Snow Days in Florida?

I know most of the country has been facing severe weather situations, but when the Florida Panhandle gets to 28 degrees, everything shuts down. Our district closed for three days last week due to the frigid temperatures. Now I know frigid is all relative, but you have to understand, this is Florida. We do hurricanes, we don't do ice and snow! We don't have the necessary equipment in place to de-ice bridges, so with all that being said, we had three "snow days" and I was able to get a unit completed that I had been working on for some time.

We all know that repetition is the key in getting some of the skills our students learn firmly planted in their brains. I created a pre -FCAT ( Florida's state test)  review for my third graders that is a repetitive worksheet based on the major math concepts. I had already taught multiplication, division, place value, fractions, and touched bases thus far with geometry, measurement and time. What I came up with is just that, a review sheet that I give out weekly to keep all those skills we had already learned and ones that I would be covering more extensively in the next month or so on the forefront of their brains. Check it out!

Weekly Math Review

Let The Olympic Games Begin!

I love the Olympics! To be completely honest it is the only time I watch sports. I have quite a few students this year that are very eager to start reading chapter books, especially the Magic Tree House series. For a first grade student the biggest challenge after word recognition is reading comprehension and stamina. I decided to create a unit to use as an enrichment piece for small group instruction, that would include the current events that are going on in the world. The unit was designed to accompany the Magic Tree House Book #16, Hour of the Olympics. It includes comprehension questions for each of the ten chapters, character maps, a character map writing activity, a map skills activity, four non-fiction close reads that tie in social studies elements, a compare and contrast activity, two comprehension tests with keys, an olympic sports log, a narrative writing prompt and an opinion writing prompt, an olympic craft and a gold medal graphing activity. This unit was also created with both the Summer and Winter games in mind, so that it could be a resource for either one. This is a great way to include current events and non-fiction into a whole group read aloud or small group instruction. This could also be used for literature circles. Check out some of the unit pictures below and let the games begin!

Let's Start the Year with a Freebie!

Happy New Year! As part of my first grade morning work I do what I like to call a word of the day. This is a really great way to introduce and reinforce vocabulary. I like to pick words that correlate with what I am teaching for my Common Core ELA block. These usually have a Science or Social Studies theme since everything is now integrated. At the beginning of the year the students are required to trace the word, write it three times, fill in a sentence using the word, unscramble the letters and paste them in the correct order, and then use the word in their own sentence. After I have taught nouns, verbs and adjectives I have my students start to circle these parts of speech in their sentence using certain colors (red for nouns, blue for verbs and green for adjectives). This has really helped my students with their writing while at the same time reinforcing these grammar components. When we return this January, I have updated the activities to make them more challenging. They will only need to write the word twice, fill in the sentence using the word, and then instead of unscrambling the letters they will need to write two sentences (one asking and one telling) using the word and identify the noun, verb and adjective in each sentence. If you would like to try out a few of these worksheets with your students be sure to check out my New Years Word of the Day Freebie as well as my other Word of the Day Units in our TPT store!

Cyber Sale

Well, Thanksgiving is over....three more weeks until winter break, but who's counting!

We have decided to join TPT in their Cyber Sale this Monday, December 2 and Tuesday, December 3.
We are offering 10% off all our products along with TPT's discount, Happy Shopping!

Check out our Gingerbread poems, both printed and cursive versions along with our December quilt square!

Gingerbread Poem

What is a Pilgrim?

This is the question I am asking my students. What constitutes a Pilgrim? I created this unit incorporating the book Molly's Pilgrim along with four other texts, which deal with the same theme of immigration. Each book takes coming to America from a different part of the world and delves into the fact that people emigrated to America for a better way of life. Whether it was for religious reasons as the Pilgrims or for security and safety

I broke Molly's Pilgrim into three sections and created comprehension questions for it as well as the other four books. I also created graphic organizers to compare and contrast the similarities as well as differences in the texts. I am also having my students create a Heritage doll using a clothespin, which will be a take home project. Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Literature Unit

Third Grade Goals

My goodness, it is already October, where does the time go? Today we have officially started our second nine weeks and with that I have my third grade students once again write out academic goals for the nine week period. I have them revisit their previous goals to see whether they were attained or whether that is still something that they are working towards. In doing this it puts some of the responsibility onto the student's shoulders as it is something they are working towards.

These goal statements are in our TPT store for FREE. I have included one for each of the nine week periods in both girl and boy versions.Third Grade Goals

Halloween Poem Book

This is a project that my children did in elementary school, so I applaud the teacher I was working with at the time for the great idea. It consists of 26 pages, one page for each alphabet letter. The poem goes through the alphabet talking about Halloween type things. " A is for attic with spooky old things. B is for bats with black flapping wings." It continues like this through the alphabet. Initially I  wrote out the poem on chart paper, one letter a day. The students would copy it and then draw a picture which describes what the poem is saying.

As the years have progressed and I went from first grade to third, I changed it up a bit by creating a cursive version. The premise is the same, however I wrote the day's entry in cursive, for the students to copy. Even as third graders, they love this project. Now we have created a computer version of the poem, with pages for each letter and as well as a power point poem, so if you don't 

have time to re-create it on chart paper, you could show one slide a day for the students to copy. 

We have created two different files, one for primary grades which is titled Halloween Poem Book, and the third grade cursive version is titled, Cursive Halloween Poem Book. The file consists of the alphabet pages, power point poem, a black and while version of the cover page to make a book for each student. We start this project at the end of September, so we can get through all 26 letters of the alphabet by Halloween.

We printed our cover pages on orange copy paper, but the rest of the pages we printed front to back, which used less paper. I hope your students enjoy this project as much as ours do.