Sight Word Magnets on Cookie Sheets

So today I finally got around to making one of those adorable things I saw on pinterest this summer. Ok fine, by "make" I mean print off from a website where someone else had already made it :) My grade partner had bought the cookie sheets from the Dollar Store this summer for sight word magnets and was nice enough to let us borrow them today to spell out our sight words. Here are our pictures below:

The handout I printed for this came from HERE and it is FREE.. woohoo!

Gotta love those centers that can be thrown together in a matter of minutes, right??

Happy Halloween everyone!!

P.S. Today was day 46... I can't wait for day 50 and all of our 50th day fun!!

Hip Hip Hooray! It is ALMOST the 50th Day!

We are already almost at the 50th day of school- I can't believe it!! All of the 50th day packets that I have seen on TPT have a 50's Rock N' Roll theme to them. I wasn't really feeling the Rock N' Roll theme so I created a new little packet of activities to celebrate the 50th day.

 

For this weekend only it will be on sale for $2.00 and then on Monday morning it will go up to an unknown (by me!) amount. Click on the picture above to go to my TPT store or click HERE!

I hope you're all having a great weekend!

Pumpkins, pumpkins, and more pumpkins!

This week we have been working on our pumpkin unit. We completed our "Getting to know our pumpkin" handout a little bit at a time throughout the week while we have investigated our pumpkin. 

 Alright, alright I admit we did not count all of the seeds in the pumpkin. When my kiddos went to music, I stashed half of them away. Thank God because we ended up counting 450 that I did keep and that took what felt like forever!!

  

This is our beginning sound concentration game. I made the mistake of forgetting to tell my assistant to glue the letter cards onto a different color of construction paper than the picture cards until after they were laminated- oops! So then I put stickers on the back of the letter cards and told the students to pick one with a sticker on the back and one without. This worked out pretty well until they started memorizing which letters had which sticker on the back. It was pretty clever so I couldn't even be mad :)

This was them coloring the life cycle stages before gluing them onto the green yarn "vine". I totally forgot to take a picture of the adorable vines. I will have to take some tomorrow and make a post!!

And finally, we carved our pumpkin today!! After voting using our "ballot" from my unit, we tallied the results and figured out what our pumpkin would look like. Here he is!! Pretty plain, but considering I had to carve something quickly enough to keep the attention of a bunch of 5 year olds it worked out pretty well!!

Friday is tomorrow-- woohoo!!

Beginning of pumpkins and last week's shape monsters...

This week we began our pumpkin unit and boy oh boy am I excited!! We used our pumpkin "ballots" and voted this morning on how our pumpkin will be carved. It is looking like we will have triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a semi circle mouth. The kiddos (and I) are super pumped about it.

Another thing that we create every year at this time is our pumpkin life cycle activity I found from A-Z Teacher Stuff. After reading several trade books on the life cycle of a pumpkin and discussing it, we use the handout below and color in the pictures. We cut out the pictures and then glue them closed onto green yarn to represent the vine of the pumpkin life cycle. Then we create our pumpkins. Today we started painting our pumpkins. 

 

We use non-waxy paper plates and paint them orange. Once the orange has dried, we cut a little hole at the top of one of them and then staple them together. After that, we paint black lines on our pumpkins but as you can see, we have not gotten that far yet!!

Another thing that I wanted to share with ya'll was one of our favorite Halloween activities that we did last year, our Spooky Shape Monsters. I apologize that I can not for the life of me remember which adorable blog I originally saw this on- so if you recognize it PLEASE let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!! I unfortunately did not come up with this super cute idea on my own. Anyway, these shape monsters are glyphs- as if we don't do enough of these in my class already anyway!

 

  

Another little tip that I am sure many of you all do already anyway is to either cut your die cuts out of scrapbook paper or to mount your die cuts onto scrapbook paper. This always adds a little extra touch that makes everything just a little bit cuter :)

 

Pumpkin Mini Unit- Giveaway for the first 3 to comment

Here is my pumpkin mini unit that features science, math, and literacy activities:

In this unit there are quantity discrimination games, beginning sounds games, ending sounds games, pumpkin measurement activities, graphs, a syllable counting game, science predictions and recording data of actual results and more! You can find it HERE at my TPT store.

And because I am just completely stumped about what to dress up as this year for our school's Halloween parade, the first three people to comment below with a suggestion of an appropriate teacher costume AND leave their e-mail will get this mini unit for free!

Have a spook-tacular night!

4th Grade Prayer Partners- Saint Kateri Native American Craft

Since we are a Catholic school, we get to meet with our prayer partners (the big kids at school) at least once a month to complete a religious activity. Our class gets to work with the 4th graders because I have many students with siblings in 4th grade. Our prayer partners also sit with us when we go to mass and come to read to us (and eventually WE read to THEM!) a few times a month. My kiddos LOVE their prayer partners and love giving them hugs and waving to them every time we pass them in the hall. I also love seeing former students who I would not expect to be very nurturing rise to the occasion and work so well with a little kindergartner. Long story short- I love prayer partners!! 

Tomorrow, Kateri Tekakwitha, the first ever Native American saint will be canonized by the Catholic Church. In order to celebrate this exciting new saint, we worked with our prayer partners to make little Saint Kateri crafts. Of course, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures :( The website we got the idea from has pictures though so I will upload those since ours looked essentially the same as hers. What I love about this craft is that you can do this even if you are not Catholic- it can easily be made for Thanksgiving or for a Native American study.

 Now we did not make the vests, just the headbands due to time constraint but I thought I would post the pics of the vests anyway since they are so cute and maybe someone else will be able to do them. The headbands came out so cute-- I wish I had remembered to take pictures!! 

We found this idea through Catholic Icing, a website that has great ideas for Catholic teachers or Catholic Sunday School teachers. The website has step-by-step directions on how to create these if you would like to create your own.

Now I am off to go look at potential wedding reception venues!!! Have a great day :)

Play Doh Numeral Formation FREEBIE and pics of our bats :)

We finally finished up our bats and hung them up on our windows today. They were made "extra spooky" by our real life GIGANTIC spider that made a web outside our window. We love watching him to see if he has caught any bugs in his web. I am just happy that the kids can watch all the exciting cool things about a spider without having to have one INSIDE our room- phew! Spiders creep me the heck out!! Here are our bats on our windows:

 

And here is our real life spider friend outside our window... he is so big!!

Also, this week in math we have been working on our numeral formations and in centers we made our numbers with play doh and then showed them on ten frames. 

I slipped these papers into sheet protectors for quick and easy "laminating" and presto chango- we had a new center within 5 minutes! I uploaded the play doh ten frames to my TPT store as a freebie so head on over and grab them!!

Hope you're all having a great week!

Spider, Bat and Engagement Update

Well first let me start by saying thank you so much to all you sweet bloggers for your congratulations. You just added to the excitement of my already very exciting weekend :) 

I am very fortunate that I work at a small school where we feel like a family. When I walked in to school on Monday morning there were many little surprises for me to celebrate my engagement. One of my best teacher friends made all of my students mini cupcakes with rings on them so they could celebrate the engagement too-- with their own rings. The boys were too cute, turning their rings around so the diamonds weren't showing since "boy rings don't have diamonds". 

This friend brought in lots of other treats to share in the teacher's lounge with cute little cards and these cute little napkins for everyone:

 

I also got this precious balloon from another teacher friend:

Gotta love working with all women right?? They all were so excited for me, which just added to my excitement!

While at work the past few days (while trying very hard to keep wedding planning off the brain!) we have worked more on our spiders and bats unit. 

We also finished our bat craftivities but haven't hung them up yet and I wanted to give ya'll the full effect :) I figured you could wait one more day...

I hope you're all having a great week :)

I'm ENGAGED!! And a little peek at what we did last week

Well oh my goodness have the past few days been crazy or what?! Let me start by saying that I just recently got engaged to my boyfriend of three years-- yay!!!! We are both soooo excited being the overachieving workaholic that I am, I am already starting planning!! 

But before all the excitement of the engagement, there was a little unit called Spiders and Bats that we were all wrapped up in this week. We also did Abby Mullins' unit "The Candy Corn Bandit" and oh my word my kiddos were loving it. My little sweeties were bringing in homemade "Candy Corn Bandit Traps" this year!! I certainly didn't have that last year when we did this unit! One little boy even brought in homemade quicksand and candy ( to bait him with and draw him towards the quicksand), Needless to say, this week flew by and I can't believe it is already the weekend. Here are a few pictures from our week:

 

Our Candy Corn Bandits and we made a "WANTED" poster for him. All of the "big kids" in our school are helping us look for him in order to get our reward :)

 These are the spider craftivities from my Spiders and Bats unit. As soon as we are done making the bats, I want to swap these out and hang up our spiders on the window with our spider webs!

 

Here we are playing the "Bat Cave" game from the unit. 

 

And here are a few of our finished graphs!

I hope you are all having a great weekend!! 

I'm Throwing A Sale!

I don't know about ya'll but I have been getting sooo into the Halloween spirit lately. I have got Halloween on the brain 24/7! We are going a little Halloween crazy in my room right now with decorations EVERYWHERE! I can't believe I haven't taken pictures yet to show all of you. In order to help spread my Halloween cheer, everything in my TPT store is 20% off from now until Friday at midnight!!

Maybe you can all spend the extra few bucks on a pumpkin spice latte or something ;)

Spiders and Bats- Finally!

My Spiders and Bats Unit is finally posted- woohoo! In this unit there are several reading and writing activities, as well as 5 math activities. My pumpkins unit will be coming within the next week or so. The first two people to comment below telling me ONE thing you would like to see in the pumpkin unit AND leave their e-mail addresses will get Spiders and Bats for free!

Happy Monday!

Spider and Bat FREEBIES!

It is almost time for the Spider and Bat unit! Can you tell I'm excited?? In order to kick it off I am giving away two freebies! These two pages can both be found in my Spiders and Bats unit that is 30+ pages of science, math, and literacy fun. Click on the pictures to be taken to my TPT store where they are free!

Spiders and Bats Unit

I am VERY close to being finished with my Spooky Spiders and Bats Unit and will probably be posting it on Sunday. 

I have noticed on a lot of blogs lately that bloggers are asking for suggestions of what to put in their units. What a brilliant idea!! Is there anything that you all would like to see in my spiders and bats unit? 

So far there are:

Several writing prompts 

A venn diagram

A survey with tallies and a graph (similar to my colors unit survey if you purchased that)

 A game board for centers with reading number words 

A spider craftivity with reading and following directions

A bat craftivity with reading and following directions

A list of spider and bat books for a class graph

If there is anything else you would like to see in this unit let me know ASAP so I can add it in! 

Currently October

It's time for another Currently with Farley from Oh Boy! Fourth Grade! Here is my Currently October:

 

This is supposed to be a day to sleep in a little bit for me because I head to Atlanta for my sister's wedding. Unfortunately I am so used to waking up at 5:30 (and so is my dog Tucker) that we both ended up waking up early anyway. It is nice to sit and relax while I drink my cup of coffee and type up my Currently post on a Thursday morning though! It is like a flashback to summer- ahh the good ol days...

But I am SOO excited for the wedding!! My big sister is getting married- WOOHOO!! I will post pictures for sure!

Have a good day ya'll :)

Monday Made It!

I have finally gotten around to making my first Monday Made It! This past week I made paper clip holders for myself and a few other teachers at my school. I started by buying the little tiny pots from Michael's that are $0.69 and paint markers that were significantly more expensive (boo!). Here they are below with step by step pictures!