Sub Plans Made Easy with a FREEBIE and a SCHOLASTIC GIVEAWAY!!!

Hi Peeps! Traci Clausen with Engaging Teaching here... sharing about that fabulous topic... making sub plans!

Taking a day off as a teacher means writing sub plans. We all know how much that weighs on whether or not we take that day! In my little world, life has been in the way a lot recently and that has resulted in quite a few sub days. For these days, I am so thankful for the things that make planning for a day I can’t be in the classroom so much easier.

Stop by my latest post and grab a copy of my sub plan template and a FREE editable version that you can edit for yourself!!


Leaving Scholastic News for my sub to use with my kiddos is a big part of keeping my sub planning simple.

Don't forget to enter the SCHOLASTIC GIVEAWAY while you are visiting, too!

Visit Engaging with Traci Clausen for a chance to win and to grab your FREEBIE!

Gobbled Up Numbers!

Hey y'all, it's Michelle Hudgeons from Smitten With First. I wanted to share a quick math freebie with you all.  All you need is dice and construction paper! 

Let your students know that some very hungry turkeys are coming to your room today and they are going to gobble up numbers!!! 

Give each student two dice and have them roll the dice to generate a number to build. The two dice will be their number for the tens place and ones place.  After students roll their number, they will color in their ten frames. The ten frames will become the turkey's feathers. 

After completing the ten frames and turkeys, students will record (on the recording sheet) how many tens and ones their turkey gobbled up! 

You can have your students go ahead and write the number that their turkey ate inside the turkey's belly, OR have your students trade turkeys with another student and have that student write what number the turkey ate. 

You can download this freebie here or by clicking on one of the pictures below. 

Teacher Gift FREEBIE

Hey y'all! It's Michelle Hudgeons from Smitten With First! 

Incase you're anything like me and you're checking off last minute "to-dos" off your list, I have a cheap and cute teacher gift FREEBIE for you! This weekend while I was at Hobby Lobby, they had all their metal decor half off! Mmmhmmm, that's exactly what I said!!!  I came across these small metal letters that happened to be $5.00 on sale! I couldn't pass them up. I grabbed letters for each of my daughter's teachers, my teammates, and our office staff! I may or may not have bought them out! 

 (Hobby Lobby has both large and small tin letters. I believe the large are around $20 on sale.)

Next, I grabbed a few Scholastic books I had left over from previous book orders, some burlap twine, and these tags for a quick, cheap, simple and cute teacher gift. 

Another idea: Buy a book from Half Price Books along with a gift card and attach it to the tin letter! 

You can find the tags here for FREE! **The download includes both large and small tags depending on if you purchase the large or small tin letters from Hobby Lobby**

Summer Reading Logs & End of School Activities

Hey Blog Hoppers...It's Christy and Tammy from Fluttering Through First Grade!

Summer is right around the corner! But before we hit the beach, we always get asked a lot of questions from parents about summer learning. 

What can I do to help my child over the summer? 

How can we keep all this learning intact until school starts again? 

We're so glad they ask! 

We like to send our students off with a few summer resources that are easy to understand, quick to complete, and motivating to use. We like to keep it fun because it is summer after all!

We all know that one of the easiest ways kids can keep their reading skills fresh all summer long is to read, read, read...and then, read some more! Reading just 20 minutes a day will keep their skills strong and their confidence high. Right? To keep them motivated and reading, we provide our students with these summer reading logs. 

We've included 2 choices with tips for parents to help them support their reader at home. One is for emerging readers who need phonemic awareness and phonics support and the other is for more fluent readers who are working to strengthen their comprehension skills. Sometimes we send both!

We encourage them to work at their own pace, but to please find time each and every day to pick up a book. We even bribe them with a special treat if they bring them back to us at the start of next school year. Whatever works! 

Students can track their summer reading and keep a list of some of their favorite summer reads. 

You can download a free copy of our Summer Reading Log.

We also give each of our students this Sliding Through Summer booklet to work through each day of the week. You can read more about it {here}

Are you counting down the school days until summer? Stop by our blog to see how we wrap up our school year with a few of our favorite end of school activities!

Savor the Flavor! Becoming closer readers

Hi y'all! It's Rachel here today dropping in to tell you about a delicious reading lesson!

Do your kiddos love the speed read? Mine sure do! Many 2nd graders have been told they need to read faster, faster, faster! We have focused on those fluency scores meeting grade level expectations and we forget that sometimes we need to stop. to slow down. to be sure we are comprehending!

My teammie and I did the best (and dare I mention delicious) reading lesson on December to help our kids remember to slow down when we are reading to learn. Of course she found the idea on Pinterest, so if it's your idea BRAVO! Let me know!
So here goes!

What you'll need:
>Scholastic magazine or other article
>package of OREO cookies or some other kind if you prefer, but OREOs are perfect for "savoring"

Pass out your article or magazine and immediately ask them to open it up and follow along. Read the article aloud or even round robin it! I read it aloud.

After reading, tell them we are going to take a quick quiz on what we learned. I had mine put the magazine inside their desk for the time being. Have them number to 3 or 5, nothing too long, on a white board or paper! Ask them questions that could be found right in the text. Ask them things that really were big ideas that they should have heard!

insert groans. hurting bellies. panic.

Now, set their minds at ease. Pull out some OREOs! Woo! Cookies make it all better. I brought my kids to the rug and handed each one an OREO and told them they could eat it. They scarfed them down like they'd not eaten in a week! Then I asked them to tell me about the OREO. I got basic things like it's brown. It's good. It's really good. So we discussed why they couldn't really describe the taste, the feel, the look of the cookie. It was because we shoved them in and swallowed them right up! We didn't think about the cookie! We wanted a snack!

I explained this was just like hearing that article and having a quiz. They couldn't answer the questions because they didn't truly pay attention to it. They didn't have it to refer back to. They were probably playing in their desk!

So everyone got another cookie. We closed our eyes and savored the cookie. Boy was it good. In fact, some had snowmen or Santa on them, They were creamy inside, but hard on the outside. The OREO was really two cookies put together. It was scrumdiddlyumptious (we were reading The BFG!) It was sweet. They felt rough on our tongues. Now we were able to talk about these cookies. We took the time to think about them rather than just gulping them down as fast as we could.

We then applied newfound skill this to the Scholastic article. I had them read one section at a time, marking important info, underlining unknown words to come back to our ask about, talk about it; all the things we ask them to do when we do "close reads"-which we do not begin until January with our kids.

Amazing the difference noticing a cookie can make!

And here's a little lesson overview for you!

Happy Monday Blog Hoppers!

Rachel

Compound Word FREEBIES

Hey y'all! It's Michelle Hudgeons from Smitten With First. 

I wanted to share a few compound word resources with you all that I have been using this week...and the best part is... they are FREE!  

I recently came across the book Once There Was a Bullfrog and wish I would have found it sooner when teaching compound words.  If you haven't read it, you can listen to the read aloud here. 

I like to pause the story at the end of each page for the students to guess the second part of the compound word. They think it is hilarious. 

Hativities are quite the big deal in our room so we used these Flip It hats to identify compound words. 

The students have to find the matching compound word for each set of words and glue underneath the correct flip. 

You could also have your students write the compound words at the top of each flip. You can download these hats here. 

We made these fun little ladybugs to spruce up our hallway. 

My students had to write the words on the wings and the compound word in the middle. 

You can download the ladybugs here. 

One of my all time favorite compound word activities is something I came across several years ago in a workbook, Big Book of Everything for First Grade. Each student picks a compound word and illustrates each part of the word. Afterwards, you combine all the pictures into a class book. These always turn out so creative and fun! 

Hope you found something to add to your filing cabinet today! 

Thanksgiving Freebies

Hi, Erica Bohrer here from Erica's Ed-Ventures.  All of us at Blog Hoppin' are very thankful for you!  To say thank you, I put together some Thanksgiving Freebies by Blog Hoppin' authors.  Just click to download from TeachersPayTeachers.

Thanksgiving Freebies

I like to tell my students why I am thankful for them by writing each student a personalized note.  I created this freebie a few years back.  You can type on the PDF file or print and handwrite a note.

Here is another Thanksgiving themed freebie, it is a file folder word wall with pictures.  I just love using these with my kiddos!

Here are some freebies by my fellow Blog Hoppers:

  

 

  

  

  

Clip Art:

Thanks for reading!  If you want to start getting ready for the holiday season, check out my Kindness Elves post: