THIS & THAT AND CYBER MONDAY!

Hi, Friends! Long time, no see! How the heck are ya? I’ve been one busy chica! Someone pressed fast forward on my calendar and clock over the last few weeks, so now that we’ve got some time to catch up, I thought I’d share a little of what we’ve been up to!

We’ve spent time learning about where we live on the map! We had big fun creating these little cuties! We started by reading the book Me on the Map.  After a fun discussion, we drew mini self portraits, cut them out and created the first circle for a cover. On the cover, we listed our city. The next circle represents our state. The dark green circle represented our country and the last, our planet.

Admittedly, we like to doodle in Room 113. On each page of this fun little flipbook, we added a simple drawing to represent each of the spaces that we inhabit on the map.

We also enjoyed A Cupcake Party while creating this fun little story map! I love our reading series. We have a lot of fun bringing the stories to life as we read! Who says anchor charts have to be square? =)

(Don’t shoot me, but see that little card in the bottom corner?)  It’s the E from our CAFE menu sign!  I left the acronym up for reference, but we’ve taken our CAFE board down.  I *LOVE*, absolutely *ADORE* the structure of Daily 5, BUT the CAFE menu wasn’t meaningful to my group of 6 year olds, so we’re making better use of that little piece of {wall} real estate.

We still use the strategies during think alouds, read alouds, and small group.

                  

What firstie doesn’t need to work on word sorts? Yep! We’ve been doing a little of that too! We had fun with a little play on words in the midst of the learning too! Get it? It’s a “Synonym Roll” and an “ANTonym”? One of my little girls giggled the ENTIRE afternoon after she realized what the play on words meant! It was just hilarious!

Another of my kiddos thought our cinnamon roll looked more like the top of a lollipop, but hey…we were out of brown butcher paper, so we had to work with what we had!  I passed out each of the word cards to friends at the carpet to read and discuss.  As each pair was called on, they had to read their set of words and the group blurted either “synonym” or “antonym”. Afterwards, their card was glued to correct chart.  THEN….

….the ANTonym got hungry and took a bite out of the Synonym roll and we headed out to recess, lol!

We’re going to extend identifying synonyms with some sweet word work over the next week or so!  You can find this little set that we’re going to be digging into in my TPT shop ON SALE as part of the huge cyber Monday sale! Click the pic to head over and check it out!

If you’d like a sweet sample, leave a comment with your email address below! I’ll share a few synonym rolls with the first 3 friends that do.

Thanks for sticking around to check out my ramblings about this and that! Hope you had a yummy Thanksgiving!

WE LOVE OUR VETERANS

Hi, Friends!  How are ya?

Happy Veterans’ Day! We’ve really enjoyed this long weekend! It’s come on the heels of my son’s birthday, so we’ve continued the celebration with my sister and nephews.  It felt great to have the time to just relax and laugh until it hurt! I’m related to some REAL characters!

Our school is located in a community that is on the outskirts of the largest military base in the free world.  Most of our families are connected to the military in some way.

To honor our community of veterans, our school holds an annual Veterans’ Day parade.

Military parents come in to walk through the halls with their respective student (s) while we line up to honor and appreciate them.  It seems like a such a simple thing, but for so many of us with personal connections to the military, it actually becomes pretty emotional!

And to see the pride on the children’s faces as they walk through a cheering crowd with “their” veteran is priceless!

We celebrate our veterans by creating  little soldiers and writing simple thank you notes. I have parents from years past that tell me they still have them. My husband actually took the one that my son made for him on his last deployment! Many of them have traveled the globe and the kids really get into the lesson because they can make such a personal connection to it!

I actually created the black line while looking at my husband’s uniform hung over the chair one night! Who says a Sharpie can’t be a girl’s best friend? =)

Some of our friends chose to create retro uniforms with hats.

While another group of our friends chose to draw and color theirs.  I love the creativity that emerges from one idea being put in the hands of a number of different people.  It’s fun to see each teacher’s and student’s personality shine through their work.

The real joy comes from seeing the appreciation felt by our military members when they see them! You can grab this little craft from my TPT or TN shop to create a smile for the veterans in your life!

Enjoy the rest of your long weekend and don’t forget to thank a veteran!

Did you see it?

Hi, Friends! How are ya?

I posted today.  Did you see it? No? Well, I thought you might’ve missed it because its at another site! THIS girl is excited to be one of a new group of contributors to Classroom Freebies Too! Yep! Exciting, right?  Welllll, its exciting for ME, lol!

Annnnd, I wanted to share my news with YOU!  I couldn’t embark upon something new without all of you! Click the pic below to check out my first little post and with a name like Classroom Freebies Too….you already KNOW there’s a little something in it for ya!

 

 

 

Enjoy and have a great week!