Spring into Contractions

I just wanted to pop in really quickly to share my latest pack with you, it is all about contractions with a Spring theme.
It includes a poster for you to display as a visual reminder for students, Match and Write, Contraction Caterpillar Craftivity, Contraction Snap and some extra printables for you to extend or consolidate.  You can get yours here from my TpT store as usual it is on sale at 20% off for the first week.

If you are a Facebook follower check out my Free for Fans button to get a freebie from this pack, if you aren't a FB follower click on th FB button above and like my page to get your freebie!

I enjoyed making this pack as it is just heading into Autumn here and starting to get quite chilly in the mornings so to make something bright and cheerful helped me forget about the cold weather a coming!

Enjoy your week

Teacher toys

I was going to post this last night but could not pass up the opportunity to join in Farley's linky...so it got bumped to tonight.
I want to share with you these waaaayyy cool teacher "toys" I got in the mail this week.  These talking points are so much fun

Basically you have a 10 second message you can record on them, then when you press them they playback the message.  I could see mountains of ideas using these and of course I could not wait to use them, so our first activity had to be a whole class activity so that we could ALL use them.  So I recorded a question about bullying on each recorder then each group of 5-6 children had to discuss the question and record their ideas or experiences on a piece of paper.  Each group was given a coloured Sharpie so we could see what ideas belonged to which group, the only "rule" was that they were not allowed to write something that had already been written.  Here are some pics of them hard at work.

 You can see the talking point in the middle of each table

Here is some of their ideas of  "Can you think of a time you or someone else was bullied, what happened."  They only had 5 minutes at each station so their responses were quite short, however the discussion preceeding was amazing!

This little boy is writing down what you could do if you saw someone being bullied.  As you can see each group had a different coloured Sharpie so it was easy to see what each group had contributed.

I was so impressed with the amount of discussion these talking points created and it meant that those kiddos who usually get left behind with having to read were able to make a meaningful contribution without worrying about their ability.   I plan on using them in Daily 5 next, oh my goodness the possibilities are endless!

The other really fun teacher "toy" I got in the mail a couple of days later were these babies

                                            
It is a homophone game called Double Duel, but I really just wanted it for the buzzers, hehe.  Each buzzer makes a different noise and the "caller" read the clues to what the word is eg a fathers male child and a bright object in the sky, the student has to answer and then spell the hompohones.  We had a blast with these but be warned...they are loud!  We also had a group quiz in the afternoon about their knowledge of our Austalian unit we have been studying this term.  I also put it into my Working on Words Daily 5 box.....any guesses if it was popular!

Well that is it! I have to say they were not all that expensive and I got them from Amazon.
I have had to have some stern words with a frown about making sure that we treat them gently if we want them to last for more than one game and only one student had to leave the game out of 25, not bad odds really.

Currently for the first time!

I am linking up for my FIRST currently with Farley at Oh Boy Fourth Grade.  I have really enjoyed reading everyone's posts each month and always thought, I must do that and never got around to it.....well I got my tail into gear and finally got to it!  So here goes!

I love cooking shows and just can't get enough of them, I wouldn't say I am a great cook but I do love to get ideas from them, although it does make me hungry when I am blogging.

This post was actually going to be about my new talking points and buzzers that came this week. 

 I have to thank Rikki at The Hive for her post on finding these little babies and I will post more about the activities we have been doing with them this week.

Bills.....need I say more!

We have 8 school days left before our end of Term 1 holidays, we will be heading down to Tasmania to visit my in laws and I am looking forward to relaxing and catching up with them, ( I like my in laws and get along really well with my mother in law, yes we may be abnormal, heehee.)

Now some of you may say that a new pair of grey boots is not a need but when you are a shoe-a-holic It. Is. A. Need.  My other boots are lonely and need a new friend.

My advice for new bloggers is to Google as many tutorials as you can find, not only will you find some great you tube info but there are sooooo many blogs that offer great tutorials as well.

I will definitely be posting about my buzzers and talking points tomorrow.  Now go ahead and link up!

Easter Sale!

To celebrate Easter and spending time with my family I am throwing a 20% off sale at my TpT store, hop (heehee) on over to pick up a couple of bargains.  I am also nearly finished my Spring into Contractions pack so look out for that in the next couple of days.

Easter fun and a freebie

I am probably a bit late with this Easter post but I wanted to share a few pics of the Easter activities we have been doing.
We have been really focussed in the difference between pronouns, proper nouns and general nouns, so I created a Hunt the Easter Noun to help them consolidaate the differences.

Here are my littles on a pronoun, proper noun and noun Easter hunt.  I had one of my darlings hide the cards for me before school, (she was so proud that she knew where they all were!)  Then they had to find them and record them in the correct columns on their sheet.

They also had some Easter sentences that they had to match up.  I put them into the little plastic eggs that they sell at the $2 shop and they got to search through all the eggs, match the sentence beginning with the correct ending then record them into their journals.  They had alot of fun!

We have also been using our little plastic eggs for matching multiplications and skip counting (I forgot to take photos of that one, whoops!)

They are really enjoying our Easter activities and if you would like a copy of the Hunt the Easter Noun packet (a bit late for this year I know) you can get your copy here

I have left one card blank for you to put in your own name as a Proper Noun, I don't know why but they get a real kick out of it!  

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 Well, one more school day, 4 days off then back to school for 2 more weeks!  Have a great Easter everyone and if you are travelling, be safe!

 

How Pinteresting Easter edition

Well with Easter just around the corner it would be very remiss of me to not have a How Pinteresting Easter edition.  This was actually a little more difficult than what you think, there are sooooo many great pins out there about Easter.
Without further ado....

This is way too cute!

These would look great as classroom decoration

Great activity for number recognition, you could also adapt this idea for just about any concept, number facts, time, fractions, sight words, blends it really is endless.

An easy and cute craft for the kiddos to do at school or home.

This is such a fun game to play with the kiddos, not sure if I would let them get all the chocolate though!

Well I hope you have found some fun easy things to do for Easter in your classroom, can't wait for the Easter Bunny to visit my classroom!

PS Thanks to Mel @ From the Pond for the cute Easter Bunny in my How Pinteresting badge.  It is part of her Graphics Club.

Telling the time and Easter activities

Hi all,
I just wanted to share a few pics of the happenings in my classroom in the last week or so.  I have had so much going on I feel like I am just catching my breath........in time to start planning for next term, oh they joy!

Well we have been looking at time as mentioned in my last How Pinteresting post, you can read about it here.

So we made these fabulous flip clocks that allow the students to have the 5 minute mark under the numbers. First we wrote the clock numbers on a small paper plate, this was the first challenge for some of them.

                                        Here you can see one of my kiddos writing the          10 min mark under the number 2

Then we made our minute and hour hand and labelled these, we also divided the clock into quarters and labelled o'clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to.

(Can you tell how well trained my kiddos are already not to look at the camera!!)

When we put our clocks together we were then able to use them to....

make our daily shedule that matched analogue time with digital time.  Match digital and analogue times and count the minutes in 5 minute intervals, and.......

pass the time with our friends!   Yes it was Crazy hair day on that day.

My kiddos loved this activity and I can really see the benefits from them making the flap clocks.  I randomly ask them through the day now what the time is and you can see them counting around in 5's and making sure they are checking where the hour hand is.

Before I go I wanted to let you know about the Easter activities I have in my TpT store, I have been so focussed on school that I forgot to tell you all about them.

Here is my Coin Toss Bunny Hop game.

Students toss a coin to either move to a higher or lower number and try to be the first to get to the other side,  because it uses chance the game is different each time they play it.  I have also included 3 different levels to cater for individual needs.

Click on the pic to get your copy!

Next up is my Easter Bunny Craftivity pack

There are 6 different writing templates to choose from, both fiction and non fiction to go with the bunny template, that you can paint, draw, collage whatever you can think.  Just click on the pic to get a copy.

Hope your week is going well, I will be back with some pics of our Monet inspired Waterlilies collages.