Stellaluna

This starts week one of Unit Two in our Reading Street basal. Our skill is comparing and contrasting.  Monday is supposed to be the day we do our leveled readers, but they are just entirely too hard for my little readers.  So we decided to do mini lessons into go along with our skills instead.  For today’s mini-lesson I read Stellaluna and the kids used a bat graphic organizer to compare and contrast bats and birds.

Click on the picture to download the graphic organizer. How would you use this in your classroom? Please let me know how you could take this to a deeper level of understanding!

Happy Teaching!

Life with the Ledgewoods

It is officially fall in our area!  Fall is my favorite time of the year.  Now, don’t get me wrong summer is GREAT!  Once school starts I don’t care for the hot weather. I take after my grandmother and believe that when the season changes so should your décor and your wardrobe. I spiffed the house up this weekend for fall.  Now we just have to get our pumpkins for our porch and we will be all set!

Happy Fall Yall!

I added pumpkins everywhere!  A few sprigs of fall foliage in my arrangements.

Do I have enough cookbooks?  lol

Chalkboard fun and kitchen shelves… I still need to add my FALL banner to the bottom.

Living Room view from the kitchen.  Don’t yall think that the door would look great black?  me too!

Hall view of living roum.  If you follow regularly… you get tired of this wall, but it is my FAVORITE thing in our whole house, except for Carter :)

Just a few add ons to what we normally have in the entertainment center shelves… Fun story about our flag.  My brother in-law did an internship in Washington, D. C. and he got us the flag that flew over the White House on our wedding day!

 

 

 

 

Happy Fall and Have a “Spook”tacular Halloween!

Mummy Glyph

Click on the picture to download this FUN EASY glyph.  My students will be making these mummies to go along with a Halloween summary and my bulletin board says”Get Wrapped Up in a Good Book” Enjoy!

The 30-Day Challenge

You hear that phrase all the time!  Losing weight, building up stamina to run a race, car dealerships running a sale, etc.  I think that the biggest 30-Day Challenge is the First 30 days of school.  My lack of posting is first of all a bad habit and second of all directly related to my school year craziness. Everybody is their own kind of busy so I won’t try to compare stories or carry you through my day, but I do want to carry you through the last 30 days! 

For the most part my kids are great, actually the best class I have ever had, but the MOST challenging.  We are settled into our morning routine and reading stations are running as smoothly as one could expect in fifth grade. We are finished with Reading Street Unit One and will take our Benchmark Test this week.  Hopefully, all of the hours of pinning and creating lessons to help teach the skills and strategies will pay off. Even though I admit that part is fun for me. Envisions Common Core Math is going well. We’ve covered cells,and completed an AMSTI kit on Variables (the kids LOVE this) in Science and covered map skills and Early Americans in Social Studies.

I hope that your year is going as well as you hoped.  I finally had an original idea and I am going to be using it for our Halloween Bulletin Board.  Check back for a glyph freebie before Friday!

Hoping the next 30 days are even better!

    

 

Football Fridays and College Game Saturdays

Baby Birthdays and Births

  

Flying our Airplanes

Great way to review…I put up posters with the names of all of our skills that we need to review… the kids had to choose at least three skills and write down their schema about that skill.

  

We love Pandora playing over my speakers… our top stations are:

1. Tween Radio

2. Radio for Kids Radio {Pretty much all Disney}

3. Lady Antebellum

4. Justin Beiber

5. Pachelbel's Canon in D

6. Praise and Worship

Have a great week!

Clothes Calendar

 

 

This is a handy dandy tool that I use every month.  My sister and I have planned our outfits since we lived in the ZTA dorms together. I used to do it on notebook paper and kept the notebook on my closet shelf.  Now with all the cuteness available, I use this printable. If you had room on the back of your closet door you could frame it and write on it with an expo marker :) Mine happens to be covered with a shoe rack.  I plan out what I’m going to wear during the school week, or otherwise I would just stare at my closet and wait for something to jump out at me. {know that feeling?}  I can also be prepared and know what I have to iron for the week.  August and September are pretty easy because in Alabama the temperature is HOT.  October can be kinda tricky with the weather changing.  I usually plan one month in advance.  I literally takes ten minutes off my morning routine.  Some days I just don’t feel like wearing what is planned so I’ll hunt up something else, only to regret not wearing what was already on the calendar.  I hope that you find the “clothes calendar” as helpful as me and my sister. Here is a picture of my current calendar.  We wear our faculty shirts on Mondays and then each Friday is a spirit dress up day so I’m waiting to fill those in.

Please leave me a comment if you download the printable!

Dress Happy!

Laura

Happies

Pretty stressful 12th day~

Taught one of my sweet boys how to draw a heart.  Yes I teach 5th grade and no he didn’t know how.  This is WHY I teach…he is just precious….challenging…even VERY Challenging most days, but then I step back and think…NOBODY! not his parents, not his pre-school teacher, not is kindergarten, first, second, third, or fourth grade teacher, took the time to help him learn to draw a heart!  It literally broke my heart. I’m already in love with him and I hope that he stays in my room long enough for me to give him a chance. {please don’t critique that immensely long run-on sentence}

I NEEDED some Dt. Dr. Pepper so I made a Target run tonight.  An hour later I came home with the CUTEST tissue paper to make some poms so I can hang my table numbers, oh so cute thank you cards, eye make up remover pads (best invention ever), a birthday card, an art box for one of my kids, 3 8 packs of coke, all of which I was SUPER pleased with… and I tried to find the perfect shade of fall purple polish like in this picture

So I tried: Essie, Revlon, Loreal, Sallie Hanson, and O.P.I

Nothing even close…ugh…I came home with Loreal Paparazzi Pleaser, which ended up being super grape… not really a huge fan:

Still on the hunt for a perfect purple and a new fall lipstick!  Any suggestions?

Check back soon for some more Reading Street Resources.

<3, Laura

Week Three Already

WOW!  It has already been 10 days.  I feel like it is taking me forever to get in the groove.  We are traveling for volleyball EVERY Tuesday and Thursday, I can’t wait for a home game. I have also been keeping my goal of being at school on time (7:40) and am proud to say with the exception of one over sleeping day I have been there by 7:30!  Let’s hope I can keep this up! My co-teacher and I are on a roll with our lesson plans and centers.  It makes us love teaching because so far we have taken the stress out of it.  Envisions Math on the other hand is a little stressful.  If you are an avid reader of Open House you know that we are starting a new math program.  Last year we used Go Math and really didn’t like it till the end of the year and now we are using Envisions.  I’m pretty sure its not the program it is Common Core.  I think that the kids who are starting as fifth graders on common core are getting the short end of the deal because “they are supposed to know” ALL kinds of prerequisite skills, that we usually teach during fifth grade!  AHHHHHH we will just go with the flow and do it the BEST we can.

I haven’t been an avid picture taker during the week, but we did do some cool stuff. One thing that the kids loved was a wrap up activity for plant and animal cells.  After we went over their graded tests, we got out our science notebooks and passed out the cookies!  The kids loved drawing the Cookie Cell. ( we originally had planned to get gummy savers for the vacuoles, but we forgot so we just went with a different color M&M)  Kids didn’t care!

 

On a side note… I got paid Friday and spent a little time at my Target.  I Love Target!  Seriously love. Usually I can find something to pick up, clothing, shoes, jewelry, home décor, school supply, and sometimes one of each of those.  Most of their stuff is oh so cute, HOWEVER…..see exhibit A below:

These are HID-E-OUS…. plus they are $35…. please girls…. stay away!

Gonna Get my Groove back this week!

Laura

First Day

It went great! I fixed the link to the lesson plans, they should download with no problem now.  I’m too tired to type much more.  I’ll leave you with before and afters of my classroom:

Before

       

Progress

  take the back off so it will hang better

epic fail with paperYay for Paint!

Finally Finished

Outside BB… some kiddos didn’t quite get finished, but they turned out GREAT!  Thanks Glyph Girls.

Gallery of Good Work

View from the door

Door and Cabinets with homework frames and discipline chart

 

We answer our daily data question here and I also post our guided reading routine on this board. The tree will eventually host circle of the names of books we have read throughout the year.

 

The paws have the students numbers on them with a ribbon hanging down.  For every ten AR points the students will earn a star! Below is our library.

Other Wall Areas:

My area:

Randomness

Classic First Day Picture:

Three Rules for the First Day:

1. WEAR A DRESS

2. WEAR HAIR UP

3. WEAR FLATS

And a few of my favorite things

 

 

I hope your first day is as fantastic as mine was.