Summer Bucket List!!

I’m linking up with Deanna Jump for her summer bucket list Linky Party!  Here they are, in no particular order!

10.  MOVE

We’ve been talking about moving for a while now, and are finally getting a “move” on this summer!  For a bunch of reasons, it makes sense for us to relocate closer to where we work – which means less time in the car for my little cutie and also a MUCH shorter commute for his momma and daddy.  All that makes for more fun family time together! 

9. Spend time NOT thinking about school

This winter I started up my TpT store and this little blog.  And I’ve found myself quite obsessed with it!  The things I’m doing in my classroom, which have always worked just fine, are now potential projects – things I can make better for both my little ones and for others too!  But this summer, I’d really like to take time to just relax… while still blogging and creating a little, I’d like to have just “sit and do nothing with my 1 year old” time. 

8. Blog

I would like to keep up with my blogging, mixing in some school stuff (when I allow myself to think about school!) and some personal stuff.  My favorite bloggers are ones that mix the two – I love getting to know the person behind the teacher!  (Side note: I’m working with Courtney at Blogs Fit for a Queen on a new blog design – and it’s going to be AMAZING!  She’s so great to work with, so reasonably priced, and really fast… I HIGHLY recommend her.  I’ll keep you all posted when it’s “live”!)

7. Have some date nights

I love my little boy and all the time we get to have together – but I miss date nights with my husband!  We’re both so busy all year, and we want to spend as much time with the baby as possible – so this summer, we’re going to make time for just the two of us.  Starting with our FIRST EVER over night away in June.  I’m both THRILLED and sad at the same time.

6. Travel

We do a lot of traveling in the summer, so this feels a little like cheating.  But I’m putting it here because it really is a plan that’s important to me – travel as much as we can. 

5. Walk EVERYDAY

I bought a FitBit this winter, and have been wearing it every day to count my steps.  I do a LOT of walking during my day at school, so as it turns out, I was already logging 10,000 steps without even trying.  So my goal for the summer is to keep it up – and maybe even increase my daily total to 15,000.  I like to lounge by the pool or at the beach all summer, so if I don’t make walking a goal, I’ll quickly find my daily totals slipping to a big fat zero!

4. MOVE

Yes I’m repeating this.  I know I am.  But it’s such a HUGE one for me… and will be interesting and tricky with my little guy running underfoot!

3. Read

I love to read.  Name me one teacher who doesn’t?  But I never ever have time to read for fun during the school year.  This summer, while hanging out at the beach or pool, I want to read NON school related books.  On my Nook, or Kindle, or paper/hardbacks – I don’t care, as long as I’m reading!

2. Keep my boy busy…

so he’ll sleep at night!  He’s a great sleeper usually, but since he won’t be at day care (where he’s constantly engaged and active) it would be easy to slip into a boring day to day routine.  So I want to make sure he’s got something going on every day (even if it’s just going to the beach or the pool) so he’s engaged and still learning!

1. Spend quality time with my family…

without our iphones, ipads, laptops, televisions, etc.  We do spend a lot of time together, but I want to make it a priority that we’re “unplugged” as often as possible so we’re really spending time together.  Except when I’m blogging… J

I’ll be posting pictures of my bucket list on Instagram – so hop over there and follow me! 

What will you be doing this summer?

Ramona Quimby

We’re wrapping up our Ramona unit today.  My kiddos have so loved getting to know her, and especially loved the chapter when Ramona smashed an egg on her forehead – especially because they’ve JUST done a fun egg experiment in science where they balanced text books on top of eggs to see how much weight they could hold before smashing (their record – 31 books!)  Anyway, they’ve been loving Ramona so much, I hate to see her end.  We’ll spend the next few ELA periods working on our R is for Ramona book.  I love to see their little brains hard at work coming up with the words for each page – I love seeing how some of the more obvious letters (H is for Howie) get used for things I’d never thought of instead!

I’m posting this little book in my TpT store as a more general layout.  If you download it (thanks in advance!) it’s easy to copy front to back and cut in half before putting together.  You can also copy it front to back and staple it as a packet – or copy it single sided, cut in half and then put together with a hole punch – 26 pages is too much for at least my little stapler!

On the cover I have them draw their own cover of the book they’ve read.  That way we don’t infringe on any clipart or copyright laws!  I left each page blank for the kiddos to fill out both the letter and the sentence, and I’m including both R is for Ramona and a blank title page – so you can use it for ANY book your kids have read! 

Told you they were obsessed with the egg part!

I just posted the book this evening.  Check it out in my store if you're interested!  It's a nice way to keep the kiddos focused on learning while also waiting out the last few days of school... :)  We have NINE more!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/A-Z-Alphabet-Book-1251957

"Can I Have a Band Aid?"

Does anyone else hear this question 23094820395823904 times a day?  My students, no matter what their injury is, always ask for a band aid.  Now I totally understand the need for a comfort item, and also understand that for some kids it’s just an emotional attachment – but by 2^nd grade, I’m trying to teach them that Band Aids don’t “fix” everything.  We try to address the actual problem and “solve it” with actual helpful solutions – ice packs, refreshing drinks of water, cold wet compresses, etc.  So today, after the 5^th Band aid request, I took it as an opportunity for a mini lesson… I whipped up this small little sign and we brainstormed reasons you might actually need a Band Aid (my favorite – “it’s a BLOOD catcher!”) and reasons you might not.  Then we talked about the PURPOSE of a Band Aid…

Now this handy little sign is posted on my desk with my bucket of Band Aids… here’s to hoping it helps!  How do you all manage injuries and Band Aids?  I'm always looking for new ideas!

Catapults

One of the reasons I love teaching measurement is because it’s such a hands on unit.  Any time I can get my littles out of their seats and moving around I grab it – and measurement lends itself so well to that!

We’re still in the middle of our standardized testing, so there isn’t much time left outside of that to incorporate math lessons.  So when a few minutes popped up today, I grabbed them!  A couple days ago, working in teams, we assembled these cool little catapults (directions for assembling them are below).  

Today I brought them out and we had a little launching competition. What better way to grab the attention of a antsy-pants test taker than to tell them that we’re going to shoot things across the room! I had the kids gather things up that they wanted to launch, then each team got some time to practice using their catapult before the big event...  I had each team choose 5 items to compete with.  We shot them off, looking for the longest shot.  It was fun to see the kids weighing their options, thinking about their practices and comparing with each other before deciding what to pick. 

After each round, the kids used their rulers to measure the distance of their shots.  For the last round, we shook things up a bit and used tape measures - they LOVED having the flexible plastic measuring tapes and they loved the ease of figuring out the measurement.

Building a Catapult 

(this should only shoot things 3-6 feet)

Materials

9 thick popsicle sticks

7-8 rubber bands

1 water bottle cap

Items to launch - we used cap erasers, pom pons, plastic coins, etc.

• Stack 7 popsicle sticks together.  Wrap the ends in a couple rubber bands to hold the stack together. 
• Stack 2 popsicle sticks together.  Wrap one end in a couple rubber bands to hold them together.  Open the other end and insert the large stack in the middle.  Then using another rubber band, wrap the large bundle to the small – we criss crossed it in the middle to really hold it down. 
• Finally hot glue the water bottle cap to the end of the catapult.  I did this to a bunch of popsicle sticks years ago and we just keep reusing these parts each year.

Must-Read Monday!

I stumbled upon this Linky this morning, hosted by Teaching Madness, and it made my heart go pitter pat.  It's no secret around school that I love reading - chapter books, picture books, magazines, blogs - you name it, and I'll read it.  So this was such a fun start to my day!  It got me thinking, and I could write an endless blog about this if I'm not careful!  But hopefully I'll be able to join up with these awesome ladies each week, so I'll get a chance to share everything I'm loving!

So even though I have an endless list, I'm just going to start with the books I've read in the past couple weeks.  I'm teaching measurement right now - a unit that I both love and hate.  I love it because it's such a hands on unit, and the kiddos get to be up moving around, hunting things down to measure.  I hate it because I don't think we have enough time to really dig into the chapter, and because our chapter incorporates all types of measurement - in both the metric system and Imperial measurement.  As it is, my littles have a hard time remembering whether you measure the length of a table in inches, pounds, or Fahrenheit degrees... then we throw in centimeters, kilos, and Celsius?  Sheesh - it's a lot of information!  Then add in that measurement always seems to come during our week of standardized testing - it's crazy!  So I try to add in a lot of read alouds to give them a brain break and also incorporate a little learning.  So here are the most recent books I've read... 

 Although a little silly, my kids love shouting out the problem to the apprentice!

        

This is a fun one at our listening center.  I have a good project we do afterwards too!

I have multiple copies of this book (thank you book fair!).  I have them buddy read.

                  

We read this one today.  The kids loved comparing it to their own pets at home.  I even had one little one shout out, "Hey I'm going to try measuring Cooper!"  (Hopefully Cooper is a pet and not a baby brother?!?)

That's all I'm going to share for now, but let me know what you think!  Now that I know about this Linky, I can be more prepared next week!

#BostonStrong

Today is a day off from school for us - it's marathon day in the city!  I've gone into Boston for the marathon for as many years as I can remember, and when I moved to the city, I was lucky enough to live right on the route for a bunch of years. If you've never experienced the atmosphere for yourself, I can't really paint a vivid enough picture - I STRONGLY encourage you to come witness it yourself once.

Last year's marathon bombings were one of the scariest days I've ever had.  And the subsequent man hunt...  I was on maternity leave and spent the week watching coverage - I couldn't fathom why anyone would do something so horrible.  The manhunt was horrifying and scary - and the way the city shut down completely to hunt the guy out was remarkable.  As tragic and unimaginable as it all was, I am so proud to be from Boston - a place where we don't let someone "dictate our freedom" (as Big Papi said).  The first responders, medical teams, and victims have shown themselves to be such an inspiration.

Not that I expect ANY of the first responders, or victims will ever see this little blog - but I thank them all so much for protecting us, and showing us how big their brave is.

ANTonyms and a FREEBIE!

We’re working on antonyms this week, which I'm loving.  Somewhere in my travels on Pinterest last week, I came across a couple awesome antonym pins.  I can’t seem to find the original poster, (if anyone knows who it is, please let me know so I can give proper credit!) but it seems to be a popular idea – maybe there isn’t an “original” poster!  (Side bar: that’s one of the things I love most about teaching – so many “original” ideas have been thought of before!)

Anyway, I LOVE LOVE LOVE giving my students visuals and tricks to help them remember things.  I’ve had MANY kids confusing antonyms and synonyms this year – so this poster is SUCH a huge help!  Hopefully in the future they’ll hear “antonyms” and immediately picture ANTS… and then they’ll remember the difference.  J

This morning we started with a read aloud (as MANY of my lessons do!).  We read A Special Gift: An Antonym Story by Christine Corona.  I actually have a class set of these books, so while I was reading it aloud, my kids were reading it with me.  At the end of each page, we stopped and talked about the different pairs of antonyms and made a chart on the board.  I forgot to take a picture of it, but we added our own ideas to the chart on the board as well.

Afterwards, they each picked a pair of words and illustrated them on their own little ant.  I love how they turned out!  I tend to have perfectionist tendencies, so I like making the poster myself and then adding in examples from the kids… it’s a perfect combination of my Type A personality and KidCentric – in my opinion.  J

I love how this little guy has a ponytail!

We left our list of antonyms on the board.  Tomorrow, as a quick review/assessment, I’m giving them each a page to fill out with 4 ants on it.  I made it a quick FREEBIE, which you can find here!