Five for Friday

I'm joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly linking party, Five for Friday.

I have been going crazy the last month or so with pencils. A couple of my rascals were breaking them in half, brand new pencils!!! I had two boys in particular that were changing out their pencils probably 10 times a day.  I had read a blog post from the Ladybug's Teacher Files HERE about the Great American Pencil Challenge last year. I decided to give it a try. Let me tell you, it is working like a dream! I gave each student 2 new pencils. I wrote their number on the pencils with a Sharpie and then wrapped a piece of tape around it to keep it from rubbing off. We just finished up our second week. Three students are out because they lost their pencils and had to get one from me, but both of my pencil breakers are still in and  I may have to sharpen one of their pencils during the day. I just couldn't believe it would be this successful. We are going to keep it going till their is only one person that still has a pencil or school is out. In that case all of the kids that still have pencils will get a prize. I can say I have been sharpening a lot less pencils since we started the challenge.

I got a nice surprise the other day! I gave the kids a math page to do and is usually the case I have some fast finishers. I told them to turn their paper over and write their own story problems.  We had just started working on them so I wasn't sure what I would get, I thought they did terrific!

BTW I said I was proud of their story problems...not their grammar!

We were working on number collection boxes one day. I told the kids they could choose their number. This little girl bit off more than she could chew. She chose 200. She wrote, "Sorry I can't finish." and "Sorry I don't have enough."  How could I count it wrong! lol 

Anybody like frog legs? We had a parent meeting at school one evening. One of my former students got bored and decided to pull all of the legs off of the frogs we had made. My daughter caught her doing it. This was the scene the next morning. 

The only frogs that still had legs were the ones that she thought were colored the best! Hahaha 

I guess I got into a major recycling mode. I had cut out a kites that the kids had used to write important facts about Ben Franklin. I had a bunch of left over triangles. I was going to toss them but then I thought they would work to do fact families. I gave the children a planning page that they used dominoes to get their fact families. After they completed the planning page, I gave them 2 triangles and 2 rectangles and a piece of butcher paper cut in half. I had the kids work in pairs. I told them they were making "Fact Family Avenue".

After I took these pictures, we went over the numbers in the fact families with a Sharpie because 

I realized they were not showing up.

 It was fun to watch the groups. The girls really got into it, they added lots of detail, while the boys did the bare minimum. Ha!

 These two girls had a Day side and a Night side!

 The two girls that made this one, labeled  all of the things in their picture!  : )

Have a great weekend!

I've Been Gone Too Long!!!

Wow, I can't believe it has been so long since I have posted! My hand has been bothering me (carpel tunnel issues) and it hurts to type or even move the mouse. :(  I have more I could say, but I am going to do most of this post with pictures since the last time I posted.

This was a little spelling activity, I just had them fold their paper into eight squares. the instructions were to write the spelling word and illustrate. Don't you love it when they write sentences even though they didn't have to!

I feel really bad, it has been so long since we did this activity, I don't remember where I saw the idea, if it is yours, please take credit. We were studying Fantasy and Reality. It was such a simple activity, they were supposed to draw something they really did at recess and then draw a fantasy version of recess.  It all started off so nice and innocent...

Then I got to the boys.  Their fantasies weren't what I was expecting. "I was fighting."

"I gave someone a cut."

"I beat up somebody."

Should I be worried?  One little boy even found a red crayon and he had blood on his page. I was rather shocked as I was reading them.

To follow up that activity, we did this one (again, I don't remember where I got it.) So sorry!

I had to look at this one for a while, I thought it said A giraffe can eat leaves, but a giraffe can't poot on cars, my daughter thought it said poop on cars. After looking at it a little more, I realized it said put on clothes.  :P

I love this one, I guess a dog CAN sing other songs just not the one we sang for the Black History Program! hahaha

These activities went the story Olivia. The kid all loved the story so we followed it up by making out own Olivia. I thought they turned out pretty cute! I made my own pattern, I'll try to post it if any one is interested in it.

Another thing we did that week was to work on captions. For our first activity, I just cut out pictures from Lakeshore catalogs and let the kids each choose two. They glued them on a piece of paper and wrote their own caption. Here are a few.

I thought they did pretty good. After that, I printed out pictures I had taken of the kids and gave each child two pictures for them to write about.

"We is working on a school project." lol

                                                Rozlyne and Briana like to put puzzles together.

They really liked doing this, I made sure every one got at least one picture of themselves.

Between Delaney and I, we have had a lot going on the last month or so. We both had birthdays in March. We had a small party with some of her friends at Ghatti Town( used to be Incredible Pizza). I was actually able to surprise her, she thought we were going to eat at a restaurant with the family. She is so sweet, she got me this yellow (my fave color) padded bench for my bedroom. I LOVE it, but not as much as I love her.

A couple of weekends ago, she ended up spending a couple of days in the hospital with asthma problems. That's the first time that has happened and I hope it doesn't happen again.

Happy to be going home. 

I couldn't believe it, last week, I was picking up a chair in my classroom and it got caught on the table. The bottom of the chair leg hit my lower shin and sliced it open. I ended up having to get 5 or 6 staples in it, plus the instructions to not walk on it for 10 to 14 days. He said walking on it puts too much pressure on the staples. They gave me some crutches, but I just couldn't use them so now I have one of those knee scooters and all of the kids are jealous! HA! I hope we are both done with doctors for a while!

I'm going to close for now so I don't overdo it with my hand. I hope to get back on track with blogging, I still have some more things to share. :)