President's Day is coming

As any teacher knows, balancing work with home is not always easy. Lately it seems this has been entirely too true to me. I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, but seems like I run out of time. Teaching during the day, trying to make it to the gym, getting my own kids home to do their homework and get dinner ready...I'm left with very few minutes in the day.  Did anyone see my poor husband in the list!? It seems like I've been spending a ton of time on the weekends working on classwork and I'm tired. I cannot wait for my four day weekend coming up and I vow to take a break from all of it. But for those of you who may feel as overwhelmed as I am, I decided to give this book away for free. I know most of us spend our own money on these products and we could always use a bonus. The other day, while at the gym, I was watching Family Fued. One of the bonus questions was how much do you think a teacher should make? The number one answer was $50k a year. That tore me up! All the schooling we do, all the time we spend, and all the work we do... why are teachers not valued? So moving on... here is my nonfiction book about George Washington! I hope you and your kiddos enjoy it!

 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/George-Washington-Nonfiction-Book-with-Close-Activities-1697278
 Have a great President's Day break!

Who doesn't love penguins!?

Penguins! We can work on this science theme for weeks. The kiddos love penguins. We are working on our nonfiction book about penguins, which gives a brief example of many different types of penguins. We are also working on our writing. So far we have done our opinion writing, stating our opinion about whether or not penguins are good birds. Amazingly, I had only 1 kiddo say the penguins were not good birds. After they wrote their opinions, I revealed my opinion and the kids were astonished that I didn't agree with them. Many thought they got it "wrong". So we had to review the basis of an opinion, which is no one can tell you, you are wrong. Next week we are writing our informative since we watched "March of the Penguins" on Friday. It'll give them more facts to write about. Here are some pictures of our book and writing.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Penguins-Nonfiction-CLOSE-Book-1631841

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Penguins-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-1669467
I also have a bonus book that I've created about the life cycle of frogs. We won't be using this until almost the end of the year so HURRAY for me for being ahead of schedule! It won't last long though :)

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Frogs-Nonfiction-CLOSE-Book-1669675
Have a great day!

Winter Snow

I cannot believe I haven't posted since the end of November. So I can tell you I've been super busy, but reality, I have just taken a break. So I'm going to focus a little today and get some work done. I know many teachers and kiddos go back to school on Monday, but our school doesn't return until the 12th! I love it! When we do go back, our theme will be winter. This is a big thing since our winters are very mellow. We've been suffering a few days with extreme freeze during the evening, which is terrible for the citrus, but compared to the snowstorms other states feel, it isn't that bad. Our students think frost on the grass is snow. Many have never seen or know anything about it. Poor babies. I wish I could load them all on the bus and take them to see it, but that isn't gonna happen. So here is my nonfiction book about snow.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Snow-Nonfiction-Close-Book-1627403
I've also made a writing unit to go along with our winter/snow unit. Despite having administrative problems over printing such a useful unit, my kiddos are becoming so much better in their writing. Even narrative, which is hard for English Language Learners.

I want to try a few things that I found on Pinterest during this unit also. Where would we be without Pinterest?? I say this because sometimes I think my husband would like me to stop finding "wonderful" ideas to do around the house :) !

 

 I can use their writing to put on bottom!

 

I want to do the lego man in the ice cube! I'm gonna have to talk my son into loaning me a few of his. 

My friend found an activity at the dollar store that would be fun. It was a can that you opened, added water and then "snow" is created. It was really fun to watch, but it had a strange texture to touch. Plus it had all these warnings about toxicity on the side, it worries me to have in a classroom where I'm sure one of the 24 might want to taste it. Ugh.

One more bonus...I got creative since I was already using my snow graphics, I decided to use the rest of the weather graphics to create a weather book for my kiddos to use in the spring.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Weather-Nonfiction-CLOSE-Book-1627592

Enjoy!

December continue...

We only have three weeks until Christmas break. There is so much I like to do with my kiddos but I always seem to run out of time. Our grade level is doing the Christmas play this year. It's the story about the Gingerbread Man. That takes so much time between practices and the day of performance. We do two shows during the day and one in the evening. Luckily we are doing the play earlier than normal so we have time to relax and do our Christmas unit.
Yesterday I posted my nonfiction close books and said that I would post my writing today. So here we go.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Gingerbread-Man-Cookies-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1587286
 Here are some examples from the opinion writing for Gingerbread Man. I always do lots of prewriting so the kids understand their writing. I see my own children who are given a writing prompt and told to write 2 paragraphs with absolutely no prewriting and it's awful. But if I sit them down, create a makeshift graphic organizer, their writing is more exciting!
To go along with opinion writing there is also informative writing which includes facts about the Gingerbread Man and narrative writing to create a story about how to catch the crazy cookie.

Next....Christmas!

 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Christmas-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1587313
 These are samples of the narrative prewriting, final writing and rubric. I have maybe four kiddos who are getting good at using their imagination to give me ideas on our stories, but the rest are mostly following along. So we do all the prewriting together. Then they write the final writing independently. We are working on drawing pictures to match our stories because I am still getting pictures of a house, tree, sun and bird even though the story is about Thanksgiving dinner. It's like they were trained to draw those exact things in kinder and don't know how to move away. The last 2 weeks, I've given them extra time just to draw their pictures so we can draw details. It's a process.  Here's to the Winter break countdown!!

December begins....

This is going to be a super quick entry. My niece is with me and wants me to read the Berenstain Bears Save Christmas. Priorities people! So here are a few nonfiction books for this month. The first one is a Christmas Around the World book and the other is about how to make gingerbread man cookies.

 











 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Christmas-Around-the-World-Nonfiction-Book-Close-Activity-1564847

 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/How-to-Make-A-Gingerbread-Cookie-Nonfiction-Close-Book-1584928
 Check out these books! Tomorrow I'll add Gingerbread Writing. Don't forget Teachers Pay Teachers sale Dec 1 and 2! Now to go read a story!!

Thanksgiving

Can you believe Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away?? I haven't even begun to think about what our plans are going to be! I have been focusing on my nonfiction readers to read during our Thanksgiving unit. I want to spend more than the 2 days before Thanksgiving working on it. So I need at least 7 days worth of Thanksgiving work. So check out some of my books

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Thanksgiving-Now-Then-Nonfiction-Book-Close-Activity-1547045

My Now and Then book helps kiddos understand there were some big differences between the children from Pilgrim days compared to them today. They sometimes have a hard time understanding the time differences and I'm hoping this helps.

 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Mayflower-Nonfiction-Close-Reading-Book-1537699

This book give the kiddos facts about the ship. Most of the books I read have quick glimpses of the Mayflower but not a lot of details. So now I've created a book to give the details!

 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Thanksgiving-Writing-Informative-Opinion-Narrative-CCSS-1537899

And of course we have writing! We cannot forget to work on our opinions, informative and narrative writings. Bring on Thanksgiving!