First ever weather unit give-away!

Happy Monday all!
I hope that you have had a chance to enjoy some of this gorgeous weather that we have been having (at least here in the sunshine state of Florida)! I have FINALLY finished my newest unit called Reading the Weather and I'm totally new at this free give-away business, so here goes! If you are anything like me FREE ='s AMAZING..... The first 3 people to comment below will receive this entire unit for FREE! Don't you love the sound of that?

Enjoy the remaining part of your week and comment away!

Monday Brain...

Hello again, I guess you can blame my forgetfulness throughout the day on my "Monday Brain". I know that I am not the only one feeling it, haha...
I totally forgot to mention my star struck moment that I had at the Sean Covey, Leader in Me Conference that I attended a few weeks ago. Sean Covey's father is the 7 Habits author and an inspirational speaker from around the world. It was so refreshing to walk into schools and her testimonies of students taking ownership and leading in the classroom. I have a long road ahead of me but it was a huge sigh of relief to get away with some AMAZING ladies from my school. Here we are with Sean Covey himself:

 

 

The day after returning home from this conference was the 100th day of school and I think that I actually felt 100 years old after that day. To celebrate the day, we challenged our little ones to dress as if they were 100 years old and to bring in 100 pieced of their favorite snack. It was nice to take the morning and relax and read, as old people do I guess. For writing that day, we read a sweet book about grandparents and then brainstormed a list of things that 100 years old can and cant do. Here are some of the things that they came up with...

These kids think of the craziest things don't they! We also took some time out to mix our favortie things together, since one of my students claimed that old people cant even taste their food anymore, and spent some time talking about measurements! Just when we thought that we had enough, one of my sweet blessings of a practicum student came in and gave each of my students one of these pintrest inspired treats! I don't know about you but college aged future teachers are a huge blessing in our classroom and we are so fortunate to have a college right down the road from us that is full of eager student teachers!

 

 

Here is a picture of my team getting our 100 year old lady on!

 

On another note, we have been preparing for our upcoming "Living Museum" where each student has a significant symbol or person to research and become. In preparations for that we watched a brain pop video on what American symbols were and did an informational writing piece on facts that we learned. I wish I had a picture to show you but I guess I didn't get one of those. I did get one of the Statue of Liberty lesson that we did! This is always on of my favorite lessons because we involve more than one subject, I guess you could say common core... haha..... But we started out by watching a video about the Statue of Liberty and then read an informational piece to give us some more facts. For writing, we wrote some similes for the statue such as "The Statue of Liberty is a green as_______."  "The Statue of Liberty is a tall as_____" and "The Statue of Liberty use to be as shiny as______." After writing and a directed drawing, we did the penny experiment to see if we could turn the penny green. After a few days it worked and my kids were floored! I never seen them so engaged! So good....

 

Forgot to mention that the week before, we studied constellations and the students were so mesmerized that I let them create their own constellation and write a fiction story about it!

 

Also, one last thing I promise, I have been trying to come up with some fun ways for my students to practice spelling, please let me know if you have any advice. I feel like they are bored to death with the ways that I have out for them so any fresh ideas would be amazing!

Here is one of their favorites though....

How-to teach how-to's!!

Hey there blogging world. I have to be honest when I say that one of my least favorite subjects to teach is writing. My team totally has my back on coming up with some amazing ideas.. LOVE THEM.. I could not survive without them and definitely would not be the teacher that I am without their guidance. Be sure to give some thank you shout outs to your awesome teams members this week!

Last week our focus was writing how-to stories. We started off the week extremely simple and taught the students what a how-to was by reading the book," How to Ride a Giraffe". I of course looked everywhere for a book and stumbled upon this one in the very last minute before the lesson. This is prefect for teaching students to use an introduction, materials, steps and closing sentences (And they get to learn how-to to ride a giraffe, how cool is that??) But seriously, they enjoyed learning about something that they didn't know how to do. After modeling how to write a how-to book, we all wrote a how-to make a peanut butter and sandwich sandwich. We brainstormed all of our ingredients and I had all of the students describe the steps to me. The kicker came next when I overly exaggerated some of their cues like, put some  peanut butter on the bread. I actually stuck my hand in the jar without a knife because they didn't tell me to use a knife. This was one of those moments where I wished there was a camera in my room to witness their faces once again! Then I asked them to write their own steps independently. The next day, we asked students to get with  a partner and make their PB& J according to the directions that were given. They learned that details are the key to successful writing! He are some samples of what really took place.....

 

 

Here is one of my students enjoying her reward after a hard day of writing and you better believe that I took part in some PB&J time as well!

 

 

After I modeled this strategy several times, I had the students write their very own personal how- to books. I made them pick a topic that they knew a lot about!They turned out so precious! Her are some samples...

 

 

This is my favorite! This sweet little one goes to the same church that my husband is a pastor is at and when she told me her topic I almost melted!

 

 

Let me know if you have any cute ideas on writing how-to books because I'm like every teacher and trying to fill my idea bank as much as possible! Enjoy your week!

 

 

Fa La La La La La la..... Getting into the Christmas Spirit!!

So I can honestly say that I am getting into the Christmas spirit thanks to my sweet little husband! He was so sweet and precious and make me leave my computer and school work at school for one night (if you know anything about me, you know that it a really tough things to do as a WORK-A-HOLIC), but agreed and had such a fun night making memories that I will never forget. This is our second Christmas together as a married couple and it was so much fun digging out those old ornaments and and making hot tea and Christmas cookies while decorating our new tree.. I promise just a few pictures and I'll move on to some FREEBIES!! I apologize for the the poor quality of the pictures (my IPhone is amazing but sometime the quick little snaps don't turn out the way I want.......but you get the idea)

Our sweet little fat tree!

Okay, okay I cant resit it .... I got a little crafty (with the help of an amazing talented friend) thanks to the pintrest inspiration and made some darling little mugs for my husbands youth ministry volunteers. He wanted each one to have different lettering and fun designs with the same IMPACT student ministries logo so here's how I ended the night----20 mugs later------

 

So I promised so freebies so here they are... Just click on the picture for your free copies!

 

In class we are teaching the phonic skill of "ee" and "ea"... so enjoy the sweet treat act ivies! The frustrating part about about teaching "ee" and "ea" is that sometimes there are words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings so I created this unit to teach some small mini units on homophones! I hope that you enjoy!

 

This next one is one of my favorites. I am reading the book "Oliver the other reindeer" which is about a dog who really wants to be a reindeer which the kids just LOVE after we have already spent the week learning about reindeer. Anyways, the students have to write a letter to Santa telling him why they would be good on Santa's sleigh team! Not only is there cute writing paper but they are differentiated. If your class is anything like mine, they are all over the spectrum and I teach to all different levels..

 

 

I would love to hear from each of you to see what you are planning on doing with your little ones for the holiday!

 

Blessings,

Kelly

Voting All Around

Hello all,
My vote is in and I can tell you it has been a fun week teaching little ones about all of the politics and election pieces going on around our nation. I started the week out reading the story called " Vote for Me" which the students loved! From there it was really easy to transition into real world elections and voting. Character descriptions were the writing focus for the week and I decided to have the students describe their perfect presidents.  Some of their pieces were so adorable! Here are some of the samples from lesson:

What I LOVED about this unit (besides the future voter button) was the differentiated writing pages. If my class is like anyone elses, I have some really high, average and low writers and these pages helped my students to feel successful no matter what their level was.  This unit also includes Long A Sorts, Recording Sheets, ABC Order Sort and writing pages!

 

If you would like to grab this unit for free just click here to download it!

 

Another very exciting thing that took place this week was the announcement that I was VOTED Rookie Teacher of the Year for my school. Honestly I was blown away and so humbled because we have so my amazing first year teachers. So thank you fellow colleagues!

Here are some fun things that I was showered with:

 

 

Enjoy the rest of your week and keep a look out for the Thanksgiving Unit that is up and coming!

 

 

New Halloween Unit

Hello friends,
Hope that you are all enjoying your wonderful weekend.. Of course I'm sitting on my back porch enjoying this AWESOME fall weather (finally, we don't get to many days like this in the Sunshine State!) creating some things of this upcoming candy holiday called Halloween. If your like me you love it but will be ready for it to be over by the end of the day on Wednesday because all of those cute little costumes will be running all of the place begging for candy from anyone that they see.. So to help organize my day into something fun, yet very productive I created this little Halloween Unit which includes some addition and subtraction practice games, noun and verbs sorts with recording sheets and a "How to Stay safe on Halloween" writing activity. For your copy visit my TPT store by clicking on the link below. Please let me know if you have any amazing ideas or trick for the trade that you normally do on Halloween Day... If nothing else, enjoy your week!

Halloween Day Unit

- Kelly Thigpen

Ghosts, Goons and Goblins

This week was one of those short, yet felt longer than normal kind of weeks. We continued to work through our Halloween themed lessons and I think the anticipation of the big candy day is getting higher and higher. I just love seeing their little eyes light up each time we introduce new topics that are Halloween based. The last thing on my list for October is pumpkin activities and that will all take place next week!

We started the week with a little classroom meeting on manners. Is my class the only class that seems to lose them while they sleep at night? haha.. But seriously, where do they go? I found this adorable book from Patrick McDonald called " The Monsters' Monster". The book with a perfect Halloween themed text that taught the big idea of how far the words "Thank you" can go, or according to the monster, Dank You. Which can I tell you, I think my little ones say "Dank you" now more than they ever said thank you. Our team is really trying to incorporate writing with everything and so I created the Monster Manners handwriting page. Just click on the link for your copy! Pintrest also inspired me to have my class create the Frankenstein monster, notice boy and girl version!! What on earth would we do with our time without that amazing site??? (Pretty sure I could accomplish a lot more than I do!)

 

 

I also finished out the week teaching character descriptions to my students. Although this was somewhat hard at first, because they don't add details to ANYTHING let alone characters within their stories, by the end of the day Thursday they seemed to be getting better....Fingers crossed....To help enforce this concept, I used an idea from First Grade Parade. I asked the students to write a character description and draw a picture about themselves. Then we put these cute little ghosts over the top of their pictures to see if other people could guess who wrote the disruption. They were so enthusiastic about go around the room to try and guess who's was who's and then begged for me to put them in the hallway for everyone else to try and guess as well!

 

 

Thanks for reading and here's to going and trying to enjoy part of my weekend here in beautiful St. Augustine, Fl!