Johnny Appleseed

September is here, the school year has begun and fall is in the air.  It's time for apple picking.  It's also time for Johnny Appleseed's birthday!  Studying apples and learning about John Chapman is a fun way to incorporate so many Common Core Standards in one week!  On my quest to find resources I came across several noteworthy products I plan on using in my classroom this week.  All of these resources can be found on teacherspayteachers.com for free, or next to nothing.  It doesn't get any better than that!  Here's my list of must haves for this unit:

Apples in a Basket Addition and Subtraction Game
Applicious Apple Graph
Johnny Appleseed Thematic Unit
3-2-1 Reading Strategy
Johnny Appleseed Mini Math and Literacy Activity
ABC Order Cut and Paste
Informational Powerpoint
Another Johnny Appleseed Thematic Unit
The Story of Johnny Appleseed Printable Booklet
Johnny Appleseed and Apple Tree Hundreds Chart Hidden Picture Set

Want to Make Your Own Product?  Download this free Johnny Appleseed Clipart!

Your local library or school library has oodles of books on apples and Johnny Appleseed.  Do a book study!  Compare and contract 2 versions of Johnny Appleseed books using a Venn Diagram.  Have an apple tasting where students use their science inquiry skills to describe the taste, texture, smell, and look of different types of apples.  Learn about the apple tree life cycle and compare that to the life cycle of other trees and plants.  Practice measurement by making applesauce!  Find out what turns apples brown.  There are SO many different things you can do with apples this week.  Have fun!

FREE Common Core E-books for Back to School!!

Hurry over to TPT to get these free e-books loaded with resources and FREEBIES!

You can find the link to the ELA e-book HERE and the link for the Math e-book HERE!

Here's the description for these items:


Welcome Back Teachers!

TpT sellers have been busy this summer! Implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a priority for many teachers. To help you get started or add to your CCSS resources, we have created a collaborative eBook: “A Bundle of Tips and Common Core State Standards Resources from TpT Authors.”
This particular file is for teachers in kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade. Each page is packed with tips to help you incorporate the Common Core standards into your classrooms. Be sure to look for the link to a free item on each page.

Good luck and happy teaching in 2013-14!!

Check out these fabulous eBooks:
Common Core Math: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades K-2
Common Core Math: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades 3-5
Common Core English Language Arts: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades 3-5
Common Core Science: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades 6-12
Common Core Social Studies: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades 6-12
Common Core Math: Free back-to-School eBook for Grades 6-12
Common Core English Language Arts: Free Back-to-School eBook for Grades 6-12

Ahoy There Matey! A Pirate Themed Classroom

Summer is here!  Time to sleep in, go to the pool, and spend time with the kiddos.  For me, it's also time to reflect on the past school year and spend some time thinking about what I want next year to look like.  Next year brings some exciting changes for me.  I will have a new second grade partner, who has some really great ideas.  The change has brought out the creativity in me and has renewed my enthusiasm for teaching. 

Since habitats is a huge part of our science curriculum, we decided to focus on the ocean theme as our decor for our room.  While my partner will be decorating her room in blues, greens, and aquamarines, I decided to go a different route and decorate my room in reds, blacks, and browns...the colors of PIRATES!

Considering my room is painted off white and bright blue, I may have my work cut out for me.  But, I'm sure I can make it work, even if I have to do some painting myself!  There are tons of freebies out there for your classroom.  I found a lot of resources on teacherspayteachers.com.  Since they were brightly colored games and centers, I printed them out at school and laminated them while I was there for training the past 2 weeks. 

So far I've created 2 things for my room.  One is a behavior chart, which you can get for free HERE, done in Microsoft Word so you can customize it the way you want.  Above is a picture of part of it.  It's the kind of chart where I will put my students names on clothespins and they will move their clothespin down for each offense. I'm hoping everyone will stay on purple most of the year!

Secondly I created this cute argyle wreath to hang on my door.  It was super easy and I was done in about 30 minutes.  I bought a wreath form, some yarn, ribbon, a flower, and some felt.  I wrapped the wreath form in yarn and hot glued it down.  Then I cut out and glued diamonds around the wreath. Next I took the white yarn and criss crossed it over the diamonds.  I glued on the flower.  I made cute little red felt flowers and glued those on too.  Those area easy to make and the tutorial can be found HERE. Finally I tied a ribbon around it and hung it on my door.

 



August 2:  I was up at 3 in the morning, so I got on Pinterest (bad idea if you want to get back to sleep!) and got a ton of ideas for my classroom.  I found this freebie from Autumn Proctor-Zaminski. These are totally cute chevron stars in all kinds of colors.  I decided to use the black stars to update my word wall.  I put the minutes of the clock on the red stars.  I'm going to tape those around my clock to help my kiddos tell time.  If you want a copy for yourself, you can get if for free at my tpt store by clicking HERE.

That's all I've done so far.  I'm going into my classroom today, even though I vowed I wouldn't for another 2 weeks:) With so many ideas and thoughts in my head I just can't stay away!

I plan on creating a bulletin board for outside my room, as well as more decor and bulletin boards in my classroom.  I'll keep you posted on my next projects!

Teacher Freebies

Teachers love to share their creative ideas, so why not take advantage of someone else's creativity?The internet is a great resource for finding ideas and printables for classrooms at little or no cost.  I've compiled a list of my favorite places I go to find teaching ideas and freebies.

1.  teachertipster.com

I LOVE this site! Here, a first grade teacher named Mr. Smith offers creative, interactive ways to teach your kiddos just about everything.  He is very entertaining, and I'm sure he's the teacher every student hopes to get.  Mr. Smith has several videos that I highly recommend you watch.  He also has free worksheets as well. And, of course, you can find him on facebook. Check him out!

2. teacherspayteachers.com

I love this site too.  You can find anything you need on here, much of which is free.  These are all teacher created materials that you can immediately download.  You can also set up your own virtual shop and sell anything you have created for your classroom.  This site is a great resource and I check it weekly for freebies.  If you want to check out what I have in my shop, click here.

3.  teachersnotebook.com

Same concept as teachers pay teachers, just a different website.  I also have a shop here.

4. http://www.classroomfreebiestoo.com

Every "Manic Monday" new educators post freebies available for download.  Check back weekly to see what's new!

5. pinterest.com

Where else can you find everything you ever dreamed of and more?  Pinterest has a wealth of creative ideas I guarantee you've never thought of.

**If you have a website you rely on for help in the classroom, please share in the comments section below!**

I'm having a sale!

Check out my TPT store this weekend, where everything is 10% off!  TeachersPayTeachers is the world's first open marketplace where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials. If I don't have what you are looking for, someone else will.  CHECK IT OUT!

Vote for a low income school to win a life changing grant

I had the opportunity to work at Ohio Avenue Elementary school for five years.  My time there was very rewarding.  Please take the time to vote so this well deserving school has a chance to win a grant that would expose their students to the arts in a way that has not been available to them before. read on to fidn out more about the grant.  You can vote once a day!

 VOTE HERE!

Ohio Avenue Adaptation Integration & The Arts Enrichment Project
Ohio Avenue Elementary School
Columbus City School District

The Ohio Avenue Adaptation Integration & The Arts Enrichment Project would bring together teaching artists and educators to enrich student learning through providing an ongoing arts-integrated curriculum for our students. The project would provide opportunities for our students and staff to engage in and experience the power of the arts through collaborative teaching and learning with a variety of community artists and teachers at the school. The inclusive project would bring together all students of both regular and special eduation. It would expose our students to various aspects of the arts through integration into the curriculum and would provide opportunities for performance, engagement with the community, and encourage creativity.

Impact of the Grant:

Currently, students at our school have visual art and vocal music once a week for 30-60 minutes depending on their grade level. We have one third grade class that is participating in a dance residency in which they get dance once a week for 60 minutes. If our school was granted the NBC4i Make a Difference Grant we could utilize the financial support to increase the number of students and the amount of time that our students have with the arts while enriching our curriculum and thus learning for our students. Our staff believes strongly that we should do everything in our power to provide enriched and meaningful learning opportunities for our students during the school day since there are many factors that we cannot control when our students are not with us. We have seen the impact of the dance residency partnership with community organization VSA (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) with one of our third grade classes this year and we want to expand the program to reach more students and to engage more teachers. The collaboration between community artists and teachers would also develop capacity and understanding of the arts and integration so that our teachers could continue arts enrichment even after the project has completed the funding period. The grant would allow us to have at least 4 teaching artists for the upcoming school year.

In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, everything in my teacherspayteachers.com store will be 20% off this Sunday, February 3rd! Many other stores will be holding a sale as well.  You can get an additional 10% off using the coupon code SUPER.  Click here to check it out!

Publish a Classroom Book for Free!

Every year my students and I create a story, where everyone gets to contribute their text and illustrations to our classroom book. I bind it together with the plastic spiral binder machine we have at school and it looks awesome.  The kids are so excited to read the book that it's always a popular choice during silent reading time.  Because of its popularity, the pages begin falling out shortly after the first few reads.

This year I decided to take advantage of an offer from Snapfish.  Using the coupon code HPREWARD you can get a FREE (up to $12.99) custom photo book. Sales tax and shipping will be added to your order, but it's still a great deal.  I plan on scanning my student's illustrations and uploading them into a cute soft cover book that will surely last through multiple readings. If you're interested, you need to hurry!  This deal ends 1/31.

It's Time!

My second graders are just beginning to tell time and are super excited about it.  I'm super excited too because the sooner they can tell time the sooner they stop asking me what time it is:)  They created these cute clocks today to help them learn how many minutes each number on the clock represents. 

 

I created a template that you can get free here, or click on the teacherspayteachers.com widget to go directly to my store where you can download it for free.  First I had the kids fill in the lines on the inside circle with the numbers they saw on our classroom clock.  Next they filled in the lines on the outside circle with how many minutes each number represents.  I let them color the hands any color they wanted.  While they were in gym I laminated each clock, and when they got back they cut it all out and assembled it with a brad. I had them keep them in their desks to pull out when we are practicing telling time.  I might have them take their clock home to practice as well.  This was a very easy project that all of the kids seemed to enjoy. 

Dollar Store Deals

I'm a sucker for bargains.  I can't help it.  I'm always on the lookout for something inexpensive I can use in my classroom.  The dollar store is a great place to find some deals.  So when I found a bag of clear glass stones, I snatched them up knowing there just had to be something I could use them for.

I decided my students could make words with them.  I used a permanent marker to write the letters of the alphabet on the back of each one (I quickly realized I had to write the letters backwards).  I made sure to include 3 or 4 of each vowel as well as some of the other more common letters so my kiddos would have enough letters to spell all kinds of words.  I put the stones in a fabric softener container with a flip top lid that I was getting ready to recycle and voila!  I had an instant literacy center.

Here's what I have my students do with the stones: they sprinkle out a few at a time and try to form words with what they have. If the letters they have don't spell anything, then they sprinkle out a few more.  As they build, the kids make a list of  the words they create and then turn it in to me when they're done.  It's a fun, self directed center that takes no time at all to set up.

Now, if only I could figure out what to do with the giant fly swatter I bought...

So THIS is how you make a blog

Wow!  I never thought I'd see the day when I had my own blog.  I'm proud of myself.  I'm getting out of my comfort zone and I'm trying something new.  Desperation will do that to you!  Why am I desperate, you ask?  Well, it's a long story but it all comes down to this:  I am having a challenging year, to say the least.  Or maybe just a midlife crisis.  Either way, it gave me the courage to start a blog.

I think my husband will be happy.  I have all these ideas racing through my mind and he is the lucky one who gets to hear all about them:)  Now you get to be the lucky one who gets to be privy to these wonderful ideas! 

 

Here's a little bit about me-I'm a thirty something elementary teacher currently teaching second grade at an inner city school. I've worked at 4 schools in 15 years and have experience teaching grades k-3 and 6-8.  I'm glad I've had the chance to teach so many grade levels.  It's helped me figure out that second grade is my favorite grade.  I love second graders.  They are so cute, not to mention self sufficient, really eager to learn, and still love their teacher.  They make me feel like a super hero with their daily hugs and letters of devotion. 

 

One thing I've learned over the years as an educator is that teaching is A LOT of work. I'm not just talking about the physical aspect of teaching, but also about all of the prep work that goes into making sure each lesson is taylored to every student.  It is exhausting.

 

 Something else I've learned is that I can't do it all alone. Oh, I've tried. Believe me.  Teaching is an isolated profession.  At what other job do you go into a room with 25-30 children for several hours a day and have little to no interraction with your peers?  Our 30 minute lunch breaks aren't spent chit chatting in the teacher's lounge, but are spent setting up the classroom for that awesome science experiment that took us weeks to plan.  Wouldn't it be so much easier if we had a little help?

 

Here's where the blog comes in.  This is a place where we can help each other.  I'm looking forward to sharing my ideas with all of you as well as hearing your ideas.  I'm anxious and excited to see where this new adventure takes me!