Five for Friday: Compound Words Fun

Hi, Friends! How are ya? I’m really beginning to love Five for Fridays! We had so much fun in class this week, it was a little hard to narrow it down, but I think I may have managed it. We introduced compound words. They’re absolutely one of my favorite things to teach…



…but as I got ready to begin the week, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what books I had used last year! Enter some fab friends that helped me out over at the FB page and voila! We were stocked with suggested titles, off and running!

   

The kids absolutely loved predicting compound words as we read Once There Was a Bull…(frog)! The riddles in Strawberry Bullfrog brought about lots of giggly fun too. We used the cards from my Compound Word Work packet to play a quick game. Each student was given a “little word” and had to move around the room silently to find their partner. Tammy’s cutie patootie clip art made for some fantastic self checking for my little struggling readers to match the “little words” to make their “big word”.



See those little apples on the floor? Well, we read a story about a silly little rabbit who thought the sky was falling when one fell on his head. As my kiddos were finishing up an assignment at their desks, wouldn’t you know it?! The same gust of wind that caused that little apple to hit Little Rabbit on the head blew through our classroom and knocked ALL of the apples right off of our apple tree! It even separated compound words back into two!!! Oh, my!



Well, we couldn’t just leave the apples spread out all over the floor!



Soooo, after collecting their assignment, each student stood, collected an apple, and walked the room to find it’s partner. They then, built a compound word to post back onto the apple tree. It seems the wind is still blowing because one little apple is missing its partner. =) I hope Little Rabbit and his friends didn’t eat it! You can grab the apples we used here.

Hopefully, we’ll find it on the floor Monday morning. Next up….we’ll be reading The Tree from Poppleton Forever. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yep! That little tree cutout is going to come in handy next week too!



Have a great weekend! See ya next Friday! =)

Valentine Five for Friday

Hi~ya, Friends! TGIF! It’s been one long, FUN, Ex.haust.ing….week! I’m linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching and Stacy from Simpson’s Superstars to share the love from this week.

 
We started the week by floating along with word work goodies! Most of the skills we worked on this week, thank goodness, were review skills because the chatterbox monster reared his ugly head again! Either that or my parents let their kids into the Valentine’s Day candy a little early! Man….thank goodness, for Daily 5.  Without it, I’m pretty sure my hearing would not still be intact.

We worked on using context clues to determine the meanings of words and naming synonyms. I thought replacing them in sentences might be a bit tough, but it wasn’t! It was actually one of their favorite activities this week.



Frrrrrooooooggy……is always a hit! There were tons of grins and giggles when we read Froggy’s First Kiss. As we were reading the story, I replaced Froggy’s name a few times with one of my biggest chatterbox’s name and the kid’s totally “got” the reference. That brought on an insane amount of giggles that caused us to make connections and enjoy the story even more!
After having so much fun creating our Valentine bags with Froggy, he carried right on over into math. We have six table groups in our room. In the middle of each table, there was a heart with a fact family chosen by the students. We used digital dice on the Mimio to choose our numbers. Remember all that talking, I mentioned? Well along with it, came a bad case of the wiggle worms! Rather than fight it, we incorporated it into the lesson because they really, REALLY, REAlly needed to move.

Each student listened and followed directions to fold and cut out their fact family houses. After doing so, they rotated (when told) to each of the six tables to write the four number sentences included in each fact family. To complete the foldable, an illustration of Froggy and Frogelina’s classroom was added.



My sweeties showered me with a few of my favorite things! *LOVE*! They may have motors running those lips, but they’re pretty observant! Admittedly, I don’t eat much. I graze. I’m constantly nibbling on something. One of my students noticed that I always have the same green water cup, so he brought me a new one. Another brought my favorite trail mix and candies and lots and lots of yummy chocolate. They’re just so sweet!



After recovering from all the overflow of l-o-v-e in the room, we floated off into space to use future tense in our writing and make connections to Science. I love how these simple little astronauts turned out!

The doorbell’s ringing….so that means our Friday night Domino’s pizza has arrived! See ya later! Pizza & pjs, here I come!

Five for Friday {1st Timer =)}

Hi-ya Friends! Since I’m skipping my usual Friday evening nap to keep up with a tweenage sleepover, I thought I’d link up with DoodleBugs Teaching for my first Five for Friday!



These are actually a few of my fave random pics from the last couple of weeks because my iphone camera has finally given up on me! I suppose I’ll have to do something with the over 1200 pics on it to get it up and running again!



We’ve been having fun cutting up contractions. This week we also made a flipbook, but my kids snatched them up and took them home before I was able to snap a pic! Considering my iphone camera has had a ENOUGH of me, I guess I’ll have to catch the next one.



We’ve begun exploring editing and grammar during our morning message. Do you ever find yourself asking if you actually just said something out loud? If we really stop and think about some of the things we say during the course of the day, we’re really quite funny! As we were wrapping up this little discussion, I was doing everything to keep from falling apart laughing because I kept mentioning all the “missing periods”. I know…..geez! Next time, we’ll stick to capitalization or spelling, lol!



The kiddos have had a ball doing research using Pebblego. I absolutely love this site! It provides easy access to great nonfiction topics for students to research, gather data on, and even has an option for them to print a reflection sheet to show what they learned! This is one of my kiddos absolute faves and mine too….because it takes 0 prep time!



Today we celebrated the 100th day! And I lived to tell about it! Ha!



This one’s not school related at all, but it’s definitely one of my favorite pics from the week! I’ve been doing a little redecorating and *LOVE* how this little arrangement turned out. Why do builders insist upon putting windows right over the bathtub in neighborhoods where the houses are a spitting distance apart? It cost $0 because each of these babies were in the back of my closet!

Whooo hooo!  Have a great weekend and don’t forget to check out some of the other cute Five for Friday posts!

What a week, CURRENTLY, & a sale!

The week started out GREAT!



The heaven’s opened and one of my little struggling students had a wonderful “lightbulb” moment. I love this kid to pieces because he’s almost as stubborn as I am! He’s very creative about avoiding reading, but little does he know, he’s met his match in a teacher that’s just as determined to see him GROW!

On Monday, he sat down to read with me and was so excited to have successfully read his guided reading book. It was one of those moments, where I seriously had to fight back tears! I’m a big softy for “my kids”. After he did such a fantastic job, I sent him to read to another teacher. His face lit up like a Christmas tree and my heart just melted into a big ole blob of proud.

When he came back, he told me to hold out my hand and then gave me the stickers that my team mate had given him! {tear} He said that I had worked really hard to help him and he wanted me to have it! {Insert content sigh-------------------------->here.} I wore those stickers ALL afternoon!

THEN, I was voluntold to help with benchmark testing and had to leave my beloved land of firsties for two days. No biggie, I just hated having to press “pause” after having the type of breakthrough I’d been working for all.year.long.



In math, we worked on telling time. The kids had the most fun working with the practice clocks, but were very insightful during our discussion about analog and digital clocks. They realized that most of the time, we don’t use analog clocks. Most of the time, we don’t even use clocks at all…..we check the time on our phones, ipods, ipads and computers!



In Science, we’re currently engrossed in objects in the sky. The kiddos really enjoyed creating sundials and learning how they related to telling time! This was the brainchild of one of my coworkers and took a minute for me to understand, so I was glad that my kiddos enjoyed it so much. I’m not sure who had more fun checking the position of the shadow during the day…me or them!

And now…..wouldn’t you know! Another month has come and gone! It’s time for CURRENTLY! =)

 
Click the pic to check out the great links at Farley’s Oh Boy, Fourth Grade! I’d better run and get those lesson plans written AND set up for the BIG SALE! That clone seems to be on back order!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Tanya-Dwyer