Nautical Classroom Decor for the New School Year

Hey guys!

Hope everyone is having a great summer! Mine has been fun so far but I am excited to get back in the classroom and start decorating for the upcoming year. At my school we can't get back in until August 5th because they are repainting so I am patiently waiting. 

While thinking of a new theme for my classroom, it's hard for me to shy away from an ocean theme. (It's where I pretend I am during those stressful days in the school year) I have had a beach theme for the majority of my teaching career but I wanted to spice things up a bit. Instead of just bright colors, I wanted to make it more beach house like or nautical. I could already picture myself getting tired of the red and blue, so since pink is my favorite color, it seemed obvious to change the red to pink. I searched a tpt and found the perfect clipart/color combo that won't be too many of the same colors at MyClipArtStore. I wanted to do a lot of navy and white fabrics in my classroom, so I like the fact that there is that light blue and pink added to this and took advantage of it when making my decor set. Here are some pictures of the set that you can get at my tpt store by clicking here or any of the pictures below. 

Behavior Chart - I will put spray painted white clothes pins with their names on it and they will start out on green every day.

Months of the Year for Classroom Birthdays

Welcome Sign

 Desk Name Plate

Table Numbers - I also included circles with just the picture inside. I haven't decided yet whether I am using numbers of calling the tables by picture. For example, "Starfish may line up now."

Have a wonderful weekend!!

Economics Unit

Hey guys!

Many of you will be either coming back from Spring Break or at the end of it. I am at the end of mine. I definitely had a wonderful one but stayed up way to late so we will see how tomorrow goes! :)  

Anyways I thought I'd share something that our second graders do around this time of year to learn about Economics. This is definitely a more hands on approach and I cannot think of a better way for them to absorb this information! First, we talk about words that we use when discussing Economics. Once we have an understanding of words like goods, services, producer, and consumer, we will break off into groups of two or three. From there, we will start creating a business plan and sample advertisement. Here is what it looks like: 

Click on the pictures above to see everything I do during this unit. The kids will start collecting things from home and creating their good or service. They can choose anything from paper airplanes to a nail salon. Here are a few pics of what the students chose to do last year to give you some ideas.

Paper Airplanes

Bookmarks

Jewelry

Puppet Show

Face Painting

As you can see, whether they chose a good or service, they had things to work on and had a blast! Hope this helped some of you get an idea of different options when it comes to teaching Economics. I am excited to see what my kids have in "store" for me this year! Let me know what you think and I hope you enjoy your week ahead!

Black History Month

Happy Monday! 

Or happy that it's over with :) Monday's are so hard..but once they are over, the week seems to fly by! Plus I get to watch Juan Pablo on the bachelor tonight..so I'm happy!

Anyways, I wanted to share a couple things that I've done for MLK Day/Black History Month. You can find the following unit, along with book and website suggestions here: Black History Month

We started the unit by writing a dream that they have to make their community or country a better place. We continued learning about MLK by creating a "was had wanted" chart along with a circle map that listed facts we know about Dr. King. Then, we compared Ruby Bridges to ourselves, allowing us to see what it was like in her shoes. We wrote character traits about Rosa Parks, which was an easy transition from our Reader's Response character map. 

Lastly, we broke into groups and each received an important vocabulary word or person. I gave them a piece of paper that I framed with a sharpie and drew a few lines at the bottom. They needed to draw a picture and write a definition or explain the most important thing about that person. After this activity, we were ready to take our end of the unit quiz which is shown here. 

I hope some of these activities helped if you are struggling with ideas or just time! 

Reader's Response

Happy Friday! 

In the second half of the year, my district moves away from literacy stations and more towards Reader's Response, while the teacher does Guided Reading. In the past, my students have struggled to come up with something to write about or to vary responses from day to day. I've created this chart to help the them get started.

Since my kids sit all around the room during independent reading I made a smaller chart for them to use anywhere in the classroom. You can pick your freebie by clicking here. 

front view

back view

I also wanted to be sure the students weren't picking the same type of response each time so I made another sheet to go with it. They must add a tally on each one before they are allowed to repeat a response. Each time they fill a tally in all of the columns, they get a choice of what type of response they do. 

My afternoon class was able to start choosing from the list today and I was excited to see that they were understanding what to do and completing it. Here is a sample of one of my student's work. I gave each student a copy of the character trait list that you can download for free here from Workshop Classroom. This sheet helped a lot when teaching different character traits during our study about Rosa Parks. We also talked about how they have to show evidence from the text on why the character encompasses that trait.

Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your super bowl weekend!

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Valentine's Day

Hey guys!

With Valentine's Day coming up, I like to think of inexpensive ways to give my students a gift since I have two classes. Here is something that I will use with my kiddos this year!

Click the following link to get your set of coupons free from my tpt store!

Valentine Coupons and Bookmarks