Five for Friday

Hello Friends!

Today I am linking up with Doodle Bugs for her Five for Friday Linky Party.

1. I know that I already  blogged about this but I am so proud of how well my students did at building stamina this week on our Daily 5. We worked on read to someone and writing and I was thoroughly impressed with them.

using check marks for Check for understanding

Love my little writers!

2. I went to our women's ministry event called Taste of Fall this week. It was so fun and filled with JUNK FOOD! :) I mean.... just take a look at this table! I thought about eating well.... well, that is until I walked into this:

Wow. Just. WOW!

3. I'm at a hotel this weekend with a friends for a Women of Faith conference. I'm looking forward to a fun and relaxing weekend away. We already went for sushi and are planning to get massages today. :)   The hotel we are staying at is close to Disneyland AND they serve breakfast! I L.O.V.E free food!!

YUMMY!

4. I logged onto the TPT website and saw this! I know that they do a random rotation but it is so neat to see yourself on here and to know that you exist! Ha!

5.  I just finished my Gone Fishin' unit. It's so fun! Kids "fish" for different letter sounds. The unit is also editable so that you can create your own game. You can do parts of speech, different types of sentences, or any type of sorting activity. I'm looking forward to using this with my students.

Happy Friday Friends and enjoy your weekend!

Blessings,

Daily 5 - Read to Someone and Writing

Hello Friends.

Just wanted to share a little praise that happened in my class today. We have been working on building stamina for Daily 5. So far we have done work on writing, read to self, and read to someone. Today was our first time doing read to someone. We made an anchor chart and we talked about what I expect of them and then wrote down what they should expect of me (working with students, helping them read, listening to others read, etc). I've been a bit nervous about introducing this component of the Daily 5 since my class is pretty chatty this year. This is usually one of my favorite elements of D5... seeing kids all sprawled out all over the room and listening to kids read. It makes my heart happy. But this group.... well, let's just say that I repeated myself over and over and OVER again how important it is to stay on task and focused now that I was pairing them up with a friend.  I usually let them choose, but for the first couple times, I pair them up. I might have bribed them with skittles  (<----- don't judge me)  encouraged them to stay on task and then put my stamina chart up. I started the timer and then they were off!  I sat at the back of the room and all I heard were a bunch of little spies using their "spy talk". AHHHH!!! They were AMAZING!!!! We went a whole 10 mins and 4 secs!!! I was seriously impressed and SO proud of my little friends!! Here are some pics of our Daily 5 practice:


Students were sitting EEKK (elbow to elbow, knee to knee) and using the checkmark to check for understanding. After a student read a page, the other student would put the checkmark to their head and say, "I just heard you read..." They did FANTASTIC!! After a couple of practices, they will be able to sit wherever they want. Call me a control freak or whatever but I just know that they need to sit at their desks the first couple of times of practicing. LOL.

Here we are working on our stamina for the writing component:

Love this little boy who is in our "thinking position". Hands on chin and they say "Hmmmmm...." :)

Love that one is in thinking position, one is whisper reading, and the others are writing away. HAPPY! HAPPY! HAPPY!

Oh, and this is not part of our Daily 5, but I just love this little art project that my team teacher did with my bubble map. :) She is so fun and I  love coming in on Mondays and seeing the neat things that they did for Fun Friday the week before.

Love those lashes!

Thanks for stopping by, friends! Hope your school year is going great!

Daily 5 Read To Self

Hello Friends!

Today will be a short post since I have Back To School Night tonight. I job share so I am at home today and will go back to my school site later today to get the classroom ready.

I wanted to share a little about our first 2 weeks in implementing Daily 5. If you have not tried Daily 5 and have been on the fence about it, I would really encourage you to DO IT! I LOVE it and it really is my favorite time of the day. In fact, my sweet little Daniel from my class (and a couple of other students) kept asking when we were going to do Daily 5 again. They know that it's at the end of the day, but they were just SUPER excited to do Read to Self since they had earned sitting ANYWHERE in the room. Note: this year, I have a tough and SO VERY chatty class so I was a bit scared to see how "sitting anywhere" would turn out.

I start my Read to Self with them just sitting at their desks. I wanted them to build some stamina in displaying the right Read to Self behavior before I threw in the fun factor of sitting around the room, under the tables, at my teacher desk,  etc. I told them that if they made it to 6 mins, that I would allow them to sit anywhere in the class. They worked together and within just a couple tries, they did it. WOW! To be honest, I didn't think that they would get it that soon, but I am a woman of my word.... so I allowed them to sit anywhere they wanted... even under the desks....which I had to take back because they just weren't ready for THAT much fun this early. Ha! Well, I guess the excitement was just too much because our first try of sitting anywhere got us a whopping 16 seconds before someone was off task! I stopped them and they came back to the gathering place. We talked about what we did, we assessed ourselves with a thumbs up/down, reviewed our anchor chart, and tried again. This time I heard my students whisper to each other, "Come on guys, let's do it!" and "NO talking (insert name here) and "Ok, read the WHOLE time (eyes one the usual suspect who usually does not)." So we tried our round 2 of Read to Self and we made it 4 mins and 38 secs! They would have gone longer, but it was time to clean up so I stopped them (insert student groans here). They did great and I seriously was SO impressed by their teamwork in reaching this goal.  Here are some shots from our Read to Self.

Kids love sitting in our rocking chair. 

Love their little crossed legs!

We will continue working on stamina and introduce Read to Someone next week. I know that my students last year really loved reading with their friends.  Like I said, this class is making me earn my keep so I am a bit nervous about introducing this component. But I know that with a lot little bit of work and hair pulling patience, I can get them there.

Have a wonderful day friends!


Blessings,

Five For Friday

Hello Friends!

Today is Friday and I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for her Five For Friday Linky Party! I love being a part of this party because it makes me slow down and reflect on the happy things that happened this week. Plus, I get a snapshot of all my favorite bloggers' week. I'm such a stalker big fan of them and have been so inspired by their creativity and enthusiasm for teaching.

1. I got nominated for the Liebster award!!! This award is given to up and coming blogs with less than 200 followers. Since I haven't had my blog for very long, I fit perfectly into this category and was SUPER excited when I was nominated by Ramblings of a Happy Teacher. I love this award because I've been able to check out other smaller blogs while looking to pass on this award to another teacher. I've found SO many great blogs that I might not have found because I stick to my usual "big bloggers". I've found that these teachers from smaller blogs are AMAZING and are doing some pretty wonderful things in their classrooms.

2. This week was my sweet baby girl's 3rd birthday! She has taught me many things, especially humility. Ya see, I raised 2 wonderful boys who are well behaved, obedient, and agreeable.  Right when I thought that I had it all together.... then came my #3.... AND it was a girl! While I LOVE LOVE having a girl, she is SO different from my boys. She is feisty, disagreeable, drama, Miss Independent, you name it. My hubby told me that having a little girl explains A LOT to him why I  I mean.. uh hum.. girls act the way that they do.  Some question nature vs nurture in the way kids behave....NOT her. Seriously, she was just born this way. While she can be a little ornery at times, she still has my heart and I LOVE LOVE that I have a little girl!

Seriously! How does SO much cuteness get into such a little body??!!!

 3.  My church is a host site for a leadership conference every year. It's called The Global Leadership Summit. Although it's hosted at different churches, not all speakers are Christians. I got to hear some AMAZING leadership principles from leaders of all kinds of background.  Here are just 2 of them:

This is Mark Burnett. He is the executive producers for hit shows like The Voice, Shark Tank, Celebrity Apprentice, Survivor, The Bible Series, etc.  He was amazing and had some great leadership tips. 

Colin Powell was absolutely inspirational!!!! He was amazing and IS an amazing leader!!!

4. This week I introduced the Daily 5 into my classroom. Last year was my first year doing it and I LOVED it!! Now, I'm starting over again with this year's group and it makes me miss my last year's group SO much! I'm sure you all know how it is. This group is tough and I know that they will get there, but it's gonna take some... A LOT of work. They actually did REALLY well for their first round of Read to Self. It took us a couple of rounds of practicing, but we made it to 3 mins!! I was so proud of them!

5. We are camping with our friends as I speak. This is our last camping trip before the kids start school. I LOVE our little camping group. We are at a beach called Bolsa Chica and are just steps away from the sand. We've been camping with this group of friends for over 6 years! Our kids have grown up together and just play well with each other. Camping with each other is something our families look forward to every summer.

This is the view from the steps from our RV. So close to the beach!!!

Movie time in our RV with the kids

Feeding time!

Friends since birth

That's a snapshot of my week. Hope yours was just as wonderful. And for those who have not started back at work, enjoy squeeeezing out the last bit of summer. :)

Thanks for reading, Friends.

Blessings,

Five For Friday and A New Product!

YAY!!! I'm so happy to be linking back up with Doodle Bugs for Five For Friday. I've missed blog hopping and reading about all the week's happenings of some of my favorite bloggers. So, here we go....

1. I started school this week. I blogged about it here in my previous post. I do have a tough group this year.... it's actually just a tough group across the board. In fact, we second grade teachers have had our eyes on this group 2 yrs ago when they were just wee little kindergarteners. Oh boy, the were tough back then and we prayed... we PRAYED that the kinder teachers would work some magic. Well, they tried but this group resisted. Then we prayed for our first grade teachers to work THEIR magic. But to no avail, this group of kids still struggled in every way. And seriously... I honestly think that we have the BEST kinder and first grade teachers around! I mean, if they couldn't even turn them around then we knew that we had our work cut out for us this year. Just thinking out loud here... but WHAT the heck was in the water 6-7 years ago???!!! I'm just sayin'. Well, tonight I just got an email from my team teacher that these past 2 days (Thurs and Fri) were TOUGH! In the first week of school, we really spent A LOT of time going over procedures like CRAZY and they were still not getting it.  Kids not lining up, getting out of their seats, talking, etc.  My poor partner said that she felt like crying! Oh no! I wonder what would happen if I just didn't show up got sick on Monday? I'm thinking that Monday will require some extra coffee with 10 shots of espresso and some extra EXTRA practice of procedures.

2. Since we started school on Wednesday and I work Mon-Wed, I only worked one glorious day this week. :) We did have a good first day. We did some fun activities that I already blogged about but will give you the short version here. My favorite thing that we did on the first day of school was my time capsule activity. Here are some pictures from it.

They filled out their favorites at the beginning of the year and will fill it out again at the end. Last year, it was so fun to hear my students compare their choices from the first day to the last day of school!

 I went around and measured each student with a piece of yarn and then put each student's yarn in a ziplock with their name on it and tucked it away in an envelope until the end of the year. Btw, YES...... I am wearing my fuzzy black slippers. My poor feet were not used to wearing heels all day because of summer.  

At the end of the year, students measure their yarn and write down how many inches tall they were and then measure their current height. I attach the ziplock on this page. 

You can read more about this activity on my post here.

3. Our church was a host site for the Global Leadership Conference. I served at it and then got to go for FREE... and you know that free is ALWAYS the right price! This is the second year that I've gone and I always walk away feeling inspired. It's not just Christian leaders speaking, but all kinds of high level leaders. Here are some..

 This is Mark Burnett. He is the executive producer of The Voice, Survivor, The Bible Mini Series, Shark Tank, and many others. He totally impressed me! 

Colin Powell was AWESOME!!! Loved listening to his take on leadership!

4. Last Sunday, my Roman's Project group met for dinner. This group is basically made up of 11 ladies who some have never met each other before. What we do have in common is our journey through memorizing chapters of the bible together. We are spending this year memorizing Romans Chapter 1,8, and 12. We just finished chapter 1 and went to dinner to celebrate this big accomplishment! 

5. Tomorrow we are going to celebrate my mother in laws birthday at my old workplace. I was a rollerskating waitress at a 50's diner before I began teaching. It was so fun and I have not been back for years! I'm excited to go back and bring my kids there. I think that there might still be pictures of little ole' me in my 50's carhop outfit hanging on the walls. We shall see tomorrow.  You can check out the cute little restaurant here.

Now for my new product!

I'm finally done with another one of my TPT units!  YIPPEEE!!!! This is a reading comprehension unit with thinking maps and Daily 5 activities. There are TONS of activities in this unit that I've used in my class for years but finally got around to making it cutesy. Some of these files are editable so that you can adjust them to the needs of your classroom. There is even a Daily 5 Suggestion page filled with activities from my unit. If you have never heard of Daily 5 or are thinking about implementing it in your class.... you really need to just DO IT! I LOVE it and so do my students! 

Worksheets are common core aligned and standards are written on the appropriate pages. There are some card games that are also editable. I encourage you to download the preview and see this great resource (ok, I *may* be a little biased) that can be used in your classroom!

Reading Comprehension Unit

One of my six original comprehension strategy chant posters

This is an ADORABLE activity that helps students work with what a sentence is. 

They feed these dragons sentences and sentence fragments. So fun!

If you would like to see more previews you can visit my TPT store here.

That's my week, friends.  Can't wait to blog hop and see what the other teachers have been up to. Thanks for reading!

Blessings,