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 :) }

Phonograms Galore! And freebie...

Hey everyone!  I hope your first few weeks of school are treating you well! If you just started this week, trust me it gets better!  

Well I'm off to dinner with the hubby but I wanted to post my Phonogram Fun student book real quick first.  It includes all 70 of the phonograms used in the Spalding Method.  Click the image if you'd like to snag it on TPT or here for TN.  

And while I'm on a phonogram roll... here's a freebie perfect for a literacy center.  Click the image to download.  

Summer School & I'm leavin' on a Jetplane

I survived!  My husband has been in Japan for two weeks without me and in exactly two hours my plane departs to join him.  Hooray! (For the joining part, not the long flying part)  This week I've been staying with my sister who recently had a baby and teaching summer school.  My school decided to let the teachers have free-reign over their summer school classes this year and I decided to teach a Dinosaur class, a Fairytale class, and a Mystery class.  It has been a lot of fun!  I did a lousy job of snapping photos of all of the fun things we did - but here are just a few:

 We talked about and read LOTS of awesome fairy tales.  Then the kids created their own inside an awesome castle card foldable.

 We talked about lots of fun dinosaurs, wrote about them, drew them, modeled them with clay, and even made our own plaster of paris fossils! 

The kids had a lot of fun with these.  They were tricky for a lot of the kids - but they were thrilled nonetheless.  I had an assortment of flashlights so we turned off all the lights, shut the blinds, and partnered up.  We taped a piece of black construction paper on the wall then ended up using chairs to rest the flashlights on to cast a shadow of the student who was sitting very still in front of the black paper. Then they cut them out and mounted them on paper.  They turned out pretty great and the kids LOVED guessing who each other was.

We made magical wands, plus glittery castles and crowns, but I forgot to photograph those :(

 This picture I added just for fun.  I've been a little bored of my hair recently and I saw a hairstyle sort of like this on Pinterest and thought I'd give it a whirl.  It turned out pretty well considering that I did it all blind.  My favorite part of the photo is my cute kitty, Lucky, who jumped up on the bathroom cabinet to pose for the picture and get the camera flash.  So cute.  

Are you teaching summer school?  How does your school do it?  Is it purely academic review or more like summer camps?

Well I can't wait to hear, but it's TTFN because I'm off to Japan!

Students Appreciating Teachers

Last week my first grade team was trying to think of ideas for the last week of school when I had the idea that we should swap students and make a thank you gift for one another with each others' students. 

 It was fun for the kids to experience the other teachers and they were ecstatic about creating a secret gift for their teacher.  I came up with this little booklet and each student made a tissue paper flower then we put them together into a bouquet.

To make the flowers thread a pipe-cleaner through the bottom of several layers of tissue paper cut in various sizes of circles, we used 5, then thread a button through the pipe-cleaner.  Take the pipe-cleaner back through the button then twist the pipe-cleaner ends together to make a stem.

 Each page inside the book contains this simple poem and the students wrote 3 reasons why they love their teacher.  Their reasons, like "you plan really fun fieldtrips, you always help me, you teach us everything" were super sweet and thoughtful. Click any of the images to download the book for FREE. Enjoy!

 This is the gift my students made for me - SO cute.  They each wrote a letter to me on the back of their apple.  They were really sweet. :) 

 

Volunteer Gifts & My Little Ninjas

For the last few weeks I've been deliberating about what to do for my classroom volunteers.  I thought about mini first aid kits from the dollar store, and sure, they're practical, but where's the fun?

 

So I did some Pinterest perusing and was inspired to create these:  voila!  (PS - it's hard to see, but the baggie is full of smores goldfish, but I'm also using the regular cheddar ones and swedish fish too. The water bottle (dollar store find) has lemonade candies and lemonade flavor packets).  I think they turned out pretty cute.  :) You can click any of the images above to download the tag template for free. Also, after I had decided to do these I saw some great ideas on The Teacher Wife's blog - check them out.

  Now... the picture below is not for the faint-hearted I will tell you that much. I saw an idea like this on Pinterest months ago (I'm sure you've seen it - adorable!)... and I'm a little over-ambitious at times and couldn't shake the idea out of my brain.  So of course I had to try it and here it is!

    I just ordered prints and cards with this photo on the front from Walmart.  The occasional volunteers will get a print.  The regulars will get a card with a written message inside.

 Now who could these little ninjas be?  Surely not escaped from Flat Stanley's Japanese Ninja Surprise!?

 Oh look, there's more!  Aren't they cute? 

Oh boy, put on a mask and a whole different side comes out.  Check out some of their cute Ninja stories below.  (This page and mask are both in my Flat Stanley unit - see previous post to win it for free!)  You can click here to download the Ninja Adventure Writing Page for free.

 

 Also, I've seen this cute idea all over all of those fantastic teacher blogs out there, (sorry I don't know who to credit for the original idea) but I didn't jump on the bandwagon until there were just 8 days of school remaining for us.  The idea is each day you pop a balloon and inside there is a surprise note telling the class something fun they get to do that day. 

Mr. Smiley is now nose-less and my students were ecstatic to discover that their surprise fate for day #8 was..... (drum roll please.... ) An EXTRA recess!  They can't wait to see what tomorrow's balloon brings.  Thanks for whoever started this fantastic wildfire idea. :)  Obviously, I love it.

What fun things are you doing for your last few days of school?

PS - I just joined my first Linky party (I know, where have I been, right?) on Courtney's blog over at Swimming into Second. You should come join too!

Flat Stanley Unit Giveaway & Award

I don't usually ever blog twice in one day, but it just so happens that I've been sick in bed/on the couch for two days now and had a lot of computer time on my hands :( so it brightened my day when I was awarded the Lovely Blog Award by Tori @ http://toristeachertips.blogspot.com/. She truly has great ideas! Check her out! I'm so excited to have made some new blog friends!  See the end of this post for my blog award recipients - Hopefully I can brighten their day! Do any of you new bloggers ever get discouraged with how cumbersome and tricky it is to learn the blogging world like I do? Sigh.


 And next up... FLAT STANLEY!  As I said earlier - my kids LOVE him.  I'm so excited to use this integrated all-things-flat-Stanley unit with them in our remaining 2 weeks of school.  You can click the image below to grab the unit on Teachers Notebook, or you can click here to get it on TPT.

Also... I'm going to do a little GiVeAwAY of the unit to the winner of my HUSBAND's random choice next Sunday! :)  Here's what you need to do:  1 - Follow my blog. 2 - Follow my TN or TPT store 3 - Leave a comment.  (PS - If you blog about this giveaway I'll give my husband extra encouragement that you deserve to win:)

Here are a few Flat Stanley crafts we've done:  We read Flat Stanley and the Egyptian Grave Robbery several months ago with our Ancient Egypt Unit and made these cute mummies.  Currently we're reading Flat Stanley and the Japanese Ninja Surprise, so on Friday (by student request) we did some ninja star origami - wouldn't recommend for first graders without additional adult assistant.  Next week we're going to be making ninja masks, but I couldn't resist making mine beforehand and doing a ninja photoshoot with myself some... uh... friends afterschool.  :) 

 

And FINALLY here are all the FABULOUS blogs that I found and am awarding the Lovely Blog award. It really was fun to sift through so many teaching blogs to find these hidden gems!  Here are the award rules: 

1) Follow the person that gave you the award.  

2) Link back to the person that gave you the award.  

3) Pass the award on to 15 new bloggers. 

http://www.mrsjonescreationstation.blogspot.com/

http://1stgradewithmisssnowden.blogspot.com/

http://funforfirst.blogspot.com/

http://teachingwithloveandlaughter.blogspot.com/

http://thewizardofboz.blogspot.com/

http://thefirstgradereader.blogspot.com/

http://www.adventuresn2grade.blogspot.com/

http://hellomrssykes.blogspot.com/

http://runteacherrunriley.blogspot.com/

http://lakairways.blogspot.com/

http://thirdgrade-firststate.blogspot.com/

http://teach123-school.blogspot.com/

http://theteacherschatterbox.blogspot.com/

http://tangledupteaching.blogspot.com/

http://classfullofspecialkinders.blogspot.com/

http://munchkinmanagement.blogspot.com/

http://madlylearning.blogspot.com/

http://publicschoolteachersodyssey.blogspot.com/