Sunday, October 20, 2013

Candy Corn Commotion!

I told my students that there is a rule in my classroom:  we can't talk about Halloween until October 1st.  So after many weeks of the kids asking me how many days it was until Halloween in September and my response being, it's still September, I am not talking about Halloween yet...they walked in October 1st, a student saw the date and they all started asking me, How many days until Halloween?!

Bless their little hearts. I know they are just really excited, but 31 days of asking how many days it is until Halloween.  I just direct them to the calendar now...count the days! :)

So I have the decorations up in the classroom and I have been gradually putting Halloween centers in the mix for Literacy and Math.  After seeing the following pin on Pinterest, I decided I was going to throw some candy corn into the mix for math this week.

This pin has just been pinned 194 times from my board, but I know it is super popular!  It got me thinking...


I decided that I would use the fact family candy corns as an art project, but I want to give the students some practice first.  So I made these Candy Corn Fact Family dry erase centers:


I made 15 of these candy corns and while we are doing Guided Math groups this week, the kids will work on practicing fact families with their partners during their games rotation.  There is just something fun about doing fact families on candy corns instead of fact triangles.  If you are interested in them, I put them in my Teachers Pay Teachers shop for only $3 these next two weeks!


Then I think at the end of the week we will make the candy corn craftivity.  I used the cute black and white template from the clipart set that I used for the math center candy corns and this is what the kiddos are going to make:

I think they will love them!  I put them as a freebie in my store if you are interested in them...



They are bilingual in the sense that one says "name" and one says "nombre," but use them how you want.  We are studying nouns right now and I thought it would be cool to do noun candy corns where the students have to write a person, a place, and a thing.  There are a lot of ideas!

I hope to link up later this week and report back on how it all went.  I hope to have some pictures of the kids in action for you all!  

Have a great week!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What in the What?

It has been over a month since I posted.  I am rectifying that situation right now.  I started thinking that no one was missing this little side project of mine and literally in the last week, I have had five friends at school ask me why I haven't blogged and a few new followers on Facebook.  

So I am back!  I have a goal to try to post at least twice a week and I really hope everyone can give me feedback of what they would like to hear about.

In our district we have been very slow to get to Common Core.  We are all at different stages of the game, but at least at my building I can say that we are very dedicated to really learn it and to learn how it can reach our students.  Last Friday we had an in-service and learned a lot about reading for information (yea Abbie).  

I know that we are supposed to be pairing nonfiction and fiction texts each week.  So in honor of our new theme, I tried to do just that.


This is just the start of our new thematic unit (plants and life cycles) so I hope to find authentic literature to pair with our non-fiction text book.

Since this is our real first taste of non-fiction I wanted to teach the elements of non-fictional texts.  So not to overwhelm my kiddos, I am going to stick with a couple of elements everyday for this week and next week.




I am pretty proud of the kids - especially when my favorite part of teaching happens...wait for it.  The connection!  This was the mini-lesson for our reading workshop time today, so after we learned about these elements the students set off to read their own self-selected texts.  The students were so excited to find labels (rĂ³tulas) in their non-fiction books!!  I love it!

Do you have any cool ideas to help the kids get into non-fiction or exploring informational texts?  I really want to know!!!