TPT Easter Sale - 20% Off!

Happy Easter Weekend!

I am joining in with a BUNCH of other sells to celebrate Easter with a 20% off sale!  Click on the picture below to go to directly to my store!  Happy Shopping!

It's Testing Time Already??????????????

Where has the year gone?  I can't believe we will begin state testing in two weeks.  Did I get it all covered?  Are they going to bubble and not get lost in the answer sheet?  I am starting to have those testing nightmares already!  Ha Ha!

This post will be all about test review.  YIPPPPEEEEE!

We reviewed conjunctions with a quick activity.  Each child picked out two sentences that they could join together with a conjunction.  They wrote each sentence on a sentence strip.  Next, they glued a "glue bottle conjunction" to join the two sentence strips.  This really helped them understand that they had to "glue" the sentence together to make it correct.  We still are working on capital letters and punctuation, but they basically have the idea.

I had to share some other Pinterest finds that another teacher on my hall found.  She made this cute replica from a picture she saw on Pinterest.  So cute to help them remember the difference between area and perimeter.  I'm going to made this to my charts for next week.

 They made some "pledges" for testing time.  "OWL" use my BEST Test Taking Strategies.  Adorable!  Each child made their own owl and write their favorite strategy on it.

We made a BRAG BOARD on the chalkboard to show off good work from our review activities.  The kids LOVE to see who's papers got picked and we make a huge deal as we put new stuff up.  Here is a picture of the board from one day this week.

                           

We reviewed magnets and made these flipbooks.  They turned out GREAT!

We have been using several packets from my TPT store to help them review.  At this point in the year I don't have time to spend with a lot of prep.  Most of them are just print and GO!  Which I LOVE!

The first one is no prep to review sentences that don't belong.  It's a project on my board and use product.  No copies at all.

Elapsed time!  Holy cow is that a hard skill.  We have been much more successful since we started putting it on a number line.  Here is something that we will be using next week to review.  It is another SCOOT game that is a simple print and go.  Nothing to put together.

We are also reviewing place value with a SCOOT game.  Can you tell we love to play SCOOT!  My kids LOVE to see the cards hanging up when they come in.  It's so easy and it gets them up and moving.  

It has an answer sheet and key, as do all the games.  Since paper is a little hard to come by this time of year, we are going to just write our answers on notebook paper.

We will also being using one of my newest products for math test prep.  All you have to do is project the questions on the screen.  It comes with answer cards that you can print off for the kids to use or you can use whiteboards.  

I also have math and ELA test prep available in my TPT store for my 1st and 2nd grade friends.  It is aligned to common core and SAT 10.  All of the test prep bundles are on sale right now.  : )

So that's about it for today.  I am getting very close to my first goal with my blog and TPT.  As soon as I hit it look for some very special "thank you" giveaway and a sale to celebrate.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Happy Teaching!

Tracy

Homophones and Prefixes.... OH MY!

We have been really busy in our classroom!  Our first big tackle of the week was working on homophones.  After we spent some time defining and giving examples of the 25 words we worked on last week, we read the BEST BOOK!

It is written by Gene Barretta.  It is a cute story about a deer's Aunt Ant and she writes a letter to him that starts off Dear Deer,.....  I bet you get the storyline!  So much fun and the kids loved it!  We read it together and then picked out favorite parts.  We discussed how the author used two or more sets of homophones on one set of pages.  We "noticed" that the pictures went along with what each homophone meant and how clever the author was to write a story like this.

Now for the CHALLENGE!  Yes, we love a challenge.  The kids got to either decide if they wanted to work with a partner or by themselves.  (Easy way to stick in STUDENT CHOICE from our evaluation model!)  They had to pick one or two sets of homophones and write a page like the author did in the story.  To add a little higher challenge for my top kids, they had to write more than one page.  Most of them divided their paper into four and came up with four great ideas!  We shared them and the kids rolled laughing at their amazing work!  Here are samples!

This was the first time I did this activity, but it goes in the KEEPER pile!  Completely engaging for the kids and lots of fun.

We also have been working on prefix and suffix.  We are great at identifying if it is a prefix or suffix, but we are struggling with what different prefixes or suffixes mean.  We made this flip book to help us practice. 

On the inside they had to sort a list of words that I had on the smart board and then they had to add some of their own.  Very easy to do and was a simple grade!

I am nearing a HUGE, BIG, GIANT, ENORMOUS milestone on Teacher Pay Teacher!  Please keep checking back because I will be having a flash freebie and a giveaway to thank everyone that has purchased my products.  I will be sending an email out to everyone that is following my store so they don't miss it.  If you aren't already following my store, you can click this link to do so:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Tracy-Smith-9427

Happy teaching!
Tracy

Dr.Seuss Fun!

Well all of the ice and snow kept us out of school for several days and we missed Dr. Seuss Week!  I was so disappointed, but we are planning to do it when we get back from spring break.  A little late, but still will be so much fun!

We did get one project done before the snow hit.

Writing is always part of everything we do.  This year I have made it a real priority to make sure that we write at least once each day.  I gave each student an outline of the hat.  We looked a different Dr. Seuss books and brainstormed what we saw.  Bright colors, crazy designs, bold stripes, and everything else they could think of.  For homework they decorated their hat anyway they wanted and wrote a paragraph to describe it.  They couldn't put their name anywhere on it and they turned it in a manila folder so no one had any idea who designed which hat.  While they kids were at music, we hung all of the hats in the hall.  We took turns reading different descriptions and the kids had two guesses to try and pick which hat belonged with it.  WHAT FUN!  The smiles on their faces when they heard all of positive comments about their hat were priceless!  

We gave away two prizes.  The criteria was simple....  the hat and the description went together.  One of my students actually took it a step further.  She wrote her paragraph in somewhat of a Dr. Suess form.  It was so cute!  Here are some up close pictures of the hats.  

This was the best activity that I have ever done for Dr. Seuss.  It's a KEEPER for years to come!

Happy Teaching!

Tracy