We're ready for Christmas!!

Just in time for the Holidays!!

     If you are anything like me you look forward to the holidays to put a little extra fun into the classroom. Sometimes a theme does so much for getting students excited about working! I tend to get told that there is NO time in 3rd grade for the fun stuff, that we have too much work to do. I refuse to accept that we can't do our work and have fun too.

     So, with that in mind I have created a Gingerbread Unit to enhance your holiday season. There are activities for grades K-3 that will engage and excite your students. The picture below shows a preview of some of the files you can find inside. If you want to see more JINGLE on over to my TpT store for a preview. Click on the preview picture to go to my store. Happy Holidays to you all and I hope you enjoy!

Cyber Monday Sale on TpT - Christmas Multiplication Fun

Head on over to my TpT store this Monday for                   Cyber Monday Sales!!!

I am going to be joining the TpT Cyber Monday sale and ALL of my products will be on sale. I am working on finishing up a couple of new ones to put up as well. Here is my brand new one that went up today.

The kids in my class do this activity every year, usually for an independent morning work activity and then we hang them up around the room. In this activity students will create a Christmas tree based on multiplication facts. This file gives you the choice to have students use preset facts or for older kids to create their own facts to use to make the tree. Hop on over to my TpT store to grab this activity by clicking HERE.

So much to be thankful for!!

Well with today being Thanksgiving, I thought I would share a couple of things I am thankful for. . .

First, I am so proud that both my twin (Susan) and I just found out that we both PASSED our test and have received National Board Certification!!!!!  Woooooohoooooo!!! I was such a long and difficult process but it definitely helped us to become stronger teachers and gave us the reminder of what a difference we can make in children's lives.

Hooray for us!! 

(This is a picture from our school field trip to the museum. I love that I get to go on these trips with my twin.)

Second, I am thankful for my wonderful family who always supports me. Even when I spend WAY TOO much time on school work, blogging, and creating TPT products! My husband and my two beautiful daughters cheer me on every step of the way.

Third, I am thankful to have a job at t wonderful school that values the teachers and the students. Teaching is a thankless career sometimes, but the people we work with are always there to support one another and the parents and students at our school are such a blessing. 

And lastly (for today), I am thankful for all of the resources teachers have today. With the use of bolgs, Pinterest, and TPT there are so many opportunities for us to stay connected and learn from each other. I know that I am a better teacher for learning from all of you.

So, with that being said HAPPY THANKSGIVING and I hope you all stop to think about what you are thankful for.

Non-Fiction with Gail Gibbons

Non-fiction Text Features and the Author of the Month!

This year I am really trying to make time for our author studies. Since there is so much going on it is hard to do one a month, so instead I have worked it to study one author every two months. To go along with our Journey's reading program I wanted to pick an author whose focus was non-fiction. So, who better than Gail Gibbons!

This is the poster that we have hung while we study her. I started by going to the local library (my FAVORITE place ever!!) and checking out as many books of hers as I could find. After a lesson on text features and a non-fiction/fiction book sort using Scholastic catalogs, is it was time for research. Before I sent the students off I had another mini-lesson on text features using the books I had checked out from the library.

Students were then paired up and were allowed to chose their topic from the stack of books I had. There were enough for them to all have a choice and really find a topic they were interested in. Over several days the students worked with their texts. They read, took notes, reread, and then created posters. The only directions they were given for their poster was that it needed to be informative, it should include a heading, at least five facts, and a picture. Many of my students chose to draw a diagram and here are what some of the posters came out like.

After everyone had finished their posters we set up a Gallery Walk. Students were asked to really study the posters that were created and take notes from the posters. They were to write down one fact from each poster (other than their own) that they found interesting.

The kids did such a good job and are getting better with non-fiction text features everyday!

Fraction Frenzy!!

Fractions, Fractions and More Fractions. . . 

This unit we went a little crazy with fractions. I was inspired by many ideas from my fellow teachers through Pinterest and blog posts so I decided to go all out and practice as many different ways as possible. This is what my bulletin board came out like, I love it!!

 

We worked with fractions of a whole and fractions of a set. After completing some in class work and posts in our math journals (which BTW are fabulous as this is the first year I have used them), I had the students each complete three activities.  

Our first activity was ice cream fractions. The students created their own ice cream cones and wrote the fractional parts of each. We were also able to pull in graphing skills by collecting data of the entire class and creating bar graphs. Thanks to Susan we were able to take this lesson even deeper. Each student developed two questions about the data and wrote it on a large index card. The cards were then switched around and the questions were answered by another student. When the student was done answering the questions they gave it back to the original owner who then checked their work. So many math skills in just one lesson. To get this lesson click HERE to visit my TPT website.

 I love to see the creativity of the kids. It was their idea to make the bar graphs look like the

 ice cream flavors!!

The next activity we completed worked with parts of a whole. The students were to create pizzas with different toppings and show the fractional parts of each. We brainstormed toppings that could be eaten on pizza and students drew pizzas for pizzas divided into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths. They then chose their favorite to create a large pizza. Here are some examples below.

The last activity we did was create a bubble gum machine. Students made a bubble gum machine, colored bubble gum pieces and the recorded the fraction pieces that they had.  I don't have any individual pictures of these, but you can see some in the bulletin board picture at the top of this post.

It really was a lot of fun and I could see the students' knowledge of fractions getting deeper with each activity we created.