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!!!!

Tooth Fairies, Teeth, & a Little Bit of Money

Have you ever wondered what the Tooth Fairy does with all those teeth?!?! We asked ourselves that same question and the kids came up with some pretty clever answers! First, we read a little book…

And for a little reader’s response, the kids wrote about what they thought the tooth fairies did with their teeth! And they made some cute little scrapbook tooth fairies to go along with their writing.

This is probably my favorite thing we’ve done to date! I LOVE how they turned out!

The kids did pretty much ALL of the work themselves. I showed them an example, but told them they could make their fairies look however they wanted. I cut out the heads, arms, & legs. I also cut out the star on the wand {using our die cuts}. I really wanted them to focus on the writing piece more than the art…but I LOVE how different they all came out!!!

The kids have been having *12 kinds of* fun using their “teeth” and mouth math mats for dental themed problem solving in our math journals. I know this is all shades of ridiculous, but I really love problem solving with the kids! I think it’s so neat for kids to talk about their problem solving strategies and see that even though they solve problems in different ways, they can still come up with the same answers!!

Graphic courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles

The mouth mats and problem solving prompts are included in my Dental Health Mini Unit on TpT.

We’re still truckin’ along with money, too.

This was one of the activities in my Coin Collection packet on TpT.

One of our word work activities was sorting /ee/ & /ea/ words. The kids loved it! I love hearing them when they find one of these vowel combos in their reading books…they get so dang excited!

Graphic courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles

This little activity is in my Dental Health Mini Unit, too. You can grab it at TpT if you’re still in the market for some tooth trouble ;)

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be learning about Patriotic Symbols, Presidents, & TEXAS {yee-haw!} in our social studies curriculum, so be on the lookout for LOTS of fun stuff!! In addition to all that greatness, we’ll be knee deep in Open House preparation and Deanna Jump’s America Unit is the inspiration for this year’s theme!! It couldn’t have come at a better time!! Stay tuned for lotsa fun stuff!! I’ll also be posting a March Madness Mega Pack of literacy, math, & science activities on TpT this weekend!! Get excited….HA!!!!