I hope everyone is having a great start to their school year!  I always seem to forget how exhausting it is!  #backtoschooltired I wanted to drop in to share one of my favorite activities we did in second grade for reading.  Hang with me first and third grade teachers!  This can be adapted for your classroom, too! I wanted to get my students excited about citing evidence from the text, since that is the big push these days in reading.  I am constantly looking for ways to get my littles engaged in their learning and using the detective theme throughout the year helped me accomplish just that!  I like to start the second week of school by introducing my Text Detectives Only! Book Club .  We start out by reading Secret Agent Splat, since we read Back to School Splat the week before, so they are familiar with that cute little cat.  Then, we make an anchor chart together as a class.  Each student writes one thing they think a detective does on a post-it note and I add it to the anchor char...
This past week, we had our kindergarten night and open house.  This was the first time we met our new, sweet students and their parents.  As you may know, I moved from second grade to a kindergarten team teaching position.  We wanted to make our 38 kindergarteners and their parents feel welcome and excited about their upcoming kindergarten year.  I am going to share with you some easy and fun little gifts you can use to greet your new little ones and their families. We went with a happy rainbow and chalkboard theme in our kindergarten suite, so we wanted our gift to match our theme.  Holly came up with the idea of giving them Jello with this cute little saying, "Jello!  Welcome to Kindergarten!"  I told her it was the most adorable idea ever and we went with it!  We were going to attach a spoon, but we decided not to so the students could just eat it at home.  You can grab the free labels by clicking on any of the pics below.  I have included labels for grades Pre-K ...
Over at the iTeach Blogs, there is a big giveaway going on right now in celebration of back to school!  One lucky winner will win an iPad Air 2, an owl case, a stylus pen, and a $15 gift card to iTunes.  This would be a great asset to any classroom! How to enter?  Just fill out the rafflecopter entry over at one of the iTeach blogs and the end of THIS POST .  Leave a comment telling why you want to win or how you would use the prize in your classroom.  The giveaway closes on Saturday, August 8th, so hurry on over and enter!  A random winner will be selected and announced on the iTeach blogs via the Rafflecopter on Sunday, August 9th.  Good luck! ...
Last year, my school's first grade team asked me if I could come up with some resources to supplement their Journeys Reading Series.  They knew I had created them for second grade and felt like something similar would be really useful for them in first.  We brainstormed some skills they would like to be hit in each unit, as well as activities and printables, and went from there.   There is always a comprehension skill focus each week, whether it be main idea, drawing conclusions, etc.  I always include a student mini-booklet, a flap book, posters, and an interactive notebook template.  I like to include enough activities for each day of the unit.                     I always like to post the spelling, vocabulary, and high frequency words in a pocket chart for students to use at word work and writing centers, along with the picture cards that come with the series. We push and say the sounds for each spelling words on these little word mats....