Teaching Blog Round Up: August 2015

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Popcorn Day!

Hi friends, it's Renee from Fantastic First Grade Froggies. Have you started back at school yet? I had kids for three days last week and we had so much fun! We reviewed our five senses so we can "explore" our world this school year.

We had popcorn day on Friday. First off I read a fun popcorn book called the Popcorn Dragoon. The kids always love this story.

Next we explored unpopped popcorn using our senses (no tasting). We discussed our findings. Then I had each student count out ten kernels (I have 20 students). We put them into two separate mason jars, taking this opportunity to count by tens. When we were done, we had 100 kernels in one jar and 100 kernels in a second jar. Then we used an air popper and popped 100 kernels. We compared the popcorn with the unpopped kernels. It was interesting to hear their responses.

Some kids insisted that there were way more than 100 pieces of popcorn (even thought we popped 100 kernels).

Then we got to taste the kernels and use all five senses to explore the popped corn. We filled out this chart as a class.

I had every intention to fill out this popcorn poem paper that I made, but we ran out of time. We will finish this up next week. Click below to grab a copy for yourself!

It was a yummy day!

Thanks for stopping by today.

Renee

Sunday, August 9, 2015

The TpT Back to School Freebie eBook is HERE!

Hi, Teaching Friends!

No matter how many years you may have been teaching, it's always great to have some new tricks up your sleeve, especially at back to school time! Teacher/authors at TpT have worked hard to make things a bit easier for you with this brand new resource that's jam packed with classroom tips, freebies, and links to great resources!

There are more than 50 freebies in this collection!!

Here are a few sample pages.

Teacher Tam is sharing a great set of one page math games. Easy to prepare, easy to use!

If you're thinking about trying out interactive notebooks this year, Bex at Reading and Writing Redhead is offering a cute sample from her Language Arts Interactive Notebook set.

... and here's mine! :) If you've already downloaded my free set of graphs and tallies for back to school, please stop back at my store and download the updated version! I just finished tweaking it!

I'll be sharing more pages throughout the week on my collaborative blog iTeach First, and on my FB page.

If you teach PreK or kindergarten, you'll find your sampler here. If you teach third or fourth, here's a sampler for you! There are sampler eBooks right on up through 12th grade, so tell your teaching friends, please! If you go to any of the listings at TpT, you'll find links to all of the books.

Please enjoy browsing this fantastic resource! I know you'll love the treasures you'll find in it!

Happy Teaching!

Monday, August 3, 2015

My 4 Favorite Back To School Products

First, Get 28% off of my ENTIRE TpT STORE:

CLICK this image to grab 28% off of my ENTIRE STORE!

Now, Here Are My Four Favorite Things: #1 Heidi's Songs:

I love anything and everything from Heidi's Songs, but my favorites are her sight word songs and her new math songs.

Click on the image.

My students loved sining Heidi's sight word songs, especially while walking to the library, the computer lab, the science lab, music class, or even lunch. Why not make the most of that time?

Click the image.

I just make sight word cards, laminated them, and attached tongue depressors. As we walked from place to place, I just held a card above my head facing the line of children and they would break into song!

You can grab her songs by clicking HERE or on any of the images about her songs.

#2 My Show & Tell Apron:

Click on the image.

These amazing aprons come in so many colors that there is one (or more) to match your personal colors or your classroom colors.

Click on the image.

My newest tutu apron just makes me smile! Imagine picking up your class wearing this!

Click on the image.

It's super interactive too. You can have kids place cards in the pockets, you can ask students to name the cards in the pockets, or you can even do a little song & dance with the story telling cards.

Here is Sandy, the creator of these amazing aprons, demonstrating how to sing her
3 Bears Song with her story telling cards.

I have 3 different apron and I use every one of them. They even make a child size apron so your kids can have fun being the teacher!

#3 Is My Collection of Sit Spots:

Whether I'm creating a spot for each child to sit or identifying my centers by colors or shapes, my Sit Spots help me out. They are adorable cut outs made from colorful Velcro.

Click on the image.

Here they identify the "Purple" centers.

Here I used them to manage the electrical cords.

You can say, "Good-bye," to your dirty rainbow rug and replace it with Sit Spots. You can even write your students' names on them!

You can see the Sit Spots here with the students' names on them.

If you write letters, numbers, or sight words on the spots you can create games like a bean bag toss onto specific sight words or onto numbers or letters in order.

I LOVE the green footprints for Saint Patrick's Day, but they can be used to direct traffic patterns and identify places to stand while in line.

The leprechaun has been here!

#4 ESGI for All of My Assessments:

Now is the perfect time to get started with ESGI. It will save you more hours than you can count!

Click the image.

It allows you to assess your students by using the build-in assessments or you can even create your own custom assessments! The data is amazing. You can instantly see how your class or an individual student is doing on every single skill.

Click the image.
Use code B2174.

Quick and easy intervention groups too. Just click on the gray portion of the bar graphs and you can instantly see which students did not pass each skill.

Click the image.

Print custom flashcards for each students to use in your RTI kits or send home for practice.

Click the image.

And the parent letter is so much easier to understand than almost any report card. I staple it to the top of our report cards. Best of all, they come in English or Spanish.