Sunday, December 1, 2013

Deck the Halls with TpT Cyber Sale Linky



I am sure that y'all have heard by now that TpT is having a HUGE Cyber Monday sale! As a seller and a buyer, I am so excited.  I've teamed up with some of my blogging buddies for a super fun link up, Deck the Halls With TpT! 

http://bainbridgeclass.blogspot.com/
 Special thanks to our hostess, Christina Bainbridge! :) Click on the image above to check out this FUN link up party! :)



We are showcasing our favorite products to the tune of our favorite Christmas carols.  So here's my playlist!



Here are the links to find them on TpT!
Polar Express Centers and Fun for Bigger Kids
Christmas Graphic Organizers
Winter Graphic Organizers







Thank you for caroling through my store with me! I hope you found something off my playlist you can use. :)  My entire store will be 20% of Monday and Tuesday. Don't forget the code Cyber for an additional 10% everyone's sale prices! 

Happy Shopping!







Friday, November 29, 2013

Beat Blue and Black Friday Sales

Hi, friends! Remember me? :)  I am so sorry for my blogging absence lately.  Like many of you, I've been a little overwhelmed!  Between transitioning to the Common Core, graduate school, a new teacher evaluation system, and trying to leave time for friends and family; this sweet blog of mine has been neglected.  The good news is that I have a little bit more time on my hands no that I am no longer coaching Girls on the Run season and I look forward to getting back into creating and blogging.

With the craziness of this year, I've never been more thankful for Teachers Pay Teachers.  I've purchased a lot of great resources to use this year with my sweet students.  It's comforting to know that so many great resources are out there made by those who know to reach students the best, fellow teachers!

Today I'm throwing a special Black Friday sale on my Christmas items in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

My Christmas Graphic Organizers and Polar Express Centers and Fun for Bigger Kids are 30% off today only! :)

Many of you know that I am a HUGE Ohio State fan! I just LOVE my Buckeyes! Our biggest rivalry game is this Saturday.  We will travel up north to play that team up north. 

 
In honor of my Buckeyes amazing season and one the greatest rivalries in college sports, I am throwing a Beat Blue sale today and tomorrow! :)  All non Christmas items are 20% off today and everything is 20% off tomorrow! I know Cyber Monday is coming up but this a great chance to purchase anything you need for the upcoming week, since the sale is actually during the work week. :)
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Fourth-And-Ten

Click on the sale picture above or here to check out my store! :)

Friday, October 4, 2013

A Peek Into Our Week: Mighty Jackie

Happy October, everyone! :) Even though this month has only been four days long, it has been jammed packed with SO much. I completed my first set of OTES evaluations, our first night of parent teacher conferences, papers for graduate class, and a sickness to boot.  Even though this week was super busy, we had a lot of fun in reading this week!

Our Treasures' story this week was Mighty Jackie
 
Mighty Jackie is a great little book about Jackie Mitchell, a seventeen-year-old who played against the New York Yankees in an exhibition game and struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.  Since baseball's post season just started, it was the perfect week to read this story.

Our district has a 2008 version of Treasures, so we've been aligning each story to the Common Core ourselves. This past week we focused on point of view and using specific details from the selection when responding to questions about the text.  

On Monday, I introduced point of view by reading two versions of The Three Little Pigs


Fairy Tales are a great way to introduce point of view, there are so many great options! 


This is what our focus wall looked like this week. I got the posters from my fabulous friend, Nicole Shelby's Point of View pack. I also her pack in my small groups this week.  

I used the point of view paragraph's from Nicole's pack at the beginning of the week with each of my groups.  They were great for quick formative assessments, and my students really enjoyed them!
I put the recording sheets in page protectors and just reused them throughout the week, loved it! :)

In the beginning of the week, we focused on point of view as read Mighty Jackie.  Later in the week, we practiced some Close reading techniques as we answered questions about the story. 



Again, I just put the questions in page protectors and reused the questions with most of my groups.  It was a great way to save paper and added some novelty to increase engagement in groups this week.



I have a large percentage of gifted kiddos this year, so I've been extending their thinking with Amanda's fabulous  Just Glue It! Multi-Step Response prompts.  My students LOVED writing journal entries from Jackie's point of view and I was blown away by how amazing their writing was! 

My kiddos LOVED Jackie's story and kept asking so many questions about her, so luckily I found this video on You Tube.  They really enjoyed seeing some actual footage of Jackie striking out Babe Ruth. 


Today, with some of my groups we read a passage I found about Lizzie Murphy, another woman who played professional baseball during the same time period as Jackie. 



We compared the two women after reading about Lizzie and it was a great way to squeeze in a review of comparing and contrasting.  

Today we read Players in Pigtails as a class as a mini lesson. Players in Pigtails is about Katie Casey and the All American Girls Professional League.


This book is also available on United Streaming as well and is narrated by Zooey Deschanel.  My students really enjoyed this book too and it lead to a lot of great discussions about the advancements that have been made in the opportunities girls have in sports now, compared to when Lizzie and Jackie were girls and during the 1940s.  We also used specific details from the text to answer questions about the story. 

All this talk and reading about baseball lead to a surge in interest in some of these books.  :) My boys have quite the waiting list going on with these. :)


Well, that was a little recap of our week.  We had a lot of fun this week, and I'm almost sad the week is over.   Have a great weekend!

Friday, September 20, 2013

So it's been a while and Lovin' the Daily Five

So let's just pretend that I haven't blogged in a really long time.  ;) That I've showed you my classroom tour and all our back to school fun.  K? I promise those things will come soon and you'll see why below.

New standards, new evaluation system, new assessment systems to learn/proctor, graduate school and Girls on the Run have taken up a lot of my time lately.  I *think* that I might be able to come up for air for a little bit now.

The school year is going really well! I feel so, so, so blessed to teach language arts to two awesome sets of kiddos.  It's been great being able to readjust mid day and try things again in the afternoon. :) I also share my kiddos with one of the sweetest and kindest people I've ever met.  So needless to say, I've really been loving being departmentalized.

This year, I finally implemented the Daily Five.  I've had the book for years and finally decided it was now or never.  My students and I have been loving it.  I've gotten a couple of questions about how the Daily Five works in my fourth grade classroom on my Instagram and thought I would share what has been working for me! Even though there are lots of great blog posts out their about the Daily Five and so many resources, I can't stress enough how important it is to actually read the book! I read lots of blog and looked a lots of websites this summer but nothing helped me like reading the book!

Like my rotation chart? I got it from Lori of Teaching with Love and Laughter! I love it! You can download it here

The stations that have been working well for me have been read to self, word work, and work on writing.  I plan on blogging more about what my kiddos do during these rotations soon. 

We've tried and tried read to someone but it hasn't quite clicked.  Many couldn't quite grasp it wasn't a time to socialize and our stamina building days never went well.  Plus after about three weeks of whole group lessons, they needed to be super short and to the point, while worked on building our stamina, my kiddos were more than ready to get things started! I hope to try it again now that we've started.  I'm hoping now that they've seen Daily Five in action, they'll be a little more cooperative!

I don't have all the materials for listen to reading, so if/when that is phased in this year, it will be later.  The awesome thing about the Daily Five is you can easily adapt it to fit the needs of your kiddos! 

Most days, we do three rotations.  I have four guided reading groups.  I meet with each group at least twice a week.  Between my two classes, I have eight groups.  I use this little notebook to write down things I didn't finish with each group so I'm not starting each group by saying, "Okay, what did we do last time?"  Not, like I've done that before. :) 



I use a mixture of our district formative assessments, classroom performance, and MAP testing data to make my groups.  I keep generic resources I need for most groups in my Teacher Time tub.  I keep handouts, task cards, stir sticks (reading pointers), extra pencils, games, and hand outs that I use with most of my groups in here.  Specific materials for each group, I keep in a basket on a book shelf behind my guided reading table.

This was our first full week of Daily Five rotations and the kiddos and I loved it! Here's a little peek at what we did!

 
Inferring from fiction and non fiction is big in the common core for fourth grade, so one day this week, I used a portion of Creekside Teacher Tales' Find Us Forever Homes Pack for part of our small group time.  My kiddos LOVED this activity, and I'm glad we only found one sweet doggy a home this week so I can reuse this activity a few times this year! :) 

 
We also worked on identifying different types of Text Structures.  We read a magazine article from our Treasures book and decided how the text was organized/structured.  We used Rachel's free Informational Text Structure Handout to help us out. 

We also worked on analyzing characters in literature.  We focused on using text based evidence in our descriptions. To do this, one day we read a part of our weekly story, The Raft, and wrote descriptions about the main character, Nicky.  With some groups that required some additional instruction, I used Rachel's character traits task cards.


The character traits hand out came from the fabulous Beth Newingham.

Also, we've slowing been learning our fluency stations routines and procedures.  So far, we've mastered our fry phrase games, poetry, and roll, read, and repeat from Christiana Bainbridge's Fourth Hundred Fry Phrase Intervention Pack


 The point of view cards are from One Extra Degree. :)

Well, I'm off to dig into the huge stack of reading that I have for my class! :) Happy Friday!

 

Saturday, August 17, 2013

TpT Back to School Sale, My Top Wish Listed Items, and What's on My Wish List

Hi there, friends! I had grand intentions of linking up for the rest of Teacher Week and then well, I decided to do lots of last minute fun things I probably won't be able to do once school starts, or at least the first few weeks of school. I met friends for ice cream and chatted for hours.  We had an impromptu fire pit night with our neighbors, and I had dinner with a few co workers.  It was nice to pause and enjoy life for a bit in the midst of all the craziness of going back to school. :) I'm hoping to link up throughout the next few weeks.  

I am really excited because tomorrow is the beginning of Teachers Pay Teachers Back to School Sale!  
Click on the banner below to check out my store!
 

Thanks so much, Krista for the sweet graphic!

Today I am linking up to a fun linky/blog hop to share some of my store's most wish listed items 

 
 My top wish listed item is my Types of Sentences Activity pack. It is filled with fun games and activities to review the types of sentences.  My students really enjoyed this unit last year and really set the tone for a lot of the hands on   activities we did last year. 

The second most wish listed item in my store is The Story of My Name Writing and Craftivity.  I love this activity so much! My students always enjoy learning what their name means and how their parents chose their name.  You can read more about this activity {here}.  

 Climbing up the list is my Spelling Contracts Throughout the Year pack!  I have used these contracts for years and my kiddos and their parents have always enjoyed them! They really enjoy switching things up each month and the flexibility the contract provides.  Judging from the feedback, many buyers' students have loved it too and it just gives me the chills to know my resources are making learning fun and enjoyable for so many students. 

I have several items on my own wishlist as well! :)
 I have lots of things on my wishlist too! I have Natalie's Common Core Galore Checklist for Fourth Grade ELA in my cart and ready to purchase! I also can't wait to dabble in interactive notebooks with my friend Nicole's Fourth Grade Reading Notebook.  Also, the FABULOUS Hope King posted a sneak pick of some Reading Strategy Subway Art on her Instagram yesterday. She hopes to have them posted today and I can't wait for them! :) They will be the perfect fit for my Brights and Stripes classroom. :) 

How about you, what's on your wishlist!   
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