Cheap and easy Christmas craft and a freebie!

 It's a Festivus miracle!!! I made an original craft!! I'm making them for the staff at my school, and my husband (our principal) is making banana bread to put on them. Eight down, 11 to go. Does it look like a peppermint? That's what it's supposed to look like. At first I thought it did, and now I'm not so sure. It's just craft glue and white glittter. 98 cents at Walmart, thank you very much. It's actually not taking that long, but now my neck hurts and I only have 2 more days to get them all done and sprayed with a cover coat. Of course it's the 11th hour and I'm starting a new project. If I wasn't a maniac and freaking out before the last couple days of school, I don't think it would really be Christmas. Some people need snow, some of us need extreme busyness. At least you don't have to shovel that.

 So here's our peppermint math for tens and ones. I used candy canes as tens and peppermint marshmallows as ones. I put them on plates around the room (wrote the answer on the bottom so I would remember) and the kids went around in partners writing the number and the extended form. I wrote the station number on left-over gingerbread dye-cuts. This picture is upside down, but here's how we did it in whole group with mini white boards.

 Look at the beautiful hair on that one!!!! Puts us all to shame, that Mom!!!! Mother of the Year.

 Here's a link for the worksheets I used, plus some other stuff. It's free!!! I know this is super late, but if you can't use it now, maybe next year??!!
Merry Christmas and have an AWESOME vacation!!!!

 
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A Christmas flash mob

Have you seen this flash mob?  It's a singing flash mob of Christmas songs at a mall somewhere. It is so awesome!  I'm trying to pass it around to everyone! It's so cool. I wish I could do it with the kids at my school. Not really realistic, but I can dream. Check it out- it's so worth your time.  I tear up every time I watch it.

I'll be back tomorrow with a freebie for Christmas. Or maybe later tonight if I can get it done. You know how it is.
 Merry Christmas!
 
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Charlie Brown week and a classroom tip

 Everything in my TPT store will be 28% off using "cmt12" code at checkout. It will be on Monday and Tuesday, so check it out here. I'm working on a Charlie Brown unit to use with the "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown" story.  I don't do Santa in my room, so we have Charlie Brown week, and for their Christmas gift I give them a Charlie Brown plastic Christmas glass from Walmart, and then I make these ornaments, and put it all in a stocking. The ornaments are so easy to make- and cheap and FAST! I do the Charlie Brown unit the last week before Christmas vacation, and each day I dress up as someone from the story. I bought some cheap white tennies from Target and used a sharpie for Lucy's shoes, and put eyeliner all over my clothes and rat up my hair for Pigpen. It's fun. The kids dress up sometimes, too. My unit right now is 67 pages. I'm not done, it'll probably end up at about 75 pages. It's reading activities and grammar. I'm hoping to add some math to it before the sale.

Ignore the messy looking tubs of stuff next to their work. Note to self: Don't buy see-through tubs.

 Here is one of my favorite things about my classroom this year that I worked on over the summer. It's just a strip of ribbon that I cutsied up with ribbon and buttons at the top. I attach their work to the ribbon with paper clips. You can see them at the top of the kids' work. Two of them are covered in glitter, so they're a little harder to see. I attached the ribbon with 3M velcro strips and it's working like a charm and so easy to hang their work!
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Scholastic Thanksgiving

Have you seen this Scholastic site? It's all about Thanksgiving and it's awesome! Check it out, there's really great stuff and so user friendly! I planned my whole week around it! I also planned my Thanksgiving unit around it. 

3 digit addition

Missing addends

Addition center

Graphing about life now vs. then

Go check out Scholastic! It'll be a great additional resource for your Thanksgiving Unit! My Thanksgiving unit is on sale right now for $1.50. When the sale ends on Wednesday, it goes up to $4.

 
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Odds and ends and a T-giving giveaway

Writing about the details they noticed about me. Thankfully no one wrote "fat and flabby arms", which clearly would have been accurate. I think I saw maybe Cara Carroll do this. With skinnier arms. Yikes- that is FRIGHTENING!!!!! When did my mother take over my body???!!!

Getting signatures for classroom mayor! They LOVED that! The classroom mayor project was pretty fun. It's in my community unit.

The Fork Run- carrying candy corn on a fork after predicting how many pieces we could get on the fork and how far we could take them. During "or" sound week. From my Fun with Phonics Sounds unit. 

 

  I think you all know that my TPT store has been Where Everything is a Dollar. I recently read a TPT newsletter that spoke to having a dollar store, and just pretty much said it's a bad idea. I understand where they are coming from and what they were saying. I never meant to undercut other sellers or hurt the market as a whole. I felt badly about doing something that would hurt other people, so I decided to raise my prices. Not a lot, just a little. Now I feel sad that everything's not a dollar anymore, even though I still think it's a pretty smokin' deal. So I decided that every time I post a new product, I would make it a dollar for the first 24 hours. And I would give a couple away here on my blog. My latest product is for T-giving. It's mostly grammar and math, with a little bit of spelling thrown in. But remember, I make my products for what I need in my classroom, so my spelling words fit what I need. They're pretty basic words, though. I'll try to add some more on another night. It's about 40 pages for $2. But for the first 24 hours, it's only a buck.

So for the first 2 people that comment about me raising my prices, I'll send you a free Thanksgiving unit. Just make sure you add your email address.

Thanks for reading! Hope all is well with all of you! Time is flying! Does anyone else feel like you're just not getting enough stuff in during the day???!!! Is anyone else totally behind on handwriting???!!! And for all you people who post daily, or even weekly...how do you do it????!!!!!

 
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Halloween...or not

Here are my weekend finds from the dollar section at Target...

I'm not a huge Halloween person. I let my kids trick or treat, we do trunk or treat at school and I help at the trunk or treat at my church, but for a bunch of reasons, I don't celebrate it in my classroom. I love dressing up, and I always do for our school trunk or treat, but that's about it. Well, of course there's also the candy! But I got totally sucked in to the cute monsters. So I decided I would use it to my advantage this week in the classroom. We're reading "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything" and of course "Where the Wild Things Are". And "Go Away Big Green Monster". We're going to use them to talk about how monsters aren't real, and I'm going to try to capitalize on use of imagination this week. I'm using one of the monster containers to do a grammar noun, adjective, adverb and verb sort game. And remember the metal shaving/magnet pictures on the left? My grandparents had one, and so now I totally have a soft spot for them! I thought they were SO COOL! So I'm going to use them as a game, probably with grammar or math. I'll put them in teams, and for every right answer you get to put the hair on the monster! Whoever's monster has a head of hair first wins! They could be a writing tool, too!  The Frankenberry cereal is for adding and subtracting. I put a unit on TPT and Teacher's Notebook of some of the material I'm planning to use. So check it out if you need something cheap and quick!

 And we just may need to make these!


Have a great week!
 
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Standards and a Pumpkinpalooza freebie

How many of you post your standards in your room? How many of you match up your assignments to a standard, and how do you do it? Is it in your lesson plan? Your curriculum map?  

Teaching in a private school is different, in so many ways. I come from a private, SMALL college and I feel like I'm playing catch-up on the standards train. I'm trying to learn, though. And I especially want  to learn what's expected of you public school teachers. I want to make sure I'm up to speed. I REALLY appreciate any information you take the time to share!!! 

So here in Arizona it's COOL today!!!!! Fall weather!!!  And it might even be cloudy and RAINY!!! WOOHOO!!!!! So here's some pictures of our week (actually 2 weeks ago already- I am so in awe of all of you who blog on a regular basis.) of Pumpkinpalooza!

 
Here we are seeing if our pumpkins float, weighing and measuring,  and playing Pin the Nose on the Pumpkin after we wrote adjectives about the pumpkin on the square post- its that became it's nose. I used some cute pumpkin stuff from Cara Caroll and my own $1 unit. The Pin the Nose game came from Target or the Dollar Store- I don't remember which.  We baked 4 different pumpkin treats, graphed about them, did grammar, math and reading activities. I think my daughter, my biggest critic, even thought it was "pretty fun". Although I also heard "I thought it would be funner" come out of her mouth at one point. Sheesh. High maintenance much? Listen friend, do you know how many times I baked pumpkin bread in first grade? NEVER! Teaching your own child is not always the Maxwell House commercial you think it's gonna be. But it does make it easier to post pictures of kids! (: Here's a couple pages of my unit for you to try.

Have a great day and thank you for any comments about the standards!

 
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