medals

Thank goodness it's the weekend and yay for a productive Saturday. It sure has been awhile since I've had one of those. Today I've been busy at work prepping some stuff for something exciting happening in school next week. Some of you may remember, awhile back I was talking about how my students were busy at work writing stories that had a twist to classic Fairy Tales. Well..those stories have finally been completed, shipped out for publishing, and shipped back to our school. 

Excuse this photo. I had to pull this of of my instagram since my copy of our book is at school :/ 

My students are officially published authors...and to celebrate such a wonderful accomplishment..we are having a Publishing Party this Wednesday in our school cafeteria. This is an event that was open to all third grade parents. Students will be displaying their books and they will be given the opportunity to answer any questions about the process or their inspiration. They will also be given the chance to share their books aloud to others in the author chair.  They are SO EXCITED and I am so proud of them because they each did such a wonderful job and worked so very hard. 

SO...I decided to award each of them with a IM A PUBLISHED AUTHOR medal...

Not sure if anyone else has a use for these but if you're interested let me know in the comment section below and I could send you an editable version on ppt. 

AND...I just have to mention that the cover to our book was drawn by my very talented friend. Some of you may remember her as the person who re-created my Angry Birds Cause and Effect Anchor Chart. 

Isn't she so talented?? When my mom saw our class book, she thought I had used clipart to create it. 

I've been trying to convince her to create clipart because she's talented and I think she would do great. For those of you out there who do create clipart...is it difficult? Perhaps she could start this up for a summer project?! haha. 

In celebration of all the wonderful mom's out there...here is what we created for our Mother's Day Gifts. It's just a cute little bear holding a bundle of flowers. On the stem of each flower is a coupon that moms can redeem from their child. My kids also created their own coupon. Many of the wrote things like "I will complete my homework without being told" or "I will complete my homework with no complaints". lol. I had to laugh at that one. 

How precious is this little bear?? 

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms. I really give you all credit. I don't know how you all continue to be such wonderful teachers, diligent bloggers, and excellent mothers. I hope to one day be like you :)

Fairy Tale Fun

In the past three weeks, my students and I have been very busy reading fairy tales. The students have been excited in finding books that have twists or different perspectives to the classic fairy tale stories we have become familiar with. We've been spending a lot of time using double bubble maps to compare and contrast the characters, setting, and plots of the stories. 

This sparked a lot of excitement with the kids, so I decided to go with it and this year, our class will be publishing FairyTale books with Student Treasures. 

For those of you who have never heard of student treasures, it's a wonderful and very FREE publishing site. You can publish a class book and it will be a hard bound book, your class also gets a free copy. This is actually my first year working with the company, but so far I've heard tons of great things about this company from those who have published in the past. 

I've been introducing the writing process to my students and created this poster, ocean themed, of course so that I can see where the students are at in their various stages of writing. 

They are so very excited and I have some wonderful stories in progress. Can't wait to share the finished product with everyone. 

Here are some of the books we have been reading:

This is a cute book, the Hawaii Gingerbread Man. I've linked this book to amazon if you're interested in checking it out :)

This is another cute book..found this from a parent who did Mystery reader for us :)

This book has been SUCH a huge hit! The kids think this one is hilarious!!

All of these books have served to be great examples for some inspiration as to how my students can change a story, but still have a similar story line...Until next time!!

How to Make a Turkey

Last year I did a really cute activity with my students about How to Make a Turkey. They work on using sequence order words to give steps about how to create a candy turkey. I came up with the idea of doing this project last minute last year so I had such a hard time finding candy corn. It was already right before Thanksgiving and all the stores were out of their Halloween stuff. This year, I was smart enough to tell my kids to bring in any candy corn they got from trick-or-treating as well as any whoppers. Good thing I did because I saved myself a ton of money from having to go out and buy them. Last year, I had to go to a specialty candy shop and spent almost $15 on candy corn!! I'm glad I planned ahead this year :)

This is what the cute turkeys look like. You need two double stuffed oreos, some candy corn, and whoppers (this is per child). I pre packaged everything in plastic baggies the night before so that I could easily hand them out to the students. They absolutely loved this activity...

They were also required to write out the ingredients needed, as well as step by step directions. At the ending, they drew and colored a picture of what the turkey is supposed to look like. I packaged the finished products up and sent them home with the kids. :) Surprisingly, most of them wanted to wait to eat it so they could show their parents. If you would like a copy of the worksheet that my kids used for this activity you can pick it up here. 

Persuasive Writing, Homophones and a Class Consequence

We've been busy at school and have a well deserved break. Hopefully when the kiddos come back they are ready to totally pick up the pace since we will be moving quickly!!

\ This year, I have a few kids who are chronic homework forgetters. They have SO MANY assignments missing that I can't even keep up. It's difficult because I have yard duty everyday. From the time the kids come in in the mornings to turn in their hw and morning recess, I have no time to check their work. I start teaching ASAP and while morning business is going on I'm submitting attendance and getting my SPED kids ready to leave for their class. That means by the time its morning recess I haven't even had time to see who did their homework or not. It's quite frustrating. We talked about this and the kids came up with their own consequence. They said that if they did not do their work or complete it, it is their responsibility to take it (when I have yard duty) or to stay in to finish it (without me having to remind ANYBODY). If they do go out to recess and later in the day after I've checked homework and I find they are missing their assignment, they are to flip their behavior card and write a note home to their parents. I have to admit, I was very impressed with this consequence the kids came up with.  I've tried homework monitors in the past where I had this beautiful template and my monitors would check off the assignments but that didn't work for me. I had some kids being checked off if they were only partially done or even if the quality was horrible (or all wrong). How do you handle this homework dilemma? 

Last week, I purchased this super cute Homophone and Homograph unit from Christina Cottongame. This unit has so many wonderful activities and worksheets for students, I haven't even got a chance to do them all. I only introduced homophones and we pretended to be talking on our phones and read words from our homophone list. We talked about how all of the words sound the same on the phone but since we can see the list we know that they don't mean the same thing. We then made the connections that homophones sound the same but have different spelling and meanings. The kids created these cute silly homophone sentences:

The toad and his toad car got towed away.

Noah was running away from a hare with green hair.

My pet bunny was very weak this week, he didn't move.

Spongebob flew over to Patricks with a bowl of stew because Patrick had the flu.

We also have been working on writing personal narratives. I got this idea from the wonderful Amy Lemons.  I did this last year with my kids and it was a total hit both years. They loved writing about their best friend and everyone has something to write about!!

This is ME!

Aren't the pictures just adorable?? One of my students wrote about her best friend, Courtney M and went on to describe her friend. At the very end she writes she is not only my friend but she is my Teacher!! How cute and sweet is that?? That totally brought a bright smile to my face. I love how in both her writing and picture she managed to capture my 'brown hair with yellowish highlights' lol. 

Have a great week!