A place to share thoughts, ideas, gadgets, and giggles from my classroom. 💜

Black Friday Sale!


I have linked up with a bunch of Teachers Pay Teachers authors for a $1.00 Black Friday Sale!



Five For Friday Pre-Thanksgiving Addition

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to give you my Five for Friday- Pre-Thanksgiving addition!
We have been talking about Thanksgiving all week, as I'm sure you have too.  Today in my small groups, we talked about why Thanksgiving brings us all together. It got me thinking about the reasons I look forward to Thanksgiving and why it is important to me. So I am going you my top five reasons Thanksgiving, and giving thanks, are important to me!
I am thankful anytime I get to spend time with my awesome husband. He really is great!
and freaking gorgeous!
I am thankful for my job. I love being able to make a difference in others lives. This year is taking a toll on me and my love of going to school.  I learn more and more about classroom management each day, and will become a better teacher for it! I love that their eyes light up when we do science experiments and that they share my love of coloring and creating things with construction paper. I love that they want to learn and are proud of themselves when they get assignments done that they usually struggle with. I am thankful for snow days and holiday breaks. I am more thankful for weekends and quiet lunches than others understand. I cannot think of anything I would rather do with my life!
I am thankful for cleaning out desks once a week too. 
I am thankful for the construction workers that are putting their lives(roofing is going on right now) at risk to make sure my family will have a safe, sturdy, structurally sound roof over our heads. They are out there every day in the freezing cold building my beautiful house. 
Phillip brought them doughnuts this morning:) He really is awesome!
I am thankful for my family, including my pets! They are the best, really. 
And a little goofy!


I am thankful for technology! I love using technology in the classroom, in my bedroom, in the bathtub, in another country, at the beach, anywhere I want! If I want to check on anything, I can. If my husband uses a word I don't understand (he uses big words a lot) I can google it right away and act like I knew it the whole time! I have been able to stay in contact with my friends from college that are hours away or my mom who is just across town. Of course sometimes it is nice to be out of contact, but that feeling of coming back into the technology world after a day is amazing. You feel like you have missed so much, and nothing at all at the same time. 


Head back to Doodle Bugs Teaching to check out some other Five for Friday posts!




Online Communication:Blogging in the Classroom

If you have followed me for a while, you know I am crazy about kids blogging in the classroom. I cringe with I see Facebook posts or other online articles written with poor grammar. I think blogging will help students learn the proper way to communicate online and help with their writing skills while doing it!
I have went on and on and on about the site {KidBlog}. I have blogged about in my summer {Techy Tuesday} posts, if you missed it, be sure to check it out! I have a great freebie about how to get started in your own classroom. 
We have finally begun our own paper blog in class!
I tried to make their paper blog look like the actual blog post page. The white sheets are their blog papers, the post its are the comments! Students must use a complete sentence in their initial post. Then the comments need to be more than one word. 
Some of my favorite comments:
Love the invented spelling!
They were so positive and loved making comments.
O.M.G i Love it. -what more can I say! 
If you want to start your own paper blog, draw it up on poster board. Then use my {free blog post paper} and gather up some Post-its! We began the week before Halloween and after Thanksgiving break will be going online, live! This kids and I can't wait!!


STEM with Gummy Pumpkins

While looking around on Pinterest, of course, Cassondra found this great STEM activity for us to do during Fall Parties! Click here to read the original post. Students started with finding a game plan.
I did not create this page.
We were going over this page while I was carving the tops off of pumpkins. This was my way of getting an extra 20 minutes to finish them up! Students were challenged to build the tallest tower with a box of toothpicks and one tub of gummy pumpkins. I randomly chose students to be in groups and they got to discuss their plans together. Then I set the timer for 20 minutes and let them go!
Some students had great ideas of working on a base, because it's all about that base you know;) As I walked around the room, I saw and heard several different different ideas. The students were not as confident in this tower as they were in our cup staking challenge

This tower was a mess of tower, but would stand on its own!
This group was getting the right idea! 
These guys were working separately to create their own towers to put together.  Overall this activity was a little bit of a bust for my class. They enjoyed trying, but no one was very successful. But by the time they were done, so was I with the pumpkins and then the bigger mess began!



Pumpkin Exploration

So on Friday, after our field trip, I carved the tops off of 22 pumpkins with the smallest carver ever. It took about two hours. During this time the kids were at lunch, then I took some with me to recess duty, then I carved away during our STEM activity and finally finished up while we were working through our Pumpkins: Can, Have, Are, Grow page from my pumpkin pack!
I let the kids decorate their pumpkins for a contest in the morning. We used Sharpies, but Cassondra let her kids paint! 
I handed out some gloves for the kiddos that didn't want to touch the guts and goop of their pumpkin. Then I let them go at it! 

They had to dig out all their guts and and seeds. Then we did some estimating to see how many seeds we could pick up in a handful. At our field trip, Miss Linda(the farm owner) told us that a pumpkin could have more than 400 seeds! We were running short on time due to cutting the tops of 22 pumpkins, so we didn't get to count all of our seeds. 
We had so much fun exploring our pumpkins and making a mess(HUGE MESS) (I warned the custodian before hand) with the guts and seeds. We had a fifteen minute clean up time and then had snacks and finished our Fall party with an episode of Scooby Doo. I loved hearing the kids tell me ," You plan the best parties ever!" I have a lot to live up to for Christmas! 


Cornucopia Farms, Field Trip!

WHEW! What a week! We had: just coming back from fall break, field trip week, Fall parties, Book Character Dress-up day, and to top it all off Halloween! I'm going to start off with our Field trip!
We loaded the bus to head to Cornucopia Farms. It is pumpkin patch that has wayyyy more than pumpkins! It it located between Scottsburg and Salem, Indiana. As soon as we arrived, we were greeted by the friendliest dogs! The kids were ushered into the barn to learn more about pumpkins. It was a cold morning, so this was the perfect start to the day. Miss Linda(owner) told us about different types of pumpkins, about bees, and gave us some farm safety tips. Then we headed to the animal barn!
There were goats, pigs, cows, and sheep. They were all kid friendly and the students were able to pet them all! It was so much fun. Then we split into groups to feed the calfs. 
There was soooo much slobber coming out of the calf's mouth while he was eating! I'm so glad I didn't get it on my boots! The kids took turns feeding him, and after it was all gone, he was not too happy! They had a great hand washing station for us to wash after we were done with the animals. After that, we headed to the playground for a little break!
They have two super long slides, one tube and one metal. There is also a hay house to play around in! The kids looked like scarecrows after coming from there! 
Cornucopia also has a place for duck races and to practice your cow milking skills.

We took a lunch break and by that time the weather had warmed up and the sun was shining! It was a beautiful day for an outdoors field trip! Then we headed to the pumpkin patch for the kids to pick out their very own pumpkin!
When we got back from our hay ride and getting our pumpkin, it was corn maze time! There were twelve jokes, farm facts, or Bible trivia for the kids to find. I had a group of 6... you know, the kind that HAVE to go with the teacher? It was interesting to say the least! They lead me and lead me around that maze from the top to the bottom! It was a lot of fun!
When we finally found our way out we played some more on the slides and in the hay house. It was such a great trip!

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