100 Days Smarter!!

I simply can NOT believe that my students are 100 days smarter already!  This year I seriously have the best class ever!  I'm a little sad that my year is more than half way over.  This is the first year in many that I have not had any serious behavior problems.  I have a great group of high, middle, and a few babes that we're working on.  I have truly been blessed! (Especially after last year was one that made me question my career choice)

Anywho, yesterday was the 100th day.  Normally it's a Kindergarten "thing" and first graders just get a little pouty and reflect on how awesome Kinder was and how badly we want to go back to Kinder for the day.  Meanwhile Mrs. Burns is usually like, UGH 80 more days!!!!  Well this year I have a student teacher so I put her in charge of finding something small to do with the class.  They made little booklets about the 100 things they'd do if...  We got a surprise visitor at the end of the day.  Our principal came around and passed out $100 bill bookmarks and celebrated students with perfect attendance thus far....sad to say, the plague loves my classroom, so I only had 1 child with perfect attendance.

All in all, I must say, I'm pretty proud of my blooming firsties and how far they've come this year.  It was a scary start looking at their test scores coming to me.  

Cheers to 80 more day!!!!!

Resolutions!

Cheers to 2014!  WHAT! That's just crazy talk, I can NOT believe it's already 2014!  So I've noticed everyone's writing resolutions and well, after a few days debating if I wanted to do this publicly or not, I decided to go for it.
First of all I will do the typical, "get healthy, lose weight, go to the gym more" resolution.  I must say that we joined the gym in June and I was great at going during the summer, then school hit and well....I'm lucky to go a few times a week.  I am a mom, I have 2 girls in after school and before school dance, AND I'm a firefighters wife....add all of that together and I'm pretty limited on my time at the gym.  SO my goal first off is to really get back and focus on my eating, not just shoving food in my face, THEN I plan to get my buns off this couch and hit the gym.
Second, I want to spend more time with my family.  I've realized that I'm too "plugged in" and often busy reading blogs and such and don't really listen to what they're saying.  I want to "be present" when they're awake.
Third, I really want to work on blogging at least once a week.  Again, I have a hard time sitting down and writing my own blog but I love read other's blogs.
I really could go on and on with what I want to do this year rather than what I should be doing.

I really feel that 2014 will be a great year!  I will focus on life more and enjoy the next 365 days!!!

Holiday Recovery

So I literally blinked and life fast forwarded from Thanksgiving straight to Christmas.  I only had 15 teaching days between the two holidays which ended up including 2, 2 hour delays and 1 snowday on the Friday before break.  I tried to cram as much as possible into those precious days.  My class started out by having a gingerbread week the first week of December, we made, ate, graphed and did science experiments with gingerbread cookies.  The second week we did Grinch week and we wrapped up with Polar Express week (thank goodness we had our movie and PJ day the day BEFORE the snowday).  That leads to me break.....it's Thursday already folks!!!  YIKES!

I was checking my email when I received a feedback email from TpT.  I thought, hmm, what was this for?  So after a little investigation I realized that I sold my 1st product!!!!  WHAT the WHAT!?!?!?!  This instantly motivated me to get my butt on the computer and blog and start creating.  I was feeling like my creations were just a waste, other than for my own students who truly enjoy them....apparently someone else may believe in me too!  It's a small start....very very small but it's a start and I'm excited!

So check out my latest sight word phrases for January here.



                               

The Great Catch Up....

Wow! We have been so busy lately, I've forgotten to take pictures of the majority of our work however, this week it was my goal to take pictures.  Hang on tight for a giant picture dump.

This was a magical day in teaching. I gave the kids a little booklet to color and turned on some classical music and BOOM silence!  I just had to take a few pictures, I wish you could hear how quietly they were all working.

On Halloween we had a little visit from our local Tooth Fairy.  The kids were so well behaved!  Sadly she passed out pencils instead of toothbrushes, but whateves!

My sweet girlies.  My oldest was a candy witch and my youngest was Jasmine, with strep throat.  Yep, I was that bad mom that sent her to school thinking it would pass, gave her tylenol before trick or treating and then had Daddy take her to the doctor the following day when she wasn't getting better.  Oops, I had NO clue she had strep!  

Hubby and I ditched the girlies and headed to Phoenix to see The Lion King!  It was a dream come true!  We decided to go for our anniversary (which was back in June) it was a magical night!  And we managed to bust out some major Christmas shopping!

My kiddos have been really getting personal with numbers lately.  I pick a number and we find as many ways as possible to represent the given number.  This day I decided that we needed to make number turkeys (even if they look more like flowers).  I wrote a different number on everyone's turkey and they had to use the feathers to represent that number.  I was pretty darn impressed with how well my kiddos did!

We took a little trip across the street to the Fire Station.  The kids (and teachers) LOVE this field trip!  This year we had a great group of guys that let the kids explore all areas of the fire station, showed us melted smoke alarms, let us crawl under "smoke" where the fresh air was.  They ended the visit with a walk through of the fire truck!  This was sort of a crazy morning for us teachers, one of our 1st grade classes didn't get a sub so we split that class amongst the other 4 classes so we went on our field trip with 6 extra kids each.

I finally finished my November Sight Word phrases, got them laminated and cut apart. I can't wait to start using them next week.

Finally, Friday was our Veteran's Day assembly.  They invite local Veteran's, the Kindergartens march around with their flags and sing You're a Grand 'Ol Flag, our 2nd graders wrote letters to Veteran's and the girls choir sang some beautiful songs. The last picture is of my dad that my oldest drew.  In 5th grade they have to do an interview with a Veteran and draw their Veteran so this was her project hanging in the hall.

Whew! You survived the epic photo dump.

Sight Word Phrases

My class has become pros at the first set of Fry's sight word phrases and quite frankly, they're a little bored with them.  I've been trying to think of some way to spice them up a bit and challenge my kiddos.  I decided that I needed to add a little holiday/seasonal flair to the phrases as well as make more than just the first 100.  So, I had to start somewhere so the first 100 it was.  Click below to find my Thanksgiving Fry's Sight Words, the first 100.  Keep you eyes open for the following sets.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/November-Frys-Sight-Word-Phrases-First-100-952299

My Favorite Time of Year...

       October! The sweet smell of pumpkin candles, pumpkin spice latte's from Starbucks, the crispness of the morning air...I LOVE October!
        October also means report cards...GAG!
       My class has been knee and elbow deep in pumpkins!  I had an amazing NAU partnership student who put together a pumpkin unit that my class absolutely LOVED!

We started Oct. 1st with pumpkins on everyones tables.

We then made HUGE pumpkin life cycles ( I thought it would be a great idea to make them gigantic but I didn't really pre-plan where I would put the darn things.)

We opened pumpkins and explored them.  We learned that pumpkins have seeds, pulp, and the more ribs a pumpkin has the more seeds there are inside.

Finally the kids had the daunting task to count all of the seeds from 3 different pumpkins.

Check out this freebie that fed right into our pumpkin-mania...

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pumpkin-Math-915161

After we exhausted all aspects of pumpkins my classroom became invaded by bats!

We've only begun to scratch the surface of our batty unit and the kids are so excited to learn more.

A New Start

This year has be C to the R to the ZAY!  After 6 weeks our leadership decided to change the entire schedule!  Like, from scratch!  Like, new new new!!!!  I can't say that I'm loving it yet.  We had to change our schedule because we are so understaffed that our RTI groups are HUGE!  Huge as in, intensive small group has 12 kids!
So here come my new start.  I'm trying to start this school year over, though we are ending our first quarter.  Part of my new start includes opening my new Teacher Pay Teachers shop!  I'm so excited for this new journey in my life.  I just pray that I have time and creative juices to start really creating.  I've decided rather than start with things I'd like to make and use, I'm starting by making things that I will use right now.
I had my principal's observation today so I got busy over the weekend and I created some pumpkin math activities since we have been learning about pumpkins for the past week and a half.  My unit is up on TpT for free so please go check it out, download it, try it, and give me pointers and feedback.  I'm trying to remind myself that everyone has to start somewhere and this is my  somewhere......wish me luck!

So check me out on TpT and follow me.