“OVER THE MOON” EXCITED…

…about being the Featured Teacher Author in the  Teachers Pay Teachers newsletter today!  Having the opportunity to collaborate and learn with so many awesome teachers across the globe is a blessing in itself. Being featured and getting attention for my store was icing on the cake!  It’s been a great day! I am so thankful and just tremendously blessed!  All of the traffic, excitement, and congrats have really got my wheels turning…..now I’ve just got to calm them down long enough to create all the random awesomeness floating around in my head!

My two featured items are pictured below and you can click the pic to check them out if you’d like!

      

April has been a very busy month (aren’t they all) for us in the classroom.  It is National Poetry Month and the Month of the Military child.  I teach in a community that is primarily military so we couldn’t let this opportunity pass us by to recognize our littlest soldiers!  Everything about being a child in a military family is just a little bit different, sometimes difficult….but always special!  We’ve had fun creating original poems.  One of the poem types we chose to play around with was an acrostic.

After introducing the concept with the letters that spell out my name.  {Yeah…I let them tell me what they REALLY think of me!} Heheeehhehe…come to find out, they REALLY do like me! I was even likened to a character in a Dr. Seuss book!  I guess that verifies that I’m pretty animated!  I’ve got the greatest class of kiddos on the planet!  Wouldn’t trade ‘em for anything; they’re the best!

You can click the pic to grab a copy for the special military kiddos close to your heart.  There are two additional versions that will come up on the GoogleDoc: one with a saluting boy and another with a saluting girl.  I like to doodle, so we used the version above to write and illustrate.  Each kiddo drew themselves under the helmet!  They turned out absolutely adorable! Did I take pics?  N-O! For my kiddos that are not or chose not to do the military child poem….I allowed them to do an acrostic poem using the letters of their name.  Sometimes, thinking about deployed parents or how they feel about it can be a little much….

While the acrostic poems brought out our sentimental sides, we had pure fun learning that some poems follow very strict rules and that not all poems rhyme.  I say we had fun! Man, we worked out little bottoms off to follow these rules and come up with different cinquains….I’m still hoping that I even pronounced that one correctly, lol!

We used Cara Caroll’s poetry freebie to model and think aloud during small group to create these original pieces of poetry.  It was a great review of parts of speech and left us with a little brain pain from thinking so hard.  We did the one above together and created self-titled poems with a little help from friends in small group.  Check out what some of my little poets came up with!

                      

Pretty good, if I must say so myself! Some of our buds down the hall made the most adorable clouds with lists! We plan to wrap our poetry study up with some tongue twisting alliteration this week.  I can hardly believe it, but it actually IS almost May!  Our last full month of school!

To celebrate the end of the year, we’ll be continuing our A-Z Countdown to 2nd Grade.  My goal is to share what we did each day with you, so we can spend these last few days getting to know each other a little better! For B Day…we hung out on beach towels with our favorite book!  C Day brought out the caring side of us all as we purposely used kind words to compliment our friends.

Tomorrow will be D day….we will Drop Everything And Read for a while!  What do you do to celebrate reaching this milestone?  Enjoy what’s left of your weekend!  I’m off to get groceries for the week and throw the baseball around with my little sonshine!  Have a magical Monday!