He Brought it Upon Himself to Visit...

Strep Throat that is. Insert frustrated, exhausted teacher here. Thursday I was exhausted all day, but I made it through the day. Friday I woke up feeling a little horrible, but I thought it's Friday, I'll make it. Plus it's so exhausting to make sub plans and get things ready, especially for a Friday. By roughly 2:00ish I was near death. I made it through math games, then while my kiddos were at their specials for the day I really went downhill. I ran outta school as soon as the kids were gone, drove straight to Walgreens Quick Care. I was convinced I'd get a ticket because traffic wasn't going fast enough for me. I told the nurse to take a strep test, because at that point I was convinced. She looked at me funny. Like, how do you know. Well I'll tell you how I know... I work with 3rd graders! That's how I know. So now here am a few days later, extremely thankful it was strep. Which you may find weird, but I find a relief, because within hours of taking my first dose of antibiotics I was already feeling like a brand new woman! Hopefully I'll be just as thankful in 10 days when I'm done taking them.

In order to keep myself awake for that last 30 minutes, I did manage to take some pictures of things I wanted to share.

{insert the fact i'm kinda crazy here!}

{i'm testing our black backgrounds with colorful, plain borders to see if i like it for next year. i may also try the opposite. bright, plain color backgrounds with black borders. we shall see. this is my sloppy attempt to try the first option}

{maybe i'll like it more once i actually have the new posters on it!}

{we're studying fractions currently, and last week we did pronouns}

{definitely needs to be redone neater, but it definitely helped the kids out}

 

{this was mainly up to help with the spelling for the fractions. they were having trouble with twelfths. i was amazed that third graders still have trouble with the idea that it's the shaded part over the whole, not the shaded part over the not shaded part - i always thought this was a first grade thing!}

{i completely meant to take pictures of the kids pizzas but it completely slipped my mind and i sent them straight home! we did it step by step and goofy me made them glue the pepperonis on wrong, so they didn't look right when i hung them. for all the trouble they were having grasping the concept, they all did a wonderful job on the pizzas!}

{we finished the rocks part of our earth unit 2 weeks ago, and we just finished the earth's layers part of the unit. so we made our books to help us remember about each layer. apparently it was taking forever for us to messily color them and only a few of my kiddos finished. here's one of the samples.

 {all the layers, and the earth is the cover/back page}

 {we are officially in ISAT mode. so every week we're doing reading and math extended responses. my kids are still struggling with them. but i think we may be making some progress. at least i'll keep telling myself that. here's the last one we did using an article about how our bodies keep us warm}

{it's a work in progress}

{i have to give a MAJOR shoutout to A Cupcake for the Teacher! in my delirious state on friday i forgot all the parts to my big football project at home. i was in desperate need of something easy and cute for my kiddos. the majority of my class is obsessed with football, as am i. they had a project to complete this weekend, so we needed something to go along with our fraction lesson as school. we made these and then used them for our math. but seriously... the project was $1 and came with everything i needed. my kiddos did fabulous. so a HUGE thank you coming from the desperate, sick teacher i was on friday! i highly recommend going on her TN or TPT and buying it. you can always use it next year!}

So that's it for now. I'm still trying to breath normally with all of my congestion! I'm not 100% yet, and I'm sure after all the junk food I'll be eating in a few hours I won't be any better tomorrow! Any opinions on the black? I had a few people say no way! I'm loving it though! Maybe some black, some colored? Maybe back to polka dots?

Valentine Globes, Pronouns, Fractions

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm a huge fan of change. I constantly need to be moving things around at home and at school. I've always been this way. My poor Dad used to go crazy because I would move my furniture ALL the time! So we just finished lots of units and we're moving onto new things so I'm totally excited. I'm also half changing some of my room in order to prepare (hopefully) for next year. I'm going all black with bright colors, look at the way I designed my blog and you'll see how my room will be! I'm beyond excited about it! I figured I'll try a few things this year, and then if it works I'll do it next year.

In the mean time we decided we needed to make our room more festive. We still had the snowflakes hanging all over the room. I wanted to make huge Valentine's fortune cookies, but it just wasn't happening. So instead we created these:

So now our former winter wonderland, looks like this:

Now I honestly wish they were much bigger. Here's the problem. My teammate and I made these, so between the 2 of us we needed 800 circles. 200 of each color. So that's a lot of circles. The project is already difficult enough without having to worry about kiddos cutting decent circles. We have an Ellison Die Cut at school. One of our dies is a circle. My teammates TA cut out all the circles (major props to her!). I attempted to cut one globe worth on my little circle cutter, but that took long enough. So basically in order to be the most efficient we had to deal with the size we had. I still needed more patience than was available for this project. They worked though and it gives it a bit of Valentine's flair!!

We started our Pronouns unit. I would have thought pronouns would have been easy peasy for the kiddos! WRONG! They couldn't get the idea that pronouns weren't just replacing nouns with other nouns. Example:

Me: I ate a hot dog at the baseball game. What word can we say instead of hot dog?
Them: A hamburger!
Them: Pizza!
Them: Popcorn!
Me: (in my head) Oh my goodness, I wasn't thinking it was going to go like this!

We'll see how pronoun pizza's go tomorrow! I'll be sure to post pictures of our yummy pizzas once we're finished! Anyone ever have one of those days when you're thinking... oh no... one of those days? Yea that was today!

We also just started on fractions today. I'm so excited for this, because I love fractions! We drew some today using grid paper. That was another OMG moment! I have to say though, my favorite math unit is fractions. I always either do fraction sundaes or fraction gumball machines. I'm beyond excited to spice it up a bit with 3rd graders instead of firsties.

I'm also thinking of doing something Super Bowl related with fractions this Friday. We shall see. The kiddos loved this ordered pair project I gave them to do when they finished their work last week, so maybe I'll do the same kind of thing!

Has anyone done literature circles? I'm just bored with Guided Reading. I desperately need to spice it up! I think it's the fact that it's 3rd graders! Firsties are exciting, they're learning how to read. Third graders know how to read... I dunno maybe it's just a phase!

By the way, I HAVE to share about 2 assembly type things. For the past 3 years (and I think longer) my school has had a company called Historical Perspectives come to our school. They got Harriet Tubman this year. She came and pretended like she was Harriet Tubman. I loved it! We had Helen Keller last year, and someone the year before. I know they're in the Chicago area, but I don't know about anywhere else. If you're ever looking for a good historical assembly look them up, they were great.

I also am like beyond excited! When I taught first we studied Space. Well we have some colleges near by that have planetariums, but we could never get in. Or we had too many kids to go on one day, then it got expensive! We have the Adler Planetarium downtown Chicago, but that's expensive and in Chicago traffic (insert shuddering here) it would never work! So I somehow found a company with a dome that they set up at your school! They worked with me last year to set it all up within like a week. It was all such short notice. So we're doing it again this year. I planned it so 3rd and 1st get to see it. It's one of the coolest things! The best part is we don't have to worry about paying/dealing with busses! If you study Space I highly recommend it! :)

Question Posters & Pronoun Unit

Sooooo... I've been busy creating a Pronoun Unit today. I get distracted so easily, so these simple mini units that should be taking me an hour or 2 are now taking me a whole day! The exception was that I met my Mom and my younger brother for lunch. She always takes off a few over winter break and the week of spring break. It's nice because then I actually have something else to occupy my time other than watching reruns of horrible shows like Wife Swap and watching the same episodes of Storage Wars for the 1 millionth time!!

 Pronoun Mini Unit @Teacher's Notebook

I also had a request for some cutesy Thick/Thin Questions posters so I whipped those up while I was sitting here. I'm not really sure where the examples she sent me originated from, but I took the ideas from hers, mixed them from what I've taught and created the following. They're on Google Docs, so you should be able to pull them up and download them from the link! If you need to share them with someone, give them the link. Make sure you actually download them so that way all of the graphics and backgrounds show up. Enjoy!

Thick and Thin Questions @Google Docs

Night Lovelies!! <3