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!!!!

Groundhogs & Their Burrows

Since we were iced out of school last week, I’m playing catch up this week and using all of last week’s plans :) We still have LOTS to do and I barely scratched the surface last Monday! I was SO bummed that my kiddos missed Groundhog Day last week :( I planned on teaching the kids about animals that hibernate & groundhogs fit in perfectly! Shockingly enough, only one of my kiddos knew that the groundhog didn’t see his shadow last week, so we went on with the day as planned :)

We went through this awesome little SmartBoard lesson before doing anything. Y’all…this was just TOO much! Even though the lesson was primarily centered around Groundhog Day and groundhog facts, there was a lot of great info on hibernating animals! The kids loved it!!

If you have a SmartBoard, click the pic to download the lesson! I found it on Smart Exchange!! I’m nowhere NEAR talented enough to make something this dang cute!!

The kids most enjoyed learning about burrows and how groundhogs dig tunnels. Did you know they dig up to 700 lbs. of dirt when digging their burrows?! WHOA! We talked about burrows and other places animals calls home…dens, lairs, nests, caves, etc. Then I had the kids pretend like they were groundhogs and do a little descriptive writing.

First they had to draw their little burrows. CRACKING up that this one has a TV & a bed! HA!

Then they had to write a few sentences describing their burrow as if they were a groundhog.

Finally, they made a little groundhog. I LOVE this little art piece. It takes all of about 5 seconds to put together. One of my best friends, Jodi, showed me this idea years ago when we taught Kindergarten together and I’ve been doing it with my kids ever since.

The groundhog is made of one large brown heart {turned upside down}, one medium sized brown heart {cut right down the middle and used as ears}, and one medium sized white heart {turned upside down and used for teeth}. All the kids had to do was cut the ears and make the faces. The hearts were pre-cut for them! I think these are the dang cutest things! And perfect since Valentine’s Day is only a week away!