Sunday, June 30, 2013

New Item Up!

Since it's Sunday I thought I'd work on some of my items for Catholic school. I put up a set of prayer cards that can really be used for any grade. It's on a half sheet format that you can print out and staple together to make a Catholic prayer book. It includes lots of traditional Catholic prayers like: the Sign of the Cross, Hail Mary, Our Father, the Angelus and lots more. For the younger grades I'd probably take out some of the longer prayers and for the older grades I'd take out some of the more basic ones. I left this item free and we'll see how it does.  You can link to it by clicking on the picture below.



Friday, June 28, 2013

Schedule Cards

I've made the schedule cards and they are up on TpT! There are two different files. The first file is just regular schedule cards that you could use at any school. The second file is a Catholic edition with additional cards for things like Religion, Mass, Rosary, etc. I used these at the end of the year last year and they were great. I just cut them out, mounted them on sentence strips and laminated them. There are also blank cards that you can laminate and write in activities with dry erase and use over and over again. I usually wrote in things like class pictures, assemblies, etc. I have one of those schedule pocket charts and they fit great in there. In the top two sections I put the day of the week and the date:
Monday
September  25, 2012
and then on with the schedule. I'm going to be making calendar pieces as a separate file but they would go really great with this set.




Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Theme 3 is Finished!

Yea! The Theme 3 focus wall is finished and posted! Theme 3 is a little bigger because it also has spelling lists included. Here is a preview:


Enjoy! There's more to come. (Soon I hope!)

Monday, June 24, 2013

Sightseeing

We were very touristy today. My mom thought ahead and got in touch with her senator who got us tickets to see congress in session and a tour of the capitol building. I think you can get these just by showing up but this way we were able to skip most of the lines. Yea! It was very interesting and the kids loved it! Everyone was exhausted by the time we got home but that meant that I got some time on the computer! Theme 3 is almost finished and should be up soon. I had someone ask if I planned to post Themes 3-10. Yes! As soon as they are finished they'll be up. Each theme I do seems to go a little faster and the last few themes I've already done, they just need to be reformatted and cleaned up a bit to keep them consistent with the others. Once I get home I'll dedicate a couple of days/evenings to it and the rest should be up in no time.

We have a few more days of vacation and I think we're going to head out to the pool and maybe have afternoon tea at the Ritz. Fun!




Sunday, June 23, 2013

Working...Sort of!

The kids and I are visiting my mom outside of DC. I came here with my laptop and every intention of spending a couple of hours a day working on focus walls and morning work. Well....make that aobut 10 minutes...once! We're having a good time, though and it looks like the work will have to wait for a little bit. We are headed back home in a few days and I'm sure I'll get back to it then. I might get a little more donehere. It's supposed to rain so maybe I'll do a little then. I'm also working on a set of schedule cards. I made a set of jungle themed ones that fit in the schedule pocket chart. They have all the general subjects plus some blank ones that can be laminated and customized with a dry erase marker. I'm also doing a general school themed one. Hopefully soon!

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Theme 2 is Ready!

The Theme 2 Focus Wall for Houghton Mifflin Reading is ready and posted on TpT. Here's a preview of some of the pages:


Monday, June 17, 2013

New look! I'm completely new to this blogging stuff but I'm starting to get the hang of some of it. I was able to customize a few things today and gave the place a new look! I'm hoping to work on the Theme 2 Focus Wall tonight and should have it uploaded and ready by tomorrow. I'm still working out how to put a picture of it up here for you and let you click it to get to my TpT store. It's been a big learning experience!

I also took some time to redo my Jungle Themed Number Cards. I had originally done them in Publisher but for some reason it wasn't acting right. It took forever just to move things around on the screen. I did it again in PowerPoint and it worked much better. I uploaded the new version just now:


Saturday, June 15, 2013

It's done! My room is finally cleaned and I'm ready for summer. I wasn't the last teacher standing but it was close! I always start my summer with great plans to work on something school related at least a little each day. Of course, I'm always surprised when August rolls around and I haven't done nearly as much as I wanted to. I did spend what was left of this week just relaxing and it was great.

Next week I have mentor training for two days. My mom is coming to watch the kids--they don't know yet and they'll be thrilled!

I was able to get my fist few products up on TPT. My freebie is a 120 chart. I noticed as we switched to Common Core this year that all my math supplies came with 100 charts. I was also surprised to see that when we started on numbers from 100-120 lots of my kiddos were stuck! They could count it out loud but much of the time would write 99...100...1001...1002! I had a great morning work paper from Made in 1st Grade (I think it was in their March Madness Morning Work) that had them write the numbers from 1-120. We did it often! In the end they got it. Yea! Anyway, I decided that for next year we would forgo the 100 charts and start the year with 120 charts. Hopefully seeing the numbers around the room and on their math folders will make the process much easier next year.

Houghton Mifflin Focus Wall Theme 1 is Ready!

I'm getting into a routine and actually getting some work done! Last year was my second year teaching first grade and Houghton Mifflin. I really like this program and the way everything is so incremental and builds week by week. The first year I was so busy just figuring everything out that I didn't even have a focus wall. Last year I did and it really made a big difference. I started out with just writing the information on a big chart paper. I have to admit that even thought it was old school, it was a lot of fun! It reminded me of my student teaching days, chart paper and lots of Mr. Sketch markers! (yes,I did sniff each one before I used it!) After a couple of weeks I realized that it would be much easier to just do them all in PowerPoint and print them out.

Once I started using them regularly I noticed that the kids would come in and look for them on Monday mornings! After a while they were reading them by themselves and looking forward to what we would be doing that week. They thought it was so funny when I would introduce something and they already knew about it because of the focus wall!

Over the summer I'm going to work on the walls, neaten them up and post them on TpT. The good news is...Theme 1 is done and posted! You can see it here:





Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Let me introduce myself! I teach in a small Catholic school in North Carolina and I love it! I've taught pre-k, kindergarten and first grade. It seems like whatever grade I'm teaching is the best grade ever and right now that's first grade! I started teaching first grade two years ago and other teaching blogs saved me! My class is the only first grade in my school so it was great to be able to see what other first grade classes were doing. Between the blogs and TPT, I made it!

Summer's almost here! The kids are out of school and it's work week for the teachers. I don't know why but I always seem to be the last one finished! Right now my room is a disaster! I'm hoping to finish cleaning tomorrow and go through some files. I have been getting rid of a lot of stuff this year. Next year will be my third year teaching first grade. I inherited a lot of stuff from the previous teacher and I'm finally realizing what I need and what I don't. On the bright side, my tiny closet looks great! It's all cleaned out and you can even step inside to get what you need!

My goal (as always) is to be much more organized next year. This summer I'm going to work on coordinating my morning work with the Houghton Mifflin reading and math series we use. We might be changing to a new math series soon but I'm just going to go ahead and as if we're not changing or I'd never get it done!

With the kids home from school I plan to take one day a week and visit the library. Hopefully once we get home with armloads of new books I'll have time to work on my school projects and get some things uploaded to TPT!

Thanks for reading!!!
Jennifer