Magnificent Magnets for Teachers!

Happy Monday everyone! Hope your weekend was super duper! Today I am here to share some of my MUST HAVE school supplies! 

One thing I absolutely cannot live without are my whiteboard magnets. Without a collection of magnetic items, my classroom would literally fall apart. Because nothing stays up on my cinder block walls, I use my whiteboards as display boards. These magnificent magnets are my favorite school supply!

 If you are doing some back to school shopping soon, you may want to add some mighty magnets to your list!

What is your must-have supply for the classroom? 

:)

End of the Year Classroom Ideas: Second Grade Classroom Fun!

I seriously feel like I did one thousand things this week! I'm beat. But... it's our VERY LAST FRIDAY!!! Yippee! We had a rip roarin' good time this week with our end of the year fun stuff and actually worked in a few learning activities too! 

I was so excited to get home to check my mail all week. It's a long story, but there was no mail. At all. For weeks.

 But...look at what arrived just today!

Happy Happy! I purchased these pencil door signs from Tallahatchie Designs at Etsy to give as an end of the year gift for my teamies! I think they are going to love them. I love the colorful ribbons the best. They are all a little different.

If you read my last post, you know that we had something special planned each day for our End of the Year Extravaganza. 

Here are a few snapshots of our bubble day:

We also had a campout read-in, a movie day, an electronics day, outdoor picnic-style summer birthday celebrations, a princess on her way to the prom visit, a guest reader, an AR assembly and raffle, the PBIS prize cart, sibling visits and classroom switches and a board game day (just to name a few). WHEW!

A little at a time, while my second graders were having all of this fun, I was able to put the finishing touches on report cards, complete student records and get organized!

 I am feeling accomplished!

It might look like all fun and games, but the kiddos did actually do some work! One thing we did was to wrap up our science unit and put together our matter lunch bag books. This time I used red bags from Target! 

It's Pizza Box Keepsake time so we did that all week in stages. This year it all went so smoothly!  Three fifth grade students from my Science Olympiad team came down to assemble our boxes. Coloring the cover and completing the memory pages that go inside was done a little at a time during the week. On assembly day, I delegated project passing to a few students at a time. It was a snap since most projects actually had names on them this year! :)

So that's it for classroom stuff! 

Is anyone else completely exhausted??? It's hard work having fun (planning it too). This is my selfie version of "There is no tired like the end of the year teacher tired".   

Three more days folks and I am home free!

Favorite End of the Year Activities: Weekend Warriors Link Up

We all want our kiddos to leave us on the last day with the feeling that this was the BEST. YEAR. EVER. Special activities during the end of the year countdown will make the school year one the class will always remember!

 The Weekend Warriors are here this month with a linky party to share some really neat end of the year activities. I can't wait to visit all of the blogs to get some new ideas to round up for my own list of fun things to do!

I'm here to tell you about my favorite EOY craft, a few fun indoor and outdoor activities and some easy to throw together, last-minute things I like to do with my class! 

Since we have not started our end of the year celebration yet, I will be flashing back a little (or maybe a lot).

These activities have always been a HUGE hit!

Let's start with my all-time favorite end of the year project. This one is from a giant leap backward in time!
This is what we made one year when I taught first grade:

 It's a class keepsake pillowcase!

 Every child brought in a brand new pillowcase. I created the class photo, poem and student names template and printed them on iron-on transfer sheets. Parent helpers did the ironing.

 Each student added their fabric paint thumbprint.

 The poem says:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I count these thumbprints instead of sheep. 

And always remember the friends I made,

In Mrs. Moriconi's first grade.

I loved this class so much! :)
 The firsties on my pillow are college kids now. 
Wow! Stop that clock!

Now for some activities...

Here in Michigan, we make outdoor plans but always have an inside plan B in case we get rained out.

I'll start with some OUTDOOR FUN!

A favorite on a hot sunny day is a water balloon toss. 

 I am SO bad at tying balloons so we call on parents to come in to fill them. We pile the balloons up outside in big party tubs.

 Partners start close together and with each toss take a step backward until SPLAT! Afterward, we fill the tubs with water and let the kiddos go crazy with those big dollar store water squirter tubes. The teachers run for cover!

Some years, we schedule the ice cream truck to stop at the playground during our second grade picnic. 
 Kona Ice is usually a favorite around here.

 

Speaking of picnics, this year it will be a hot dog cookout!
 On the menu will be chips, watermelon, beans, brownies for dessert and lemonade. YUMMY!
We are going to have a lemonade tasting day and use this cute packet by my friend Aimee at Primarily Speaking.

I am so excited to try out these fun learning activities with my class!

 We do try to keep the last days mostly academic!

INSIDE, we always have a movie day. While the students are enjoying the show, the teachers get things like printing report cards done!
 It's a lifesaver! 

The children go to a classroom of their choice. We open four theaters, each showing a different full-length feature. 
We made tickets for the kids so we can still keep a normal class size during this time. 
Everyone enjoys some popcorn, Sprite and a large movie sized candy pack.

On the second to last day, we clean everything including the desks!  

To make our shaving cream fun more academic, I call out spelling words, math problems or a category of things for the students to write or doodle. 

Shaving cream must be a directed activity or we end up with more of a mess than when we started!

After the desks are cleaned, they get stacked and pushed to the outer walls.

 This is the perfect set up for LAST DAY fun!

One of the many things we do is to make a giant circle and play a round of hot potato and pass the beach towel! 

 When the music stops, the person with the towel is out. 
They step to the outside of the circle and watch the rest of the game!
 No one even minds being out! 

Then, we have a hula hoop contest!

Before we say goodbye with HUGS or HIGH FIVES, we take a trip down memory lane with a slide show of photos from the year. 
Then, we Go Noodle to HAPPY while dismissals are called so the teacher doesn't cry!! 
I do anyway. Every year.

This year we have added some new festivities because... believe it or not... it is MAP testing week. So, we are keeping the activities shorter, and easy to plan and manage.
I am calling it our end of the year extravaganza!

On Monday, the students are invited to bring in their electronic devices from home. On that day, some siblings are coming to spend the day in our room. They earned a reward ticket to do so! 

 On Tuesday, we will sign beach balls and then play with them outside. If the yearbooks are here, we will sign them on this day too.

Wednesday is bubble day. I picked up some one dollar bubble wands from Walmart. We are also letting the students CHEW GUM IN CLASS!!! They are getting Blow Pops!

Thursday is a campout read-in. The students spread out blankets and read by flashlight. 

The others I told you about but switcharoo day is when the students rotate through all 4 of the second grade rooms and we each do a different activity like a game, craft or experiment. They love having a chance to see another room and mingle with other friends. We number the students 1-4 and assign a number to each room.

After I made this schedule, we decided on board game day instead of switcharoo. 
This involves NO planning on our part, so it's perfect!  

 I'm also thinking of making glitter dough with the kids! Call me crazy... but it's a tradition we ran out of time to do this year.

This would be before cleaning time and then the mess would just... disappear! 
The custodians will never know. Ha!

Thanks so much for stopping by today! I hope you got a few new ideas here to use or Pin to save! 
Now, head on over to see what the rest of my Warrior friends are sharing on their blogs.

Please link up with us or leave a comment here with your favorite activity too!

:)

An InLinkz Link-up

4 Favorite Gifts for Teacher Appreciation Week

 Teachers love all gifts that come from the heart and because we often spend so much on our classrooms, it's really nice to get a gift card! 

This is a post about my favorite gift cards for guilt-free spending /splurging!  Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Teachers Pay Teachers... they are some my favorite places!  How about you? 

It's YOUR WEEK so enjoy all of the spoiling that you deserve!  The fun starts NOW!  

Read on and I will tell you what will happen if you give THIS teacher a gift card!

Even though I have an entire storage room full of books, I can always make room for more.  I read aloud every day and usually plan my instruction for reading and written response around the story or nonfiction selection of the day.  This book, Stick and Stone is one of many on my wish list from Amazon! 

I just love YOOBI!  Have you seen the new line of school supplies at Target?  The bright colors are great and I know the kids would love them too!  These will go in a special spot for my WOW WORK winner to use for the day! 

 I have too many items on my TPT wish list to tell you about all of them! My favorite sellers just happen to be my blogging besties too!  

It's no secret that I love coffee!  My favorite in the winter is a Pumpkin Spice Latte and in the summer, I order up a Mocha Frappuccino!  I'm beyond excited because a BRAND NEW Starbucks just opened at the end of my street!!!! My teammates and I plan to take our work there sometime and sit at the tables outside to do our planning.  Doesn't that sound great?  I have end of the day prep this year and by 2:15 I am pretty much spent.  That little pick-me-up is just what I need to get through the afternoon slump!

Yummy!

Now, it's YOUR turn to complete the sentence!

If you give a teacher a gift card...

Field Trip Ideas for the Classroom

Do your students love the Magic School Bus videos? My class BEGS to watch them! We like to imagine how fun it would be if we could be in Miss Frizzle's class taking field trips like they do! The focus for this post is all about in-school and out-of-school exploration and the importance of providing children with opportunities for learning outside of the classroom walls. 

The author of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites begins one chapter by giving an example of special "field trips" she would take with her own child. I found myself smiling along with this intro. You see, during summer vacation, when my own child was growing up, not a day went by that I didn't plan some special outing or activity for us to do. EVERY DAY was a field trip!

I thank my lucky stars*** that I had the time and resources to give him those experiences. I am hopeful that these have helped to make him a well-rounded young man and prepare him for the REAL WORLD he is about to enter after graduation next year. 

Some days our outing was a simple thing like exploring nature at the local park. Other days, we went to a museum or activity center. How else would we ever get to pan for gold? Too bad we didn't get some genuine gold nuggets to pay for that college education! HA! 

It is so sad to think that there are many students who never have these opportunities for a variety of reasons. For those kiddos especially, the out of school field trip is VERY important! 

I love this excerpt from the book:

If students are to link their learning to prior knowledge, they must see the personal connection between what is being taught in the curriculum and their life experiences. (Lieberman & Miller, 2000) 

Let's aim to give students all the life experiences that we can in the year we have with them!

 Different Types of Field Trips

1. Obviously, planning an out of school trip around your curriculum or unit is one idea. Then the class has some shared experiences and background knowledge to build upon for the rest of the lessons.

On average, our second graders go on three field trips a year. It costs about ten dollars per student for each trip and that adds up! We try to plan some educational and CULTURAL outings. Some of our favorite out of school trips have been to science centers, the community library, the apple orchard, local farms, Sanders Chocolate Factory, a fun run at the middle school track, a historical museum and old-fashioned school house, cosmic bowling, the movie theater, local plays and the Henry Ford Museum.

  So much fun!
There is something to be said for a field trip as a bonding experience for building relationships. That is learning too, right?

2. The Inside-School Field Trip: Another recommendation in the book is regularly taking your students out of the room to explore the school building (with a purpose). One example is to go on a scavenger hunt for shapes or to take photos for a project.

We go on a daily in-school field trip at the start of the year to practice our positive behavior in different settings like the library and lunchroom. 
We even cram 28 kiddos into the small classroom restroom to talk about the expectations and hygiene in there! 
That is considered a field trip! :)

3. Outdoor Field Trip: This one does not require a bus ride any place. This could be as easy as letting the students go outside to collect leaves, do a messy experiment, observe the clouds or something simple like that. Maybe there is a neat destination that is even within walking distance. How fun would that be? 

4. The Virtual Field Trip: Finding an amazing site to show your students is the next best thing to visiting. Unless we really have a Magic School Bus, some places will always be out of reach! 

When learning about the history of St. Patrick's Day, I show my class photos of what it looks like in Ireland with a virtual 360 tour!

image source

Here are two super sites for interactive video tours you might try out:

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Polar Husky- The Iditarod 

You can also ask your school if they have equipment that supports Interactive Video Field Trips or Distance Learning!

  Set a Professional Goal!

 Most of us are pretty good at scheduling the fun out-of-school field trips, but how well do you work in the other types?
 I know I have room for improvement there.
 Maybe try planning an in-school hunt or outside activity soon!
:)

As always, feel free to leave your own thoughts about the importance of "field trips" in the comments below! 

Bridges Math Activities in Second Grade: Five for Friday

TGIF! Life is good on Friday nights! I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share my Five for Friday picks for the week! This is a good fit for a post this week, because, as you will see, it was a little bit of a smorgasbord of stuff!

1. We'll start with a personal accomplishment from the week!

Can I hear a loud AMEN?!!! The ACT test is over! Do you remember taking it? For years there has been so much hype for this high-stakes test! What a relief to just be done with it. Good grief! Now the wait for the scores... My high schooler is pretty confident he rocked the test! Fingers crossed. Being undecided about college plans, we hope to keep all options open!

2. We've been working on measurement in our classroom. In our Bridges in Mathematics series, the unit begins with the students creating their own cute little inchworm rulers. The class enjoyed a roam the room, worksheet-free activity as they measured a variety of classroom items with them. Later in the week, we moved on to standard units with inches, feet and yards.

In our number corner workout, which is a whole separate thing from the math series, we are collecting quarters, making deposits and withdrawals in our "bank", regrouping to the hundreds place in subtraction, studying solid shapes and talking about quarters as fractional parts of a dollar. This is just part of our March Number Corner display.

3. We also began our reading response notebooks this week. If you haven't tried using them, this is a super simple way to get students responding to text following a read aloud or independent reading time. The kiddos are really excited and proud of their new books! Our author study with Tomie dePaola books has been a perfect starting point!

4. It is writing assessment time so I crammed in one last lesson on types of leads. No time to be Pinterest perfect this week friends so our Types of Leads Poster Set is displayed on the whiteboard!

5. You may be wondering where all of the Read Across America fun is in this post! We did work in one little Dr. Seuss activity during our testing week! We enjoyed watching Horton Hears a Who! Most of the kiddos had never seen it before so they LOVED it!

 I have EXTREME teacher guilt about the lack of Oobleck and red and white striped projects this year! Wish I could say we had done more, but the timing was really bad this week! 

We are planning fun things throughout the month with our author unit, so that will be another post! 

 Thanks for stopping by today!

I always enjoy peeking into other teachers' rooms to see what is going on there and to get some new ideas.

 I hope you enjoyed having a look into ours too!

:)

The Science of Learning: Teaching Strategies that Work!

We already know that Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites! So what best-practice strategies DO? I can't wait to find out and learn more! The new book I am so excited about arrived in my mailbox just yesterday. Today I'll highlight takeaways for a book study of Strategies 1 & 2 in Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites (second edition) by Marcia Tate. 

We've seen many changes in the classroom over the years. No longer are students sitting quietly in their seats all day like we did when I was in school! The first section of this book is a good reminder that students need to be allowed to interact and talk with one another. I'm not talking about casual chit-chat like you might have during a snack break or something. This kind of talk needs to be intentional.

Strategy 1: Brainstorm and Discussion :

When students talk about a topic, they will understand it better because their brains not only mentally process the information, but also verbally process it. (Allen, 2008) 

It used to be a proud moment for a teacher when another adult would walk into the room and compliment the class with comments like... Oh, they are working SO quietly! While a talkative classroom can look like a chaotic one, the benefits for learning are great.

How are you doing with this one? Do you allow and encourage discussion among students? I have to be honest, I do like it quiet when I am testing or when the students need to be fully focused on a task like reading. So many students are easily distracted by noise, so there are times when I think quiet has a purpose for learning as well.

When my students do talk, my favorite strategy to use is the WBT strategy, Teach-OK. The students pair up to teach one another, in their own words, what was just taught with gestures. The students are not allowed to simply "parrot" what was said. They need to restate it and make it their own. When they teach each other, the listener gets to hear the information in yet another way. What they may miss the first time from the teacher they can learn from a peer! When the teacher randomly calls out TEACH the students tend to be more attentive because they never know when it is coming.

I once heard this phrase at a PD workshop...Talk and Chew. The teacher talks and then the students are given time to chew on the information for a while while sharing verbally. I think this is also a good fit for the point that the author makes about discussion.

We have partner discussions down pretty well because we do them regularly. My goal is to start doing more small group (family) discussions too by purposefully structuring activities where everyone can be engaged. There are always those students who lead (or monopolize) the conversation and some that are just listeners. Having some pre-group work mini-lessons is probably a good idea!

What I have been reminded of from this first part of the book, is that we should strive for the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy as often as possible.  I love this butterfly visual. I have a copy in my room! It's great to glance at during any kind of questioning or when choosing a follow-up activity.

Strategy 2: Drawing and Artwork

This one I love! You might have guessed from my blog name that I am all about creativity in the classroom. Being creative is more than just artwork of course. This strategy is about making meaning by allowing students to illustrate concepts.

When useful, teachers should encourage students to draw pictures that can help them gain more insight by representing abstract concepts graphically. (Posamentier & Jaye, 2006)

I feel like I'm on the right track with this strategy... although there is ALWAYS room for improvement! For example, when learning about Harriet Tubman in February, I asked the students to illustrate the major events in her life. While the drawings are a little person's representation of her life, they are their own mental images.

In the first picture, we see Harriet working as a slave child and winding balls of yarn. The next drawing shows Harriet and her marriage to John Tubman. It is not likely that Harriet wore a beautiful white dress and carried a bouquet on her wedding day, but this is their schema! Good stuff either way!

This is an example of illustrating new vocabulary. 

Creating a pictionary booklet is always fun!

 I mentioned above that one thing I try to do is to incorporate artwork into worksheets. Here are some examples for a variety of subjects! At first glance these may look like plain old worksheets but many of them ended up as a project, craft or something more. These photos show the beginning and planning stages! Just because an activity is on a piece of paper does not necessarily mean that it fits the definition of a worksheet. I do not think that this book is all about becoming paper-free classrooms. But with anything, we use printables in moderation! We all know that there is value in pencil paper tasks as long as the students are assessed with a pencil-paper test! 

My goal is to do more of these types of activities on a daily basis. At best, I am hit or miss with my planning. I have to remember that the drawing activity does not require a fancy page. 

Do you use foldables? Before interactive notebooks came along, I used to do lots of them with my students. Foldables are a great way to encourage artwork to solidify content. A true foldable that I'm talking about is not always the same as an interactive notebook page with flaps. With many popular interactive pages, you may often see a clipart image to be colored. In fact, I have made several sets like this and teachers and students enjoy them because they are CUTE! But coloring a picture is not the same as creating the image yourself, obviously! Many more thought processes are involved when we ask the students to add their own pictures. Because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I am guilty of wanting everything I display or send home to be neat and cute. Some students are often in a big hurry when they illustrate or only use all one color, which is hard for me to overlook! I will try harder. My goal is to get back to using genuine student-created foldables once again!

Want to learn more about foldables?

You can check out some ideas on my Pinterest Board. 

After reading the first part of the book, I am relieved to know that I am already on my way with implementing many of the recommended strategies. I have some goals to work on as well! 

I almost can't wait to go back on Monday so I can try something new!

I hope you were able to grow some of your own professional dendrites today and take away some good info and a little bit of inspiration! Until the next link-up for other strategies in the book, be mindful of how you incorporate discussion, drawing and artwork into your lessons!

We teachers love to try new things!

How do you incorporate these strategies into your lessons?
We'd LOVE to read about it in the comments below! 

:)

A Peek at OUR Week in Second Grade! Five for Friday in February

Happy Friday! I hope your week was great! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share some highlights of our really fun, but short week! It was a completely mixed up one for many reasons, so I'll start with the end of the week and work backward!

It is always a great feeling to finish our monster of a monthly bulletin board! It's a combo for Valentine's Day and our 100th day! 

The look we were going for was sweetheart candies. The colorful papers we had were perfect! The heart shapes have doilies behind them. Where the word love would be, we added a cute heart shaped sticker!

The class did a great job with some close reading activities about groundhog burrows. They got to use their new close reading bookmarks for the first time. It was REALLY helpful for them to have one to keep on their desk, so they didn't have to keep looking up to see the poster that I used to display on the SMART Board. We printed them on colored cardstock in lots of fun colors. The kiddos are really excited to have this special tool to keep!

Our penguin unit wrapped up this week with the completion of some penguin reports! This cute flip book report is just one activity in an awesome unit from Primarily Speaking. It is just the cutest thing ever! The class LOVED it! It was nice to see that they took such pride in their work. 

 This was a fun activity we did with Judy clocks and dice. All clocks are set to a given hour. Then, they roll two dice and move the minute hand to that number on the clock. The students draw clock hands to show the time as needed and compete in a game of tic-tac-toe. They love to play against the teacher! 

All of our students participate in some sort of community service each year. We call ours Coins for Critters! The whole school participates in this fundraiser. During the fundraiser, we read many books about rescued animals. This was day one but our jars are filling up quickly! The second graders have to count and roll all of the coins. The donations go to the Humane Society.

The first two days of the week, school was closed. For my friends who experience the seasons through the photos I share...this is the view in every parking lot! We have mountains of snow! 

You can imagine how life gets complicated with this much snow to dig your way through!

Because of the snow days, the fun for Groundhog Day was spoiled. My plan book is also a hot mess, but with all the carry over activities, lessons for next week are almost done!

 So that was a recap of our short but sweet week. 

:)