Groundhog Day freebie

 I just realized that Groundhog Day is almost here (psst...it's on February 2nd!) and I didn't have anything ready to share with my class! I searched all over the internet, but didn't find quite what I wanted. What's a teacher to do? Make something myself, of course! I whipped up this Groundhog Day mini-book, which I'm sharing with you all as a FREEBIE! Just click on the picture below to get it from Google Docs. Enjoy!

Word Family & Anchor Chart Fun

Just had to share a little project I've been working on to help my firsties understand how "bossy e" works at the end of certain words. I found the inspiration for this cute, cute anchor chart from this post by my friend Nicole at Teaching With Style.

This was the perfect companion for the new word family workbook I'd already created to use in my class. It includes 36 word family rimes, all with long vowels. I also threw in several pages at the end for review/assessment with a fun cut & paste activity. Just click here to see this in my TpT store.

 

 I also re-created this adorable chart, inspired from the same post. In fact, I asked the school secretary to special order me my favorite markers in the entire world for this project: Sharpie flip chart markers. If you have not tried them, you must! I just discovered them last school year and am in LOVE.

I also created a word family workbook featuring 37 rimes with the short vowel sounds:

Valentine's Day Fun

 I've been working away on fun materials for February and Valentine's Day. I am so excited because I purchased a commercial license from DJ Inkers so I can FINALLY use all of the adorable DJ Inkers clip art I've had for years in my TpT products!

With that in mind, I've had so much fun using my clip art to create this set of Valentine's Day cards. I made 36 B&W cards and 6 colored cards. I'm using these in my class for students whose families cannot afford to purchase cards. I'll also be using them with my students to decorate their Valentine's bags. Just click on any of the pictures to go straight to my TpT store.

I've also just completed the Little Book of February Words. I gave out the January edition as a freebie here. Each monthly booklet has 23 seasonal words with matching graphics and word wall signs. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time at My Grafico looking for cute clip art!

And, as I've done for other holidays, I created a fun math packet using seasonal treats. This time, I made a Conversation Heart math packet. The kids always love doing these. Who doesn't enjoy using candy as math manipulatives?? 

Back to School!

On my last official day of winter break, what do I do? Why, I went into my classroom to work of course! ha

Brand-new name tags, new seating arrangement, deep cleaning the (very) dirty tables, putting away the last of the holiday decorations, sharpening 1 million pencils... the list goes on. But I was VERY excited when I walked into my room and found this brand-new projector screen hung up in my room! Hooray, I've been requesting it for months!

I'm also all prepped for my very first craftivity of the year: torn-paper snowmen glyphs! I love doing these every winter, it's fun to see how all of the kids' snowmen turn out so unique. I'd used this chart previously with kinders, so I had to make a few tweaks with Post-Its.

And a teacher tip: I found these adorable owl things at the Dollar Tree this week. Funny, I found owl cut-outs similar to these at Learning Palace, but for four times the money!

Aaand here's my classroom, all ready to go!

Freebie Friday!

Partly due to the fact that my firsties need a reminder on how to be kind towards each other and partly because we will be talking about Martin Luther King Jr. soon, we are doing a month-long focus on good manners and citizenship in my class.

The wonderful instructional coach at our school is a pro at GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) and whipped up a unit for us. She began by popping into our class during literacy stations to take photos of my kiddos demonstrating good manners vs. poor manners and made this super cute Big Book of Good Manners:

To go along with the unit, I created this Little Book of Good Manners (a class book students will write and illustrate at the end of the unit):

I also created "Super Citizen" awards to hand out to students the rest of the year when I catch them remembering their manners! Our school mascot is the mustang, but I included some with stars and (of course!) owls too. 

I'm sharing my little project for FREE! Just click on any of the pictures above to go to my TpT store. :)