Teachers Taking Care of Teachers

So I am linking up to Crystal over at Kreative in Kinder to help out all the teachers (and students) who have lost everything in the recent tornadoes. What a sad and devastating thing that happened but what a great thing to be able to reach out and help them in this time of need! Head on over to her blog to get the details on how you can help.



Link up and repost to your blog! Think of how happy and touched you will make someone feel :)

Top 10 Award

I just have to send a HUGE shout out and THANK YOU to Molly over at Lessons with Laughter for awarding me with the Top 10 Blog Award!!

I was so excited and am extremely honored to have been awarded with this, being that there are SO MANY amazing bloggers out there. If you aren't already following her, you must go check it out because she has so many cute ideas!!

So I'm supposed to nominate 10 of my favorite teaching blogs. This is so difficult because there are so many out there that give wonderful ideas for my class and make me smile each day. So to all you bloggers that I follow, Thank you for making me a better teacher and continuing to give me that extra inspiration and motivation when I need a little push :)

Here are 10 awesome (sorry for the over-use of this word...my kiddos are rubbing off on me! haha) bloggers that I enjoy learning from and checking up on their class happenings each day. Check them out when you have a chance because they all have great ideas to share!

1. Miss Ice over at Third Grade Sprinkles
2. Katie at Adventures of an Art Teacher
3. Maria at Charmed in the Third Grade
4. Ashleigh over at Ashleigh's Education Journey
5. Mrs. Childress and Ms. Winstead at Fabulous Fourth Grade
6. Courtney at Miss Third Grade
7. Amanda at One Extra Degree
8. Amy at Step into Second Grade with Mrs. Lemons
9. Doris at Third Grade Thinkers
10. Christie at Teaching in Flip Flops

PS: These blogs are in no particular order, all of these ladies are amazing :)

On another note, I stopped by at a garage sale on my way home from the market. I scored about 10 books for $2.50. I was a happy shopper. The books weren't in the greatest condition but they were good books, a lot of non fiction finds too. The boy that was selling his books was so adorable! He was sitting by and guarding his books and asked me "why are you buying books?" When I told him I was a teacher he sounded very surprised haha (I look pretty young for my age.) We ended up having a long conversation about my kids, what he remembers from third grade, about his fourth and fifth grade experience and then him telling me why they were selling everything. Apparently they are moving to Japan, what a wonderful experience!! How I could resist supporting that little cutie by not buying his books :)

Anyways I'm off to clean the house (hopefully I don't get distracted)

3 days down, and 1 more to go till Spring BREAK!!

Yess! I keep telling myself one more day one more day. I am completely burnt out and the kids are on vacay mode. Today was one crazy hectic day. Have you ever thought about what your life would be like WITHOUT technology?? It seems so hard to imagine the days when we had no cell phones, computers, internet, etc. For the past week our phone lines at school have been down so we have been relying on email. Today I get to school and our entire network was down. That means that we had no internet, could not access files that are on our 'server' and worst of all we couldn't even print!! Lucky thing today was a Wednesday. It was crazy since we had no idea that we had indoor recess (even though it was completely sunny)--due to the storm (that passed, yay!) which made the playground all muddy. Also, since we're wrapping up the quarter and collected data for grades we needed to use the computer lab. I admit, I'm guilty..I'm also on vacay mode. I procrastinated (but I learned my lesson, I promise!) and thought I'd print the kids usernames and passwords when I get to school. Lo and behold I couldn't even access the darn things. I was scrambling but it all worked out and I sure am happy that we're at "1 more day till break!"

I spent a lot of time yesterday watching tutorials by the amazing Kristen at Ladybug's Teacher Files. I'm slowly learning and getting the hang of this blogging thing. Again, I'm always open and welcome to tips and advice from you other bloggers (yes, you reading this! :P) . Anywayys I wanted to see if I could embed this google doc. I made a past-tense verb sort for my kids last night. I had them organize it using a tree map format. I have pictures of their maps being put together but forgot to snap a picture of a completed verb tree map. I'll try and remember tomorrow and then post it up.

Click here if you would like a copy. 

Here's one as the student just began putting it together. At the very top is their title "Past Tense Verbs". Next,  they added their branches which were the four different rules. Below each rule they needed to paste a word that followed the rule. They were also required to write the correct form of the past-tense verb.




Hope you enjoy the rest of this beautiful Wednesday (the sun is back..Yay!). I'm off to take a shower, clean the house and get ready for some One Tree Hill

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.