Saturday, November 30, 2013

Wonderfulness in the Works!

I am so excited to be a part of the winter product swap going on over at ...and they all fall down...! I get to review an amazing Holiday Grammar Pack by Blair Turner and, although I teach Pre-K, it is actually a perfect pack for my 2nd grade daughter! {Goodness knows she could always use a little more practice with her grammar!}
 
In the meantime, be sure to check out Blair's store here:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Blair-Turner
 
And her Holiday Grammar Pack here:
 
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Winter-Holidays-Grammar-Packet-974128

And don't forget to mark Dec. 7th on your calendar so you can stop back and check out all the other awesome Holiday Product Swaps!
 
Katie
 
 

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Good news and even better news!

With Thanksgiving and the winter holidays approaching, there is always a lot going on. Of course, being done with Thanksgiving planning and prepping, I am looking forward to December plans and, as usual, our week of family traditions right before winter break. It's always a tricky unit to plan because our class is so culturally diverse. My solution? A take home project of course! ;)
 
I don't even begin to put on the front that I know a lot about other holidays besides for ones we actually celebrate in my home. Being the only blonde-haired, blue-eyed person in my classroom, it doesn't leave a lot of holidays that I know anything about. So of course I decided to have the parents to a project with their kiddos to bring in and share. This way we could all learn more about our classmates and their families.
 
What is this project you might ask? It's very simple. Each child takes home a paper to fill out talking about their favorite winter holiday tradition. I actually made two versions of the paper since I'm encouraging the parents to find the picture first and then to choose a page depending on the orientation of the picture (landscape or portrait). Then they simply put the picture on the page and help their child fill in the answers to the questions. Having Pre-K kiddos, we work a lot on handwriting so I used the line-dash-lines instead of just a blank line and told the parents to encourage their child to sound out and write the answers in. If they didn't feel their child could write all the letters on their own, they were to write the letters with a yellow highlighter or marker so their child could trace them and still get handwriting practice. Then they bring the pages back the week before our traditions unit so I can laminate them and bind them into a book before using it to introduce our traditions unit the following Monday.
 
So what is the good news? I've made the pages with a blank cover and a note to send home with the pages available in my store for FREE! Just click the picture below to find it!
 
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Family-Traditions-Class-Book-Pages-994885
 
And now for the even better news: TpT will be having their annual Cyber Monday Sale on December 2 and 3!! Everything in my store will be 20% off plus you can use the TpT code to get an additional 20% off making it a total of about 28% off everything in my store and many other stores! So be sure to start working on that wishlist now so you can take full advantage of the sale in a few days. Just click the computer screen below to go to my store!
 
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Random-Craftiness

 
Enjoy your nice long weekend!
 
Katie


Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Feed Pilgrims and Santa!

Oh my, I cannot believe it is November already! We're already in our 15th week of school... almost half done with the year!!
 
Plus, yesterday being Veteran's day, we didn't have school. However, I paid for it today! Longest... Day... EVER! The upside is that I did get a couple new things made for my TpT shop, one for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas (yes, I know it's November).
 
I am so excited about these sets that I actually wish it was Thanksgiving already (and not for the food and shopping). I just cannot wait to use these in my classroom!
 
Both packs have the same basic idea behind them: assemble the box in kind of the same manner as you would a die and cut out the cards you need to practice the skill you're working on. I usually laminate mine since I use mine with my Pre-K kiddos and they tend to get kind of rough with materials.
 
The completed boxes look like this:
 
(Only a little better because I actually ran out of color ink and had to print in grayscale and color them with my daughter's markers *sigh* Nothing like teacher problems)
 
Anyhoo, both sets are available in my shop and you can find them by clicking on the pictures below:
 
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Feed-the-Pilgrim-Math-and-Literacy-Thanksgiving-Center-963748

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Feed-Santa-Math-and-Literacy-Centers-974389
 
Make sure to check out the rest of the awesome Monday Make It posts here:
 
http://4thgradefrolics.blogspot.com/2013/11/monday-made-it-november.html
 
Thanks for reading!
Katie