Back to School Sale!

All of my products are 20% off the next two days! Enjoy my back to school sale! I hope you all have an awesome school year!

Creating my Masterpiece

I'm Well well! It's week 3 of the #tptsellerchallenge ! I created my masterpiece! I don't know how much of a masterpiece it is but I have been working on creating interactive math journals for the year and this was the one that only needed a little more work...

Have you discovered the snipping took yet? I just realized you can take pictures of pages you are working on! (Well, my hubs showed me so I can't take credit.) but, seriously how cool? (Just search snipping tool in your search bar on your computer).

This was created to go along with chapters 2-3 of envisions. It has addition and subtraction strategies. I'm really excited to use it with my students this coming Fall for the first time! Get ready for some pictures because I'm pretty crazy about taking them of my students. Last year they would stop me and say, "Mrs. R, do you want to take a pic of this?" Or "you have to get a pic of this I did such a great job!" It's motivating! 

See you around!

Sale!

Hi everyone!

I have set some goals for myself for teachers pay teachers so that I can motivate myself to keep going forward! I am proud of some of the accomplishments I have made and would love for you to celebrate with me! Enjoy 15% off of all my products until Thursday. Thanks for all your support! Here is to the next several years of teaching and making products for my fellow teachers that can be used to help students learn in exciting and fun ways. 

Week 2 of the TPT Seller Challenge

 

1. Go to the TPT Conference.

I ALMOST signed up this year but my little girl just turned one and it's been an adjustment having a little one. My husband is so encouraging and said we could make it happen next year! I keep seeing everyone posting about it and I don't want to miss out on this next time! 

2. Improve my Blog.

I am in the very beginning stages of my blog and I'm not happy with the layout or design. I would like to make it more professional looking. I also want to put freebies up and share with other teachers  more than I do now! I would also like to include my logo on my pictures and have my signature at the bottom of my posts!

3. Travel to Ireland. This is my fun one!  I have wanted to go to Ireland for years. I feel like writing it down as a dream/goal will help me actually make it happen! I have Irish roots and just love the idea of castles, sheep, and river dancing! Hopefully I can save up some of my earnings from TPT to make this dream happen.

4. Increase notoriety among other bloggers and teachers. I really would like to meet many more teachers/bloggers and share with them. I feel that I have a lot of good ideas that I can share and have already gained so much from others by reading blogs and using items from others!

Makeover Madness

 I'm so thankful for the #tptsellerchallenge   

This is my first product I fixed up! It's 20% off until Sunday in my store! I'm exciting to see the next challenge! 

Measure y'all!

For this unit I finally sat down and said, enough of making one page of my math journal at a time. I need to sit down and work on the unit as a whole! I was so pleased with the result! A lot of the following will be are pics of our math journals but I threw in a few of our practice centers too.

We started measuring with nonstandard items...

I love that the standard is right above to refer to!

We worked on measuring length and height in inches and centimeters.

They needed to practice knowing what to measure in inches, feet, and yards.

This was their practice center...

They also had to differentiate between cm and meters.

Our practice center was cm/m slap. They love this.

They also did a sort...

We also needed to work on adding and subtracting lengths. The kids did amazing with this.

They practiced measuring lines that weren't straight.

They also practiced measuring lines that were curved.

I also threw in some extra games like "owl bout a foot"

There is so much you can do with measurement and we had a lot of fun with it!

All these games and journal pages can be found on my tpt store.

 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Chalkboardsn123s

Money money money

We have spent the last month working on  money. I have always had kiddos struggle with this because it's tricky. So we have taken our time! I have also had a lot of fun extending money for my high kids.

We started by making flip charts in our math journals so the kids could identify the coins.

Then we wrote out how we can determine the differences between the coins.

Then we started counting groups of coins.

We matched the coins to the prices!

They played I have who has with money.

Some of them struggled with switching from counting 25s then 10s then 5s. We made a key on the hundreds chart to refer to in our journals.

The few that still struggled, I introduced touch points! We used expo markers to write on the coins.

We practiced finding two ways to find the same amount.

We also practiced using the least amount of coins to find amounts.

Then we worked on counting a dollar and more.

Spend and earn...they said hey this is just like monopoly!

They practiced counting by rolling a number and letter dice to remove coins from their board. Whoever had the most money at the end won!

They practiced trading in money for  coins worth more with the game trading up!

Whoever gets to a dollar first is the winner!

We practiced buying from the store! Each animal had a different amount and the students had to determine what they could buy!

We have a couple more days to practice but I have been proud of how well they have picked up counting and using money! 

How do I do both? Read and find text features!

Text features are always an interesting concept to teach. I want my students to still be reading, yet I want them to identify the text features. So how do I tackle both at once? Read on!

1. Text feature walk!

Have them read the book, but as they read stop and write down the text features! 

It's essential to have some great nonfiction books with a lot of text features!

2. Label those text features with post its!

The kids love this and I just cut my sticky notes into little strips!

3. Play some great text feature games! 

Memory

Bingo

I have who has

I had my student teacher make these and they have been great!

4. Use a passage as their assessment 

I'm big on having the kids mark the text! They read the passage and marked the text and were to box the evidence.

After they boxed the evidence, I had them label what each text feature was.

There you have it! They practiced text features while still reading!

Math journals!

Hello all! Sorry about my absence! Somebody in our family has been sick every week so it's made for an insane winter! On to the reason I blog, my love for teaching...

Our principal brought up the idea of math journals the other week in our faculty meeting and how they have proven to be highly effective in bringing up test scores! I was a little critical at first, thinking it was just more time and work for teachers. However, as our coach began to show some examples, I began to get excited! It was a way to almost "keep a portfolio" of all the cool stuff we do! It was also a way to keep rhymes and nomonic devices for kids to refer to when reviewing a concept! I was now excited about starting these journals! 

On my way home from school, I zoomed into the Walmart parking lot and ran inside to buy a stack of notebooks for my students! The next day, I was ready and raring to go. The student could tell I was excited and as I always say, "excitement is contagious!" Thus, we began our math journals!  

We have implemented them the last couple of weeks and let me show you the results....

First attempt: Missing parts into the hundreds!

Second attempt: Subtracting 3 digits with regrouping.

Third Attempt: Logical Reasoning (several step problems) I loved their explanations for how they solved it! The kids are wowing me with their ability to explain!

Then we started our money unit!

We needed to make sure they recognized the coins before we dove into counting collections of coins.

They explained how they differentiated the coins to count them...

As I realized that some kiddos were having trouble counting by 25s, 10s, and 5s, we added this to our journal...

So far, I'm loving it! It's really not a lot of work because there are so many free resources out there on TPT! 

Also the students are actually saying, "Can I use my math journal?"

My answer, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"