Monday Made It

I am finally doing another Monday Made It!  Yay!  I missed it.  To join this link up go to 4th grade Frolics for

I love October!  LOVE October.  Fall is my favorite season, I love the cooler temps, and the cute Fall clothing ( I officially got the boots out last week!!!).  One of my favorite parts of October are the cute, cute, CUTE Halloween clip art and crafts.  We are doing Spider week in my classroom, and I had some cute clip art I wanted to use, so I decided to make a literacy center with that and a skill we will be working on this week--the _at word family.  

One of my favorite things for the class to do (and it's my favorite b/c it's one of their favorite) is QR codes.  They love them!  So I made my _at center very versatile.  You can either use the picture cards, the QR codes, the word cards, or make any combination of them depending on where your class is at.  

How cute is the web bowl, btw?  That was in the Target $1 aisle and I knew I could find a use for it!  #teacherproblems!

You can find this on my TPT store if you like it!  

On to the next.  Now the next 2 aren't really school related.  Well, one is related, ..anyway,  here is my

My daughter is really good about doing her homework, and I am so grateful for that.  She has been complaining lately that she needs a more private space.  I completely understand her point.  She has been doing it at the kitchen table but that is right in the middle of traffic in our house.  That's also where her 2 younger and very active brothers will run through the house and make lots and lots of noise, so I had a craft table I decided to double as a little homework station for her.  It is off in a separate area of the house, where it is a bit more quiet for her.  I needed an area to hang some of their important art work or homework, because with my middle child in preschool now, the art work is filling up my fridge.  This is what I came up with.  

Here is a closer look at the supplies.  

I gotta say,  I'm very happy with how it turned out and it was a very inexpensive conversion.  

Ok, next.  It's RED OCTOBER here is St. Louis!!  The Cardinals are in the play offs and we could not be more excited.  Our little family all sat down to watch the game last night and I decided to make a little snack that I saw on Pinterest.  Caramel Marshmallow Popcorn!  Click here for the Pinterest link.   YUM!  

It was a hit!  AND the Cards won, so WIN-WIN!  

Back to school stuff.  I made these this past week as my class is going to start the Accelerated Reader Program.  I had a blog post about the whole thing.  Accelerated Reader is used school wide in our school, and I needed some better organization with it, so this is one of the things I came up with.  Having a testing day so that I didn't have 16 kids ready to test on the same day.  

Well, that's all I have, I can't wait to see what you all have as well!  

Everything Alphabet

Truly.  Everything is Alphabet here is KB!  We are off and runing and trying our best at letter recognition, letter/number writing, and beginning to work on letter sounds as well.  Those tricky lowercase letters throw everything off.  So we have been doing a lot of capital./lowercase matching.

 This was a simple but effective center to help with this concept.  You can find this is my Alphabet Adventure pack in my TPT store.  I decided it would be easier to copy all the lowercase in one color, and capitals in another color rather than have a set with the same color for both, so that is what we did.

 My other center was strictly working on letter recognition with a fun game I call Alphabet Soup.

Also from my Alphabet Adventure pack was stamping the missing letters, and working on matching capital and lowercase letters by spinning lowercase but graphing capitals.  See the pictures below. 

Now to tackle those tricky lowercase letters:  I had them roll the lowercase die and color in the letter if they had it.  (After reading the letter to their group).  It's a form of Alphabet Bingo really, which meant I had some happy kiddos.

We are also working hard on color words, so this center is an oldie but goodie!  

And what would literacy & writing centers be without some "write around the rooms"?  I love how these 2 just got all comfy with it!  :)  

They have been working so hard!  I am proud of them all!  Til next time...

More QR Craze

I hope everyone had a great Easter!  The month of April has just seemed to have flown by!  We will be doing our study of chicks, and other oviparous animals, this week and next.  This is always a very memorable theme for the kids, especially when they get to see the chicks hatch.  We will be getting our eggs on Friday, and they should start hatching on Tuesday!  I am so excited!!  
Until then, we are busy, busy, busy with our day to day. 

 Here is a center that is always fun.  I have found this center works better mid-late year when the kids can understand better CVC words, word families, etc.  So, in this center they pull out the letters in their name, put them on top.  If a kid has a short name or a vowel-filled name, I let them use the letters of their last name too.  Then in the divided part, I have them put a vowel in the middle, and I usually have them make a word family and try to make words from that.  That is how I found is easiest for them.  

Before Easter I started some work on QR Codes again.  I wanted something new that the kids could do at a center.  I came up with some QR codes where the kids scan, write, and put them in ABC order.  After that, I thought, "hey, I could use the same format and do more with rhyming words too!"  I also did some place value ones as well.  This week we are doing rhyming, and next week we are going to work on the ABC order.  All of these will be available on my TPT store, but for now, the ABC order is the only product up and ready to go.  

I do have a piece of advice, the qr codes are all in a row, so I found it beneficial, to put scrap paper on top of the ones you are not scanning, so it doesn't scan the wrong one.  
Click here to view the ABC Order QR codes on my TPT store.

  

the many uses of a divided tray...

Ok, so this week I find myself swamped in work! --Not for this year though, I'm already thinking of new things to implement, new ideas to try, and with three small kids, the more organized I can get now, the easier it makes my life come August.  I'm working on reading groups activities/organization, I am working on a new behavior system that makes misbehavior less of a guessing game for the parents, a new classroom makeover, my minds justa' adding on to the already large "to do" list.  When I'm trying something new though-that I think will benefit the kids, its not even like work, I get all excited. Thankfully, I've got some awesome co workers that inspire me to try new things.   Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week.  

Here is a center we have going on this week.  

If I have any advice for primary teachers, it  is BUY THESE TRAYS!  I use them for SOOO many activities!!  We do CVC work with them, we make CVC words from our names...a ton with them.  And they are only $1!!  I got mine from Walmart a few years ago during the spring/summer.  

In this particular center there are spring caterpillars, each a certain word family, and they make those word family words in their trays with magnetic letters (or whatever letters you have available).  I had them take a Dry Erase marker and write them on the caterpillar instead of using the recording sheet.  The recording sheet would be great for first grade, though.  

Here's me with my plug:  (cough, cough): The caterpillars and the recording sheet are part of Spring Bundle unit on TPT.  Click here to see it.  Have a good rest of the week, everyone! 

President's Day Goodies

We still have one more week of Dinosaurs, so I will be posting more activities with that as we go.  Tomorrow is the 100th day of school!  SOOOOOOOO exciting!  I love celebrating that day with the students, it's a big milestone!  So, I will try to have those pictures in the next day or two.  But for today, well, it was yet another snow day.  Ugh!  So I sat down this evening to create my President's Day materials.  Please check it out on my TPT store at:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Becky-Lowe    
I love, love, LOVE Melonheadz Illustrations for clip art.  They are so stinkin' CUTE!  www.melonheadzillustrating.blogspot.com 

I really am liking this whole "blog" thing so far.  The most difficult part for me was creating the blog itself.  Now its pretty easy peasy!  I'm enjoying it.  Til next time...

Dinosaur Week

Dinosaur week is always one of my favorites!  The kids are always so excited to explore this theme.  Here is a fun center we do to build on our knowledge of word families.  I just took one of the "Biggie Patterns" from Scholastic and copied it onto various colored paper.  The pattern came as a stegosaurus, so I just cut off the spines and wrote individual letters in those, and the word family on the dinosaur.  I made a record sheet and viola, there we have it.  We have been working on nonsense vs real words, so in this center, I only have them write the real words.  

Here are some pictures of us at centers this week.  We did the above center and then also did a "sight word find" with magnifying glasses to help us find those tiny tiny sight words on our dinosaur picture. We are working hard on sentence expanding.  I thought it turned out really, really well.