Rainy Days

Have you ever heard other teachers say that their students tend to 'act out' or 'get crazy' when it's rainy, windy, or full moon?? I find it so funny how it coincidentally happens  that everybody's kids can be wild at the same time. WELL..here in beautiful Hawaii it has been STORMING like crazy this week. Luckily, yesterday my kiddos were amazingly well behaved, focused and completely engaged. I felt so proud when all the other teachers were complaining about how their kids were driving them nuts.

It seems that every Monday morning the copier seems to not work. I need to learn my lesson and make my copies on Friday from now on. Well, since all that I was planning on doing got chucked when the copier broke I had to improvise. I remember seeing this super cute idea on pinterest where they used easter eggs to show fractions. I had a whole bag full of eggs in my closet (from last year) so decided to have the kids show equivalent fractions! 

I just wrote some equivalent fractions on the eggs and color coordinated different sets of bags I took apart the eggs and the kid shad to put them all back together. 

Here they are working with partners to put together the eggs. 

The kids really had so much fun doing this and I was truly able to see who understands their equivalent fractions and who doesn't. I also made a worksheet to go along with this for them to complete once their done. I'm still learning how to upload documents and saving them as pdf files so that fonts can be seen.

Well I'm off to watch the news and see what's new with this crazy storm. Last night the thunder was sooo loud it sounded like there were bombs going off! I've never in my life heard thunder this loud..loud enough to set off car alarms. **Forgot to mention, it even HAILED here today! Amazing and scary at the same time. I am enjoying this nippy weather and am off to curl up, watch the news and blog stalk. Here's a photo that I saw on Happy Hour Hawaii's Facebook page. Not sure who took it but it is an amazingly beautiful photo. Have a great rest of the week fellow bloggers :)

Freebie

Alright, since I'm totally new to this blogging thing I am still learning how to do things and navigate. I've been doing some research on how to upload files to my blog so that I can share some things that I have made/am making. I'm going to be sharing a common core math assessment for elapsed time that I had made earlier in the year. This is for all you grade 3 teachers who are reading. I hope you can find this assessment useful. Hopefully this works :) Click here if you would like to check out my very first freebie. 

PS: Any tips and or pointers for this newbie would be greatly appreciated :)

Weekend

Happy Saturday All!

Hope that everyone had a Seuss-tastic Friday. I was shocked to find out that a handful of my kids could not do a simple rhyming worksheet. They were to color in bubbles if the word rhymed with green (bean, mean, etc) and so on. I was a bit upset. It led to a lesson on rhyming. I read Dr Seuss' Hop on Pop and my kids LOVED it. I guess books are NEVER too babyish . Their faces were lit up the entire time and they were laughing their heads off. We also read the Lorax which is an awesome book and has an amazing message. We spent a lot of time discussing the story, the message then the kiddos went off and wrote a continuation of the story. It was truly precious, especially the pictures.

It's Saturday and I wish I could go garage sailing for some new class books. I am in total re-organize mode of my class library since I have inputted them all on the website Classroom Booksource. It truly is great, the kids have learned quickly how to check in and check out books. Some of the irresponsible ones have difficulty remembering but they'll get it! I totally want to re-organize the entire library by genre, author, etc. Any good ideas of how to organize?? Unfortunately, I can't go garage sailing because I'm off to a Thinking Maps Prof. Development class I'm taking.

Enjoy your weekend!

My Ocean Themed Class

Hey!!

Yay. It's Thursday and only 5 days till spring break!! I am totally ready for break and have some big plans to clean and organize my house, my class and hopefully create some awesome things for the kiddos when they return from break. This group of kids I have are tough!! They are extremely low and all the things I think will work or have worked in the past..don't work for some of these kids. It amazes me how behind some of them are :(

Anywayyys I wanted to share a few pictures of my beach/ocean themed classroom. I uploaded a pic to my pinterest account of one of my bulletin boards and it started spreading really quickly. Soo if you're already planning ahead for next year here's some ideas :)

This is Behavior Beach. My red, yellow, green light behavior system. The red and blue rings hanging are my bathroom passes. They are supposed to resemble the lifeguard ring thingies :D Since the kids are now in third, I let them know that I trust them and they are independent. They are allowed to use the bathroom at any time (other than teaching/learning time). All they need to do is put the pass on their desk so I know where they are. 

This is a view of my class from the doorway

Our schedule which looks pretty ghetto :P It bothered me that the times were handwritten so I made laminated cards with the time on it 

This is in our library "Reader's Reef". Displays all different type of genres and descriptions from the awesome Beth Newingham. If you haven't seen her site yet..you NEED to check it out.

Unfortunately these are all of the pictures I have right now. If you can see to the right of this last bulletin board you see some fishing net. Its a net hanging and the board reads "Fishing for a good book?!" The background resembles the same board as the readers reef with fish, sand and coral. The kids make book recommendation on fish cutouts, they color, I laminate and then we put it up into the net. Other children can get book ideas if they're ever at a loss for what to read. 

Amazing Library Resource

Have you ever wanted to use a book for a lesson but just didn't know if you had it or where it was? That's my problem. I love love love buying books and have collected a good sized library in my two years of teaching. I recently found this AMAZING resource from pinterest.

This fabulous website  lets you use your smart phone to scan the ISBN code (located on the back of books) and will upload all of the information to this website. You can keep track of which books you have, where they are located in your class, and how many copies. It gets even better. Your kiddos can check the books out on the computer. You can decide how many books you will allow students to check out.

The site prints reports too. You can see if students are reading books at their level, what genres they are reading, etc. You can also get your class library evaluated by a book expert based on the age of kids you teach. They will also recommend books to add to your library :)

You can decide what information you would like displayed. I current have title, author, and AR level. This summer my project will be to reorganize my library by genres/book series, etc. Then I will go back and label which basket each book is located in.

I absolutely love the idea of knowing exactly what books I have, how many, who has what, etc. The best thing about it is that it is ABSOLUTELY FREE!!! You can also export your completed library list to excel. I plan on doing this just in case the site gets really popular and decides to charge.

Let me know what you think of this site, and how it works for you :) Happy organizing!!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentines Day out there to everyone in bloggy world!! Phew, am I glad this day is over. I am exhausted. Just got home (traffic was crazy) in perfect time as it started to POUR. Only in Hawaii is it extremely sunny yet pouring. Will be relaxing as I finish up planning for the week and watch Glee and New girl :)


Sooo we had an extremely fun day today!! We began by doing some valentine math word problems. We then read this super cute story How Do You Hug a Porcupine  written by Laurie Isop. The kids then went and wrote about and drew how they would hug a porcupine. It came out sooo cute!! During math we had a ton of fun with our candy hearts. We used it to find fractions of a number, graphing, sorting, multiplication arrays, division, and even practiced writing numbers in multiple ways. 


Last but not least we made a gift for our parents. I'll post pictures soon! Hope you all have a wonderful V-day with your loved ones. :)


Did you know...teachers get the most valentine gifts on this special day (heard it on the radio). Yes, we are so lucky we are loved so much!!

Wonderful bloggers out there.

Okay. I haven't posted as much as I wish I could but life picks you up and you gotta take care of all those necessary things. I've been frantically working and trying to get all things ready for the short month of December. I want to make this month as special and magical as possible for the kiddos :D Most of my inspiration comes from all of YOU wonderful bloggers! Although, I still need to establish myself as a blogger and actually get a following I still like to blog so that I myself can reflect back :)

Often times I find myself really needing some inspiration to continue on in this career. Everyone always says that it's worth it but sometimes I really question myself whether or not this is really what I want to do for the rest of my life?! As I was scrolling through some of the AMAZING bloggers that I follow regularly, I saw that Marlene over at I heart Teaching posted about a book called Awakened. Check her blog out for a chance to win this book, full of inspiration for 'one of those days'.