2012-2013 Theme & Monthly Projects

Omiword... I cannot believe I still have some followers out there in the world! I honestly was completely blown away when I logged on and saw so many comments about coming back! I cannot say thank you enough!! Plus on top of it, I really thought I'd run into angry people on Teacher's Notebook, but I've gotten nothing but positive and supportive messages back. I definitely didn't expect that, so thanks to everyone that follows me and supports me on there!! :) As much as I loved Zebra last year, after about half of the year I wanted to vomit up zebra, so I'm given it a break this year.

I'm going to be in a brand new room, so that means organizing everything in a completely new way. I should have taken pictures of my new room before I left, just because I can't think in my head about how many bulletin boards, white boards, etc. that I have. I thought I'd share that I think I'm going to still go with black and white, with bright colors (green, pink, yellow, blue). I think it'll be calming to have a lot of basic black stuff, but then the bright colors will hopefully make things pop.

I think I was inspired by this:

It's the BW Collection by Creative Teaching Press. Honestly if you've never been on their website, you must go. Like now. Click that link up there, get to shopping!! I've been nothing but obsessed since before I was even done with college. They have so much stuff now. This is the newest collection and as soon as I saw the first picture of it I loved it! I think I can still keep a good majority of the things I have now, but I'll just get rid of some of the zebra stuff, plus I'll have to remake a lot of the stuff I've already made. I'm going to focus mostly on that polka dot pattern.... the one on the pennant border at the top in the middle. I love dots, and they don't get old!! :)

I had a request for some Chevron stuff, which I think is awesome, so I'll make sure I'm adding that into my sets as well as still making zebra and any other patterns/themes everyone likes!! If you have a suggestion or request be sure to let me know :)

I know I've posted some of these before, but I wanted to group them together so everyone could see them all in the same post. Each month(ish) I'd have the kids do a project to decorate the room. There's barely enough time for everything that goes on in our day, but I feel like kids still need to be kids and need to know about to be somewhat crafty. So we make time for these:

{december/january - 3d snowflakes}

{feb - 3d valentine balls}

{march - 3d st. patricks day shamrocks}

{april/may - 3d dragonflies}

Hopefully that inspires someone! Especially if you're not really motivated to decorate. It adds an awesome touch to the classroom and it's a great way for the kids to feel like they have decorated the classroom!!

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! :)