PTC freebie and An Abbreviation & Punctuation Education

Tomorrow and Thursday we have parent teacher conferences from 2-8pm at my school.  I'm always a little nervous going into the first one of the year because usually I don't know the parents well enough yet to gauge which type of parent they are.  Are they the "What, my child?, no! He/She can't possibly do anything wrong!" type or the "What did he/she do now? Oh yeah, he/she does that all the time at home" type, or the "Thank you SO much for everything you do for our child! What can we do to help him/her succeed?" type?

I really enjoy  meeting with parents and forging positive relationships and even friendships with the united goal of helping my students succeed.  Its always fun to meet the parents too because you can always see where each child gets of their habits/traits/mannerisms/behaviors, etc. I'm sure glad that we get a day off afterwards though because 26 conferences in 2 days, fifteen minutes apart, back to back after teaching all day is EXHAUSTING!!   

 Last year I thought it would be fun to have my students write their parents a letter and leave it on their desk for them to find when they came to parent teacher conferences.  On the side of the paper facing up they created a riddle with clues about themselves and a self portrait, and on the other side they wrote a letter to their parents all about the things they had been learning in school and said thank you to their parents for supporting them in their education.  

When the parents come I also have a form for them to write a quick note to their child to leave on their desk.  They kids LOVE finding the note the next morning and reading it to themselves. If you want to download a free copy of either form just click the images. 

We have been working on identifying and writing all different kinds of sentences in my class.  After reviewing  our beginning of the year NWEA Map test data I decided we needed to practice abbreviating and punctuating so I created this unit. Click the image or here if you want to check it out on TPT.  It has LOTS of fun things to practice and my students have been loving it.  Today we worked on our punctuation flap book and they thought it was the. coolest. thing. ever.  Haha.  I love it.  The simple joys.

Anyway, leave me a comment and let me know what tips you have for parent teacher conferences and I'll give the unit away FREE to someone who leaves a comment and their email address.  {I'll let my husband choose who :) }

Powerful Prepositions! and g...i...v...e...a..w..a....... you know what!

Am I silly to be super excited to use this new unit I created with my students?  Hopefully there are others out there like me... Anyway... I am super excited. The gameboard is my fAvoRitE!  Here's a preview of the unit.  It includes:
1 poster of common Prepositions
1 cut and paste worksheet to identify and practice using prepositions
1 worksheet to practice recognizing prepositional phrases
2 worksheets to practice writing prepositions & prepositional phrases in sentences
2 prepositon grammar review word sorts (1 color, 1 cut & paste)
1 write-the-room game reviewing alphabetical order & prepositions (can be used for a literacy center)
2 other preposition games (perfect for literacy centers)
1 prepositions quiz
Preposition Flash Cards & Game cards

You can get it here (TN) or here (TPT)  Plus, you can get it tonight or tomorrow for 20% off because I'm so excited to be done with another semester of graduate school and SO close to having my masters degree.  Yay!

And since I love a giveaway, there are 3 different ways you can get it for FREE.... 1) I'll give the unit to the first person to guess my favorite number 2) anyone who follows my TN & TPT stores, and blog, and blogs about it, and 3) simply enter this giveaway here.
I will give you a clue, since no one would ever guess this part - my favorite number is negative  :)  Good luck!

Be Possessed with Edible Apostrophes!

We learned about possessive nouns today.  It was a great review. We reviewed nouns and plurals, then compared possessive nouns to plural nouns. The students then wrote their own sentences containing  possessive nouns and used macaroni apostrophes. 

I gave them an extra to eat and it was pretty funny to hear the kids reactions. Some thought hard macaroni noodles were disgusting, and others enjoyed it.  Myself, I find the crunch of dry macaroni quite satisfying! The kids did a great job with it.  In the next few days we're also going to do edible commas and quotation marks.

 Last night I made an animated powerpoint to accompany a Christopher Columbus song I always teach my students.  They love it.  The song is from Classroomclassics.com.  I LOVE their music.  I own several of their CDs.  You can get the powerpoint here!

After lunch we finished discussing the Incas (part of the Core Knowledge Sequence), reviewed Conquistadores, and learned about Christopher Columbus and the kids made these cute puppets.

Verbs & Adverbs Giveaway!

My students have been learning all about adverbs and reviewing verbs, so I decided to create my first unit. I'm happy with how it turned out (considering it's my first), and hopefully it will be useful to some other teachers out there! You can get it here! You can also get a preview cut and paste adverbs page from the unit for free from here!

 I'm totally new to this whole blogging thing, so I figured in an attempt to help get my blog up and running I would offer the unit free to the first 5 people who leave a comment (include your e-mail so I can send it to you), and follow me by e-mail. Good luck!