Christmas Cheer

Click on the picture for the link to get a free printable at Less Cake More Frosting.  My husband thinks that Christmas threw up at our house. Last year we ( I ) had our first shower after getting engaged and it was a Christmas shower.  I got LOTS of great presents to use during Christmas.  Tonight I will give you a your of the inside of my home.  I have been cleaning like a mad woman and it is decent enough to take pictures.  I will do the outside of the villa later it is after midnight here and I am not brave enough to venture out to snap some pics.

The Kitchen

  

 

 

This is my Christmas Koozie… which I LOVE!

        

Living Room

yes those are flip flops!  I wear them around the house even in December but NOT outside!

That is the best smelling Christmas Candle you will ever smell!  It is Thymes Frasier Fur and it is amazing!  The deal of the day was the mixed colored poinensetta for 99 cents!{Home Depot}

My card display.. started out as a cute ribbon, but we are so very blessed the whole door is covered… This is my favorite card so far….precious!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas to All and to All a Goodnight

Morning Meeting

I have finally found a routine that works great for me and my kiddos!  Yes, this is my fifth year teaching, but please don’t judge because this is the first year I haven’t taught a new grade.So it has changed every year depending on the grade level.  My fifth graders are dismissed from the lunchroom at 7:50 and then walk to my room.  So they all pretty much get there at the same time {WHICH I LOVE!} and when they come in they know exactly what to do!  I am going to break it down for you by days:

Monday: When the students come in they answer a question of the week:

This is last week’s question on Monday. 

After they vote,  they pull out their morning meeting notebooks and a sheet like this is on the Elmo:

Click on picture to see the whole page of what the kids see.  The kids do their Daily Fix it First.  The kids write the sentences correctly and highlight what they corrected.  Then they have to draw and label their daily data. Monday’s looks exactly like the picture does above. Then the kids do their spelling workbook page.

The format of our morning meeting looks the same everyday. Daily –Fix Its, Daily Data, Spelling WB page or Brain Bender. Sometimes a worksheet just isn’t cutting it so I will take a math problem or a question from another subject area that the kids had trouble with and let them see it in a different light.

Tuesday: Daily Fix-Its, Daily Data: The students will redraw the Venn Diagram.  Usually I whoever was absent is here on Tuesday. Spelling or Brain Bender

Wednesday: Daily Fix-Its, Daily Data: Today we do a 3-2-1. Ss tell me 3 facts, 2 observations, and 1 question they still have about the data. Spelling Page or BB.

Thursday: Daily Fix-Its, Daily Data: We turn our data into a graph.  So far we have done bar graphs, pictographs, and we are currently on line graphs. We review origin, x and y axis, labels, and title every week! 

Friday: The kids get Free-Day Friday.  They must write a Reader’s Response entry about what they are reading personally, draw a picture about their favorite part of the Reading story, rainbow write spelling words, or read independently. 

I KNOW that it isn’t perfect, but it works for us and we LOVE it!

Happy Mornings=Happy Kids=Happy Teacher!

My Sister’s Wedding

Gah, It seems like I go from posting a bunch to like a whole month without posting! I feel so guilty and it really makes me admire the people who have WAY more going than me that post everyday and make me a better teacher!

Im going to post some pics from my sister’s wedding and our Native American totem pole projects.

shoulda got a spray tan!

Also It is Christmas in Mrs. Ledgewood’s Room!

I am going to post my morning meeting routine this week… it is something that I have struggled with since starting teaching, but I’ve got one that I LOVE now!  Thanks again to all the teachers who post on a regular basis!  Hopefully I am getting a new camera for Christmas!  So bare with the awful photographs just a few more weeks and then you will be calling me Deanna Jump!  HAHA just kidding, I just want to be her when I grow up!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

A Treasure Hunt and Homework

Our spelling words this week are r-controlled ar, er, and or words.  I loved Abby’s Pirate take on teaching this skill in 1st grade and did it last year.  So I thought I would do a variation for 5th grade.  I told the kids that a trick-or-treater dressed as a Pirate came to my house and left us a map and some clues to a treasure.  Most didn’t fall for it like my firsties but let me tell you when the final clue came in they went CRAZY!  haha I kinda loved it. After I told them the background I showed them the map and told them they had to find all 25 words before they were able to find the treasure.

Then I gave them a story that I made up and it is oh! so cute!  but my computer is being silly and I can’t save it as a PDF and upload it to Google Docs for some reason.  I will try again tomorrow. The kids read the story and and highlighted all the r controlled vowel words.

The kids had found all but one of the spelling words and they were about to have a come apart! Our counselor came in and said that she found a word in the parking lot and asked the principal if he knew what it was about {he had brought us one earlier} and he said he thought that my classes needed it. She held up that final word that she had found in the parking lot all wet and asked if we needed it and there was a resounding joy of YESES!  coming from all of the kids.

So now we have all of the words and we have to find the treasure…while the kids were in library the treasure appeared:

:        

not the great treasure box ever ….but it was filled with snickers and the kids were super happy!

happy kids=happy teacher!

Okay now to the good stuff haha

2.2 Homework

Pretty easy compared to Chapter 1!  Hope they did good!  I will answer questions tomorrow.

2.1 Math Homework

Note: You Ss should do work in pencil and erase!  Im not setting a great example and that looks like an apostrophe but its just a random mark! :)

Fact and Opinion Spider Activities

I was thinking how to incorporate fun cutesy activities for Halloween into our 5th grade curriculum, so I scored the internet and past activities from first and came up with F and O Spiders.

The first thing that we did was brain storm about what we already about spiders… I didn’t give any parameters and the list was pretty good.  Here’s what the kids came up with:

then we used our schema to make a True and False T Chart

Then students broke off into groups and read a book about spiders and took statements from their books to make there own t charts:

Then I took this adorable spider from ChalkTalk: A Kindergarten blog and just added the Fact and opinion strips the kids glued to the legs before then glued them on the paper:

Very Spooktacular!