What Happened to Mrs. Carroll? And a Few Other Things...

I took a personal day on Monday. I hadn't seen my sweet family since mid-December, so I took my boys home for an extra long weekend. Mr. Spouse had to work. Boo. While I was out, I had my kids write about what they thought happened to me. I didn't tell them where I was going or what I was doing, so it was hilarious to read their responses when I got back!!

One of my sweeties said that I was spending the day shopping with my sister, Mrs. Cortez. Mrs. Cortez is a precious 6th grade teacher. We are NOT sisters, but we *might* have told the kids that we are :) We get told we look alike no less than 20 times a week :)

Last week we celebrated the 100th day of school Sadly, I've got NOTHING to share with you. I absolutely got ALL of my ideas from Pinterest and loved every little minute of not having to recreate the wheel. We had our annual balloon launch in between the intermittent spurts of rain. It stopped right before we headed out and started right back up again as we were walking inside! Dear Mother Nature...thanks for that!!!

We also celebrated Groundhog Day sans my camera. However, I did get a few pics the next day of some things that we did to celebrate.

We made a grade level graph {Pinterest inspired} and we did the same little writing we did last year, only this time I had them draw their burrow instead of making one for them.

We kicked off our Dental Health unit with this writing I did last year. Honestly, one of my favorites of the whole year!! This year's is NO exception!! Love this little tooth fairies!!!

Now we're working on Valentine related skills and having SO much fun!! Our math tubs are FULL of Valentine math activities and we're using some of our Love, Splat centers for our literacy tubs. Next week we'll continue on with our Valentine theme and we'll be doing some awesome little activities from First Grade Blue Skies & Fun in First. They both have DARLING "Froggy's First Kiss" units!! Here are a few little things I made for our literacy tubs. Just click on the pics to grab your copies!! And feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you have any kind of Froggy activities so that I can link to yours as well!!

Froggy Freebies

In other news, I'm 100% obsessed with these cups.

They *might* make me happier than the red cups during the Christmas holidays. Bless you, sweet Starbucks. You and ALL of your overpriced coffee. Dangit.

Now you might wanna head on over to Heather's Heart and enter her giveaway...just sayin'. She's "totes adorbs" {that phrase tasted terrible coming out of my mouth. I promise I'll NEVER use it again.} Heather is always SO dang sweet and encouraging. She always leaves the sweetest comments and she has the most giving heart. She's got TONS of freebies up for grabs so you need to head on over NOW. Enter for your chance to win one of these PRECIOUS tees from Sewing Sassy...

AND a Consious Discipline CD and 5 items from Heather's TpT store. In addition to all that, Rachelle from What the Teacher Wants will be giving away 2 of her units, too!! LUCKY {in my best Napoleon Dynamite voice}. GOOD LUCK!!

I'm still computerless and going through serious withdrawls right about now. Not sure when I'll get my little laptop back, but I miss her so much I can hardly stand it. Sad, I know. Not sure when I'll be back, but stay tuned for some super fun ideas on teaching and introducing dictionary skills! We're LOVING it and having a blast {so far}!!!

TGI{almost}F!!!!

Our “Big Days” Catch-Up!

I got the sweetest email from a darling reader who wanted to know if I was okay because of my lack of blogging lately :) I’m a-ok, but my boys…well…they’re a different story. They both tested positive for type A flu last week and I was one busy momma! No time for anything other than snugglin’ the heck outta those kids. Even though the snuggles were sick induced, I’ll take what I can get! HA! I’m SO happy that they’re finally on the mend and back to normal!! I hope that’s the last of the sickies this season!!

Because I was tending to my mommy duties, our 100th day celebration didn’t exactly go as planned :) I have the most amazing team ever, so my sweet girls took my firsties last Thursday & Friday mid-afternoon so I could leave to be with my boys. I was at school for a total of 3 hours on Thursday {delayed start and left early}, and I was only at school for our field trip on Friday. Even though it was a short week, the kids still had a blast!!

We celebrated the 100th day on Thursday and started the day with some SMARTBoard fun. The kids L-O-V-E-D showing different ways to get to 100 {$1.00} with money & base 10 blocks!

We made our 100 day crowns {courtesy of The Virtual Vine} and glasses. You can find the crown printable HERE.

They got to wear their 100th day gear to the school-wide balloon launch the next day :) Probably my most favorite event of the school year!! It’s the dang prettiest thing…HUNDREDS of different colored balloons {a different color for each grade level} floating up, up, & away! Each balloon is tagged with the email address of our school counselor and a little message. SO…if anyone finds our balloons, they can email our counselor to let her know when & where they found it! SO dang cool!! Unfortunately, I had to miss it this year {BOO HOO} to take care of my boys :( This is the only pic I could get…

I also set out a 100 day chart that we added to during the day. I had the kids write words they’ve learned to spell this year inside the 100. We also wrote about 100 things we’ve learned in the first 100 days of school {around the 100}. Every time they thought of something different, I had them tell me what it was so that I could jot it down on our chart. They LOVED that!! Here’s the unfinished version…

That’s about ALL we had time for in the very brief 3 hours I was at school that day!!!

We celebrated our first field trip of the school year on Friday…BRAIN GYM!! SO fun! The kids loved it!!

After ANOTHER weekend of being stuck inside the house, I returned to school on Monday for our Valentine’s celebration. WHOA. Can anyone say CRAZY?! It was a wild day full of lots of fun activities. We started the day with a little Valentine Vocabulary activity and added several Valentine related words to a brainstorm chart. I’ll keep this up throughout the rest of the month for the kids to refer to when writing.

We had our party at the end of the day which was perfect. The kids decorated heart-shaped sugar cookies and played a few games of Bingo.

They also made these adorable “bags” for their Valentine’s!! My team has been making this for several years so I was happy to jump on board & do the same! The kids thought these were “so cool”!!

And I’d be lying if I said these little “teacher perks” weren’t a favorite part of my day :) I brought home my chocolates and bath bombs and took a long bath…*maybe* with a glass of wine…for a little R&R. After a week like this last one, it was just what I needed!!!